Hour One: Empowering GenAI video creation with powerful, cost-efficient infrastructure
About Hour One
With its GenAI video-content platform, Hour One is on a mission to democratize video content creation. Based in Tel Aviv, Hour One is used by some of the world's biggest enterprises to create cinematic-quality videos in minutes.
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About TeraSky
TeraSky provides expert consultancy to help businesses to solve their most complex infrastructure, platform engineering, and DevOps challenges.
Hour One migrated its workloads to high-performance Cloud GPUs, powering faster video content generation, better image quality, and more sophisticated AI models.
Google Cloud results
- 20x business growth since migrating to Google Cloud
- Improves inference speed by 1.8x with Cloud GPUs
- Reduces inference costs by 28%
- Produces more realistic and expressive AI-generated avatars with increased processing power
Hour One's AI video platform is powered by Cloud GPUs
With 91% of consumers saying they want to see more video content from brands online, it stands to reason that businesses are increasingly turning to video for their marketing and communications. For many years, however, the high price of professional video production restricted the amount of video content businesses could produce. Spotting the opportunity AI presents to significantly lower the cost of video production, Lior Hakim and Oren Aharon founded Hour One in 2019, enabling businesses with no technical expertise to produce professional-grade videos in minutes for highly affordable prices. Now, companies that want to deliver content in an engaging way can simply log in to the Hour One platform, describe the video they want, and Hour One's generative AI solution creates a cinematic video, complete with a virtual human presenter narrating the AI-generated script.
"We needed more GPUs to power our system. Without them we wouldn't be able to produce high-quality video, our customers would have longer waits, and it would take longer to train our models. We couldn't scale until we solved the GPU issue. Luckily, we solved it fast with Google Cloud."
—Amir Konigsberg, Founding Director and Head of Strategic Partnerships, Hour OneOriginally powered by graphics processing units (GPUs) from a third-party cloud provider, Hour One found that as its customer base grew, it was at times reaching the maximum capacity of its GPUs, reducing the speed at which it could generate videos for customers and restricting its ability to grow the business. With AI-video generation requiring a large amount of compute, and Hour One preparing to enter a period of rapid business growth, Hakim knew that it would need to solve its GPU challenge.
"We needed more GPUs to power our system," Amir Konigsberg, Founding Director at Hour One explains. "Without them we wouldn't be able to produce high-quality video, our customers would have longer waits, and it would take longer to train our models. We couldn't scale until we solved the GPU issue. Luckily, we solved it fast with Google Cloud."
Finding a cloud provider to power the video production revolution
As Hour One searched for a cloud provider that could meet its need for more processing power, it was impressed with the range of available industry-leading GPUs Google Cloud offers at competitive prices. Hour One migrated its infrastructure to Google Cloud GPUs in 2022, relying on Google Cloud partner TeraSky for technical support during implementation and for help with project management. The Hour One team also depended on Google Cloud for support as it worked to get the most out of its new system, steadily building a strong working relationship with the Google Cloud team.
"If the GPUs can't keep up, there's a delay. Also, if we want the virtual human characters to look more realistic, more expressive, we need more machines to process the data. With Cloud GPUs our videos are produced faster, our characters are more lifelike, and our customers are happier."
—Amir Konigsberg, Founding Director and Head of Strategic Partnerships, Hour OneFaster, higher-quality video rendering with Cloud GPUs
With Cloud GPUs, Hour One gained the processing power it needed to deliver higher quality videos at a faster turnover time. Thanks to the GPUs' large capacity and 99.9% availability, Hour One can deliver more videos to more customers on a regular basis. The inference time of Hour One's AI models is now 1.8 times faster than it was when running on third-party GPUs.
"Inference time matters because every time a request is made by a customer to generate a video, it relies on Google Cloud to power that request," explains Konigsberg. "If the GPUs can't keep up, there's a delay. Also, if we want the virtual human characters to look more realistic, more expressive, we need more machines to process the data. With Cloud GPUs our videos are produced faster, our characters are more lifelike, and our customers are happier."
Cost-efficient computing with scalable cloud infrastructure
Migrating to Google Cloud has enabled Hour One to improve its cost efficiency, too. With choice from a range of GPUs, Hour One can select the right unit for the particular workload, opting for more cost-effective L4s for processes that require less compute, and only using the more powerful machines when necessary.
By running its Cloud GPUs on Google Kubernetes Engine, Hour One automatically scales its infrastructure up and down as required, allowing it to quickly increase its processing power to meet a surge in demand, before scaling it back down when no longer needed. Combined with per-second billing for Cloud GPUs, this ensures Hour One only ever pays for the processing power it needs at any given time. As a result, the company has seen a 28% reduction in inference costs, which it is able to pass on to its customers in the form of lower prices, while reinvesting in the business to improve its systems.
Driving business growth with a global network of potential customers
With a cloud infrastructure providing the GPU capacity to meet its intensive compute requirements, Hour One has scaled its business to 20 times its previous size, taking on more customers and producing more videos of better quality. Now, the Hour One team is preparing to make its AI platform and cloud-based video-rendering engine available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, further extending its customer base by making its solutions available to Google Cloud customers everywhere.
"Now other Google Cloud customers looking to include generative AI into their workflow will be able to access Hour One's services directly from Google Cloud," Konigsberg explains. "Leveraging the reach of Google Cloud is going to be a significant boost to our go-to-market efforts as we grow our business."
"Previously we were worried about how we could support 1,000 customers. Now, with Google Cloud, we've been able to grow from 1000s of customers to 10X that number, without worrying about scaling our infrastructure. All we're focused on is improving our product, winning more customers, and keeping them happy."
—Amir Konigsberg, Founding Director and Head of Strategic Partnerships, Hour OneFocused on the future without worrying about infrastructure
Next, Hour One is looking beyond its own platform at how it can leverage its relationship with Google Cloud to make its core foundation models available to other companies that want to incorporate them into their tech stack. To that end, Hour One plans to put its models in the Model Garden on Vertex AI, allowing companies to use its proprietary models as part of their own AI projects. This way, Hour One is making use of the wider Google Cloud infrastructure to support its business growth, just as it is using Cloud GPUs to power its video production services.
"Thanks to Google Cloud infrastructure, Hour One has been able to create a solution that never existed before," says Konigsberg. "Previously we were worried about how we could support 1,000 customers. Now, with Google Cloud, we've been able to grow from 1000s of customers to 10X that number, without worrying about scaling our infrastructure. All we're focused on is improving our product, winning more customers, and keeping them happy."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Hour One
With its GenAI video-content platform, Hour One is on a mission to democratize video content creation. Based in Tel Aviv, Hour One is used by some of the world's biggest enterprises to create cinematic-quality videos in minutes.
About TeraSky
TeraSky provides expert consultancy to help businesses to solve their most complex infrastructure, platform engineering, and DevOps challenges.