Magnifi AI: Keeping audiences engaged with video moments that matter
About Magnifi AI
Magnifi AI is an enterprise product by video editing company VideoVerse. With a vision to empower every user to tell more compelling stories with their content, Magnifi AI is helping brands create highlights and short-form videos in real time. With customers primarily in the sports industry, Magnifi AI also supports the media and entertainment industry develop short reels and trailers.
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Contact usMagnifi AI leverages the flexibility and agility of Google Cloud GPUs to deliver short video highlights to its customers in real time and keep audiences engaged.
Google Cloud results
- Analyzes videos at speed with highly configurable GPUs
- Builds custom VMs for instant scalability
- Develops deep-learning models and scale quickly with Vertex AI
- Ensures high level of security with single sign-on
Reduces customer onboarding time from 7 days to 15 minutes
Technology has transformed the way people watch videos, and this includes the way they catch their favorite sporting events on screen. "People don't have time to watch full events anymore, they want to catch the best moments through short video highlights instead," explains Shyam Vyas, Vice-President of Engineering at Magnifi AI. For video streaming companies, this means that getting the best content to their viewers within the shortest amount of time is crucial.
With that in mind, Magnifi AI is on a mission to provide customers with the best short-form videos that keep audiences engaged and coming back. Launched in 2016, the company has offices in Mumbai, Indore, and the US.
As a SaaS company, Magnifi AI works with enterprises across various industries, including over the top (OTT) platforms, sports broadcasters, leagues, sports federations, e-gaming platforms, even entertainment companies. Since every customer has their own platform and source codes, Magnifi AI is faced with the constant challenge of ensuring source compatibility for integration with its platform, on top of making sure it can scale its infrastructure quickly when needed. The platform also needs to be flexible due to the volatile nature of the sporting industry, where its primary customers are from.
Being a cloud-native company, Magnifi AI is not new to the capabilities that cloud platforms can deliver. However, as the organization grows, it needed a platform that would support its goals in continuously delivering the best service to existing customers, and onboard new customers quickly in the most efficient way possible. Magnifi AI decided to move from its incumbent cloud provider to Google Cloud for its unrivaled scalability and flexibility, with support from Google Cloud partner Cloudside.
Integrating seamlessly across various platforms
A key requirement that Magnifi AI sought in a cloud provider was compatibility with the platforms that customers use. "Everyone has their own way of working, whether it's with other cloud providers, or with their own web portal where they publish their final content. So we need to ensure that we have the right tools available when we integrate with their platform," explains Vyas.
Whether its real-time messaging protocol (RTMP), HTTP live streaming (HLS) feed, or even a Secure Reliable Transport (SRT), the team's biggest challenge is in ensuring that new client onboarding can be done quickly and efficiently. "We have to adjust our product according to the users, and integrate with their internal content management system (CMS), and Google Cloud enables us to do so quickly and efficiently," says Vyas.
In the past, onboarding a new customer took about a week to complete, as the team had to manually reach out to cloud providers to allocate additional GPUs and set up server instances based on unanticipated loads or new client onboardings. This usually took up to a week, since the product had to be manually configured and deployed on the new instances, and then tested each time. However, the highly configurable and auto-scalable GPUs on Google Cloud automated the entire process of deploying the product on new instances, therefore enabling Magnifi to analyze videos at speed, and reduce customer onboarding time to just 15 minutes.
Choosing the best cloud combination for maximum efficiency
Because of the graphics-intensive workloads that come through daily, having the flexibility to choose the combination of Computer Processing Units (CPUs) and GPUs is important to ensure that they have enough of what they need, and avoid wastage at the same time.
"In video analysis, we need more GPU than CPU. However, most cloud providers tie the amount of CPUs together with GPUs, which means we would have a lot of underutilized CPUs, not to mention the high costs associated with it," says Vyas. "One of the biggest benefits of Google Cloud is that we have the flexibility to choose the amount of GPUs and CPUs needed and customize the virtual machines as needed."
"In video analysis, we need more GPU than CPU. However, most cloud providers tie the amount of CPUs together with GPUs, which means we would have a lot of underutilized CPUs, not to mention the high costs associated with it. One of the biggest benefits of Google Cloud is that we have the flexibility to choose the amount of GPUs and CPUs needed and customize the virtual machines as needed."
—Shyam Vyas, Vice-President of Engineering, Magnifi AIGoogle Cloud partner Cloudside wrote a script for the virtual machines (VMs) to autoscale the GPUs so that the team at Magnifi AI was able to quickly better provision its resources. "The Cloudside team really have strong technical knowledge and skills, as they were able to deliver a script that was flawless. They understood our systems and knew how to marry the technologies to the business goals," says Vyas.
With the custom VMs, Magnifi AI can develop microservices on standby, enhancing its overall infrastructure. Now, engineers can quickly set up microservices that can be turned on at a moment's notice. "We completed our proof of concept within three to four months, and can now scale on the basis of need, which means that when there is a sudden influx of videos, we would already have the infrastructure in place to take them on for analysis," says Vyas, adding that this capability has been a game changer for the business.
"The Cloudside team really have strong technical knowledge and skills, as they were able to deliver a script that was flawless. They understood our systems and knew how to marry the technologies to the business goals."
—Shyam Vyas, Vice-President of Engineering, Magnifi AIMagnifi AI is constantly improving its AI models, and uses Vertex AI to do deep learning and train its models. "Our product has three layers. Vision-based analysis, optical character recognition (OCR), and natural language processing (NLP). We go through all three layers when conducting video analysis, and are currently using Vertex AI to help scale these machines faster, to the staging and production environment," says Vyas.
Providing a peace of mind for customers with a secure platform
When it comes to sporting events, a lot of investment is poured into getting the rights for broadcasting. As such, Magnifi AI needs to ensure their software is secure. "We never publish from our platform, and make sure we never store any of the videos as we don't own them," says Vyas. By leveraging the capabilities of Security Command Center, customers can be assured that their content is secure against potential leaks. The team also uses single sign-on, which ensures that only authorized employees are able to access the content.
Building the future of video viewing with Google Cloud
"We are a media and entertainment specific solution, and partnering with Google Cloud, which has the right technologies that complement our capabilities is a move that will benefit not just our organization, but for the industry as a whole."
—Shyam Vyas, Vice-President of Engineering, Magnifi AIWith so much potential in Magnifi AI's solution, it has participated in Google Cloud Marketplace to accelerate its digital transformation, and scale faster as an independent software vendor with Google Cloud. "We are a media and entertainment specific solution, and partnering with Google Cloud, which has the right technologies that complement our capabilities is a move that will benefit not just our organization, but for the industry as a whole."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Magnifi AI
Magnifi AI is an enterprise product by video editing company VideoVerse. With a vision to empower every user to tell more compelling stories with their content, Magnifi AI is helping brands create highlights and short-form videos in real time. With customers primarily in the sports industry, Magnifi AI also supports the media and entertainment industry develop short reels and trailers.