However, delivering high-definition live video from remote locations to millions of global viewers is about as hard as it sounds. The organization’s streaming and media management infrastructure was complex and costly. A proprietary managed services partner re-encoded its video streams up to four times before reaching YouTube.

This resulted in high operational costs, stream delays of up to two minutes, and unstable connections that frequently dropped live feeds. The same vendor’s logging was also inconsistent and managed externally, so if errors occurred, it took much longer for explore.org to be able to respond and ensure streams continued to run smoothly. The organization needed a flexible, cost-effective infrastructure that could maintain continuous uptime without eating into its valuable funding. “We are 100% philanthropic, so every dollar we’re spending operationally is a dollar our founder can’t give to another cause,” says Candice Rusch, Director of New Media at explore.org. “We had to find a new solution that let us focus on our mission rather than optimization.”

Together, these solutions allowed explore.org to establish a pipeline that sends camera footage to Google Cloud and straight to YouTube. Because Google Cloud routes traffic directly to YouTube using internal networks, explore.org eliminated data transfer egress costs and streaming decay while consolidating three different services into a single unified model.

“We finished our complete migration so quickly, and this change has opened so many doors,” Rusch adds. “We have full control over our own system; it’s significantly more cost effective, our streams are higher quality, and the solution is more flexible. It’s a completely different experience, and we can spend our time on new projects instead of maintenance.”