Sky Italia: The sky’s the limit for improving viewing experiences with Google Cloud
About Sky Italia
Recently acquired by the Comcast Group, Sky Italia has 5 million subscribers and is one of Italy’s largest media companies. In addition to producing original content, Sky Italia is the oldest and biggest pay-TV provider in Italy.
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About Go Reply
Go Reply is a Google Cloud Premier Partner and official Google Cloud Managed Services Provider. It offers services in the following areas: cloud strategy and migration, cloud hosting, big data, machine learning, PCI/ISO compliance and security management, productivity services, and fully managed 24/7 services to support its customers’ business-critical applications.
Sky Italia leads the way in customer viewing experience by employing Google Cloud preemptible VMs and Google Kubernetes Engine to transcode television content from standard to high definition, as well as encode, prepare, and orchestrate HD content for streaming across set-top and mobile platforms.
Google Cloud results
- Transcoded over 5,000 video assets to HD in just a few weeks with hybrid cloud solution
- Achieved up to 80% cost savings using preemptible VMs and Google Custom Machine Types to respond rapidly to peaks in demand without the need for overprovisioning
- Reduced time and expense of hardware and software installation and configuration while focusing more on actual deployment
- Allows nearly infinite flexibility for scaling according to specific business needs without costly subscriptions
Saves 90% of the cost of always-on channels with ad hoc pop-up event channels
With 5 million subscribers, Italian television provider Sky Italia is one of the country's biggest media ventures. When the company began its cloud journey, it meant managing big technical and infrastructure changes that would keep it on the leading edge for content delivery. At the same time, Sky needed to roll out these behind-the-scenes changes—which would transform customers’ viewing experiences across different Sky platforms—with no disruption to viewers.
“With Compute Engine, we could spin up new instances so quickly that managing our peak transcoding workload became a no-brainer. No extra capex, no time wasted. And by using Custom Machine Types, we could optimize the configurations of VMs to our real needs.”
—Gabriele Ubertini, Director of Technology Engineering & Innovation, Sky ItaliaTranscoding video on demand with preemptible virtual machines
As a first step, Sky Italia transcoded its entire back catalog into high definition in only a few weeks. This was a major technical challenge. Processing high-definition content takes longer and demands four times more CPU than standard-definition video, meaning that Sky Italia needed to add resources to its on-premises infrastructure in order to meet its deadlines. To do that, Sky Italia teamed up with Google Cloud Partner Go Reply to develop a solution for integrating its hybrid transcoder into Google Cloud.
“We had to transcode all our assets to the new bit-rate set optimizing costs and time. This wasn’t possible using only our existing on-premises infrastructure,” says Gabriele Ubertini, Director of Technology Engineering and Innovation at Sky Italia. “With Compute Engine, we could spin up new instances so quickly that managing our peak transcoding workload became a no-brainer. No extra capex, no time wasted. And by using Custom Machine Types, we could optimize the configurations of VMs to our real needs.”
Transcoding old video content while keeping up with new content produced every day can put a strain on a broadcaster’s infrastructure. With more than 5,000 video assets to be transcoded to HD on tight deadlines, Sky Italia had to source new transcoding capacity in addition to its existing on-premises servers. Rather than purchase and install extra hardware, the team looked for a cost-effective solution that met stringent internal security requirements. Together with Go Reply, Sky Italia conceived a public cloud and on-premises hybrid HD transcoder and benchmarked a range of potential cloud providers. They decided to take advantage of Google Cloud preemptible VMs—highly affordable, short-lived compute instances that could handle the batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads that Sky Italia needed.
Preemptible VMs offer the same machine types and options as regular compute instances and last for up to 24 hours. Working with Custom Machine Types, which respond rapidly to peaks in demand without the need for overprovisioning, and a custom orchestrator that manages the whole process, Sky Italia has been able to efficiently manage costs for savings up to 80 percent.
“Google offered us direct peering services between its infrastructure and the Sky data center,” says Ubertini. “Google preemptible virtual machines reduced our VM spending, but we needed a way to manage the moments when they might be unavailable. With Go Reply, we created an orchestration layer that let us use preemptible VMs and normal instances together and easily recover from preemptible VM shutdowns.”
Instead of taking months, the hybrid transcoder processed the entire Sky Italia archive in just one week. On a day-by-day basis, the time required to catalog new video assets has also been significantly reduced. Taking the hybrid approach a step further, Sky Italia looked to the cloud to help manage the spikes in traffic coming at different times of the day and for special events. Video processing request volume can vary widely based on when new series are aired, when soccer matches are being played, or simply by day of the week. While the cloud offers virtually unlimited scalability to handle peaks and valleys as they arise, Sky Italia opted for a hybrid approach, keeping the baseline on-premises and scaling to the cloud as traffic requires. This solution offers on-demand, highly efficient scaling with reduced lead time for delivering VOD assets with high signal quality. At the same time, costs are kept well under control.
“Sky Italia has been very reassured by the Google road map on cloud infrastructure, such that we have now moved our public cloud hybrid transcoder to share the same code base of on-premises operating infrastructure on Google Kubernetes Engine.”
