Norwegian football club taps AWS Elemental for subscription video

Leading Norwegian football club Odds Ballklubb has used AWS Media Services’ platform to enable the fast launch of a new OTT TV subscription video streaming service.

The club has tapped Snowball Digital’s Crystallize platform to deliver Gullpila service. AWS and Crystallize will work together to enable Odds Ballklubb to deliver and make money from the service.

Launched in March at the start of the 2018 Eliteserien season, Gullpila offers subscribers exclusive access to match highlights, player interviews, tips and tricks, and other fan-friendly content streamed live or on-demand to connected devices. Subscribers have unlimited access to content and can choose a monthly subscription or pay a one-time fee for the full season.

The service currently has “hundreds” of subscribers, which the partners said had established a new source of recurring revenue for the club.

Gullpila is built on the cloud-based Crystallize platform. This combines an e-commerce engine to manage subscriber access and process payments with a video processing and delivery solution, powered by AWS services.

Designed as a “headless” e-commerce solution, Crystallize lets customers like Gullpila customize the user experience for their audiences and integrate with back-end services via REST API, GraphQL, and webhooks. E-commerce functionality is executed with the Amazon Relational Database Service, AWS Lambda, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk services.

Snowball Digital selected AWS Elemental Media Services for cloud-based video processing and delivery for the Crystallize platform‘s video workflows. For Gullpila’s on-demand content, AWS Elemental MediaConvert transcodes file-based inputs from the Odds Ballklubb video team for distribution through the Amazon CloudFront CDN.

Crystallize enables Gullpila’s live streams with AWS Elemental MediaLive, which processes real-time inputs, and AWS Elemental MediaPackage to prepare streams for delivery to connected devices via Amazon CloudFront.

Speaking to Digital TV Europe at the TV Connect event in London, AWS Elemental chief product officer Aslam Khader said that the new services illustrated the benefits of AWS’ pay-as-you-use approach.

“We work with partners to enable them to innovate. We focus on ensuring services can delver a high level of functionality [through] integration with other services in the cloud such as security, distribution and analytics. That approach is illustrated by Crystallize,” said Khader.

Bard Farstad, CEO of Crystallize, said that tapping AWS had enabled it to launch a service with very little lead time.

“We brought this to market very quickly. A year ago it was not feasible because of the upfront cost and investment in hardware and software [required],” he said.

With AWS Elemental, he said that the company had been able to get the service up and running within a few weeks.