Silver Trak Digital Accelerates Content Digitisation with AWS

Silver Trak Digital is a one-stop shop for all activities related to pre-release media content, including aggregation, transcoding, screening, and quality control. The company migrated its Media Room solution to AWS to facilitate secure, low-latency content sharing across multiple AWS Regions.

THE COMPANY USES Amazon

S3 for scalable, low-cost storage of large media files and AWS

Elemental MediaConvert for content transcoding. By migrating from a hybrid to a full cloud-based solution on AWS, Silver Trak Digital halved storage administration costs, improved platform performance, and gave developers time to focus on new feature development.

One of Silver Trak’s main products is Media Room - launched in 2015 for enterprise clients across media and entertainment - supporting the management, storage, and delivery of thousands of hours of film and television content.

The first iteration of Media Room was hosted on virtual machines in a private cloud, followed by a hybrid solution that used Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a private cloud. However, Silver Trak Digital continued to face issues with transcoding. Data movement was complicated and costly, which hindered scaling. When clients downloaded or uploaded large files, or when many users attempted to download files simultaneously, the system would slow down or stop intermittently. Storage and the security of virtual content was also an ongoing concern.

With the support of its AWS account team, the business decided to migrate fully to AWS.

Tim Creswell, chief executive officer of Silver Trak Digital, says, “We were seeking an evolution of the platform with enhanced functionality, to deliver files in a relatively untechnical way that was also redundant and secure. Also, as an AWS Partner, Silver Trak Digital aimed to leverage rapid transfer protocols on the public cloud as well as integrated storage and media processing on AWS.

Silver Trak Digital worked with Itoc, an AWS Partner, to migrate

Media Room to the AWS Cloud, following the security and other pillars of the AWS WellArchitected framework.

“We had a lot of collaboration and support from AWS and Itoc to ensure Media Room was built according to the highest standards,” Creswell explains. Itoc worked closely with the Silver Trak Digital developers to not only expedite the Media Room development and innovation, but also provide critical testing to ensure the platform met the highest security standards in servicing a multi-tenanted environment.

“Completing the AWS WellArchitected Review and Foundational Technical Review has helped us in pitching to big studio clients,” says Creswell.

Storage is the foundation of Media Room, and Silver Trak Digital relies on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store petabytes of media data, terabytes of which are transferred between its clients and their customers each day. Each client is allocated its own Amazon S3 storage bucket that automatically scales in response to the volume of content uploaded. Silver Trak Digital doesn’t have to monitor or manually provision more storage nodes as the volume of client files increases.

Creswell elaborates, “The elasticity of Amazon S3, plus the fact that we only pay per use, is fantastic.”

Since migrating to AWS, Silver Trak Digital is saving 50 percent on content administration.

Silver Trak Digital and its clients place a high priority on security, especially for confidential content such as pre-release film scenes.

Silver Trak Digital can configure fine-tuned access controls and security parameters such as two-factor authentication within Amazon S3 to meet specific business, organisational, and compliance requirements. The company has defined about a dozen roles with specified tasks that users can or cannot perform, which makes security simple and transparent. Clients access content via their browser through secured firewall portals and benefit from a searchable project environment with administrator-designated user permissions.

Silver Trak Digital also adopted AWS Elemental MediaConvert to solve its transcoding challenges. AWS Elemental MediaConvert integrates with data in Amazon S3 and transcodes stored files to a viewable proxy so clients can find and review film scenes on demand.

Creswell says, “AWS Elemental MediaConvert can handle the most format types without performance lags and has massive capacity; it ticked all the boxes.”

For clients using on-premise data centers, Silver Trak Digital uses AWS Direct Connect to securely transfer stored data while ensuring low latency. For large data transfers, Silver Trak Digital can utilise AWS Snowball. Media Room users can collect and distribute files at speeds of up to 3 gigabytes per second. The company is also leveraging Amazon Relational Database Service for PostgreSQL (Amazon RDS) to store over one million client files, accessed by thousands of media clients and their customers each day.

Users can upload files of any type and size, and files are instantly available for viewing or sharing. The latest version of Media Room also provides a range of client tools to assist in managing a growing number of files, including granular search functions, project-based content segregation, user-defined tags, and metadata fields.

Since modernising its Media Room content management system on AWS, Silver Trak Digital can provide a simple, low-latency, and secure method for storing and transferring large media files across time zones.

“Our clients have access to all Media Room features at any time of day. Regardless of what’s happening in the background or how many files are being uploaded, they can expect the same fast performance and 24/7 availability,” Creswell says.

Silver Trak Digital has developed unique industry features such as full studio-grade digital rights management (DRM), customisable screener campaigns, and dynamic watermarking.

The company is currently looking at adding value with more artificial intelligence (AI) functionality such as speech-to-text for captioning and text search across a scene library.

“The fact that AWS is always adding new services makes it easy for us to use existing technology to enrich our feature list,” Creswell says.

Silver Trak Digital has listed one of its products on the AWS Marketplace through its DAMsmart digitisation services, with further plans to list Media Room as well. Visit https://aws.amazon.com and https://www.silvertrak.com.au