—Davide Gandino, Head of Streaming, Cloud & Computing Systems, Sky ItaliaFuller customer experiences with Google Kubernetes Engine and data management
This initial success with video on demand gave rise to a “TV box telemetry” project that leverages App Engine, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, Cloud Composer, and Cloud Monitoring. It also takes advantage of an existing analytics dashboard to ingest, manipulate, and analyze data stemming from customers’ set-top boxes. Working with Google Cloud Professional Services team on project planning and architecture definition, Ubertini’s team has been able to reduce the time it spends on hardware and software installation and configuration while focusing more on actual deployment. The cloud setup allows nearly infinite flexibility for scaling according to specific business needs and doesn’t require costly subscriptions to be continued past the time they are needed.
More recently, Sky Italia implemented Google Kubernetes Engine to create further efficiencies. Sky Italia’s entire transcoding infrastructure now shares a single code base. “Phase two is based on containerization and Kubernetes,” says Davide Gandino, Head of Streaming, Cloud and Computing Systems at Sky Italia. “Sky Italia has been very reassured by the Google road map on cloud infrastructure, such that we have now moved our public cloud hybrid transcoder to share the same code base of on-premises operating infrastructure on Google Kubernetes Engine. This will help us be more efficient, spend less to get the same performance, and scale even more effectively than we do with VMs.”
“On-premises, when we experience a failure on the main encoders, it takes a few seconds for the backup encoders to kick in. As a result, mobile customers see a few seconds of black screen. Now, with the Google Cloud encoding solution, the switch is seamless because we already have a copy available and ready to deliver.”
—Davide Gandino, Head of Streaming, Cloud & Computing Systems, Sky ItaliaScoring a win for the business by moving software-defined encoding to the cloud
The TV business is competitive, with new providers and new offers continually entering the market. Sky Italia has a market advantage by providing its subscribers with premium sports content in HD—especially soccer—as part of the traditional, set-top box subscription. But more and more subscribers are moving from TV decoders to the company’s mobile Sky Go and streaming NowTV services, which allow users to watch on computers, mobile devices, and smart TVs. The product team saw that it could help Sky Italia stay competitive on mobile by converting its premium soccer streams to HD. With the COVID-19 crisis adding uncertainty as to when the 2020/2021 Series A season would actually begin, they brought this idea to Gandino. He immediately saw that his team would need to move very quickly so that the business would be ready whenever the season started. In fact, by the time they got to work, the starting date had been announced, and they had less than two months to get the technology ready for the business to take it to market.
Gandino explains, “We were asked to upscale our sports channels from SD to HD on NowTV and Sky Go mobile devices. Over the past two years, we’ve developed a solution that leverages Kubernetes to support our encoding stack. We created a software-defined encoding framework that allows us to deploy this encoding stack in the cloud, on-premises, wherever we want. After receiving this time-sensitive request from the business, we knew the only way to be able to deliver the project in time was to do it in the cloud.”
Gandino’s team had two technical challenges to consider when defining the project. Sky Italia offers two types of sports channels to subscribers—linear channels that are available 24/7 and “pop-up” channels that are available for specific events. Working with Google Cloud engineers, his team decided to use VPNs to accommodate Sky Italia’s ingest to the cloud. Encoding the linear channels for the cloud was a straightforward solution, since the encoding stack was already in production on-premises using Kubernetes. Gandino says, “We process the same content in exactly the same way, twice basically, just to be able to provide better resilience to our customers.” The encoding stack is then deployed into two availability zones, and the streams flow to the encoding stacks. Then the channels are fed back to the content delivery network and delivered to viewers.
“On-premises, when we experience a failure on the main encoders, it takes a few seconds for the backup encoders to kick in. As a result, mobile customers see a few seconds of black screen. Now, with the Google Cloud encoding solution, the switch is seamless because we already have a copy available and ready to deliver,” adds Gandino.
Sky Italia took a different approach for the pop-up channels, which only go live for specific sports events. In order not to waste cloud and license resources for channels that were only live for special events, Gandino and his team developed an orchestrator that essentially creates those channels ad hoc when an event goes live. “We create the channel, we consume the feed, and we deliver it back on-premises only when there is an event. This is done to save money on Google Cloud consumption and software licenses,” says Gandino. Sky Italia not only met the deadline but also is saving about 90 percent of the cost of a traditional channel by creating pop-ups for special events, all while delivering HD quality to viewers.
The sky's the limit with Google Cloud
With such a tight schedule for developing and deploying the solution, success would not have been possible without Google Cloud. Eliminating the need for acquiring servers, gates, and other network technology saved both time and money. Even more importantly, the resilience guaranteed with the high availability model was something that Sky Italia successfully introduced through the cloud and was then able to bring on-premises, improving the experience for all its customers. Now, Sky Italia’s mobile offerings are leading the way in viewing quality.
Sky Italia saw the potential of Google Cloud starting with the first successful transcoding project. To date, the company has about 30 solutions in production, and plans for several important projects are in the works. Gandino concludes, “The beauty of developing in the cloud is that it allows us to be innovative and to satisfy requests from the business in record time, all the while being able to manage our resources to their best advantage.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Sky Italia
Recently acquired by the Comcast Group, Sky Italia has 5 million subscribers and is one of Italy’s largest media companies. In addition to producing original content, Sky Italia is the oldest and biggest pay-TV provider in Italy.
About Go Reply
Go Reply is a Google Cloud Premier Partner and official Google Cloud Managed Services Provider. It offers services in the following areas: cloud strategy and migration, cloud hosting, big data, machine learning, PCI/ISO compliance and security management, productivity services, and fully managed 24/7 services to support its customers’ business-critical applications.