The combination of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Pub/Sub and Dataflow enables effortless scaling for high-traffic events for better user experience
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) improves developer productivity with automated deployments, accelerating innovation
Google Cloud's advanced AI and ML capabilities enhance content localization and accessibility for linguistically diverse audiences
Google Cloud AI and LLMs improve user feedback analysis and internal operational efficiency with AI
Vidio uses Google Cloud's scalable infrastructure, machine learning, and AI to provide a seamless, personalized OTT experience for over 45M Indonesian users. This enhances content localization, operational efficiency, and ad effectiveness, all protected by strong fraud detection.
Vidio uses Google Cloud's scalable infrastructure, machine learning, and AI to provide a seamless, personalized OTT experience for over 45M Indonesian users. This enhances content localization, operational efficiency, and ad effectiveness, all protected by strong fraud detection.
Meeting the demands of a dynamic streaming market
In its role as one of the biggest OTT providers in Indonesia, with more than 45+M Monthly Active Users (MAU), Vidio helps advertisers reach consumers at scale for their products and services. This meant that the company needed a scalable, cost-effective infrastructure to deliver premium content like live sports and drama series while ensuring a seamless, personalized viewing experience.
Additionally, user feedback was scattered across various platforms, making it difficult to centralize and analyze effectively for product improvements. Vidio selected Google Cloud because of its comprehensive suite of services, including AI and machine learning capabilities, scalability, and seamless integration with Google Workspace.
"Having multiple content offerings gives us much broader audience segments. This, in turn, means we need more superior data-driven user segmentation, and content curation by segments and AI-based recommendations, so we can surface the right content recommendation for each user. Google Cloud provides us with the tools to support this requirement,” says Tommy Sullivan, CTO at Vidio.
The fruitful partnership began back in 2020. As a long-term user since, Vidio has experienced the various ways the Google Cloud platform can assist a business in not just growing, but also enhancing the way things are done for the present and in the future.
Following on in the areas of scalability and cost efficiency addressed, Vidio could now look to other aspects in which to drive enhancements, including the use of AI, generative AI, and fraud detection.
Having multiple content offerings gives us much broader audience segments. This, in turn, means we need more superior data-driven user segmentation, and content curation by segments and AI-based recommendations, so we can surface the right content recommendation for each user. Google Cloud provides us with the tools to support this requirement.
Tommy Sullivan
CTO, Vidio
Enhancing user experience and operational efficiency with Google Cloud
Other than VOD content, the Vidio platform also offers premium content to its users in the form of live sports events to drive further revenue. However, consumption patterns during high-profile events tend to fluctuate, making it a potentially taxing challenge when it comes to user and viewing experiences.
The 2020 Olympics and the 2022 World Cup are two such examples, where viewership for peak periods are 11 times higher than usual. This spiked requests from a few thousand per second to over 500,000 as the stakes got higher.
Vidio leveraged Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Compute Engine for auto-scaling, which allowed the company to handle these massive spikes, ensuring that viewers can sign up and watch content without interruption. At the same time, developer productivity was boosted as with automated deployments, engineers could set up environments for new workloads in just one day.
Meeting the market’s linguistic demands
Moreover, Indonesia is the second most linguistically diverse country globally, with numerous regional languages such as Javanese and Sundanese not supported by traditional translation tools. Manually translating content into all regional languages was commercially unviable, thereby limiting content accessibility for a large audience within the country.
The automation is used to address the challenge of manual subtitling inefficiencies, which arise from the range of languages within the market and the audience.
With Neural translation model predictions in translation v3 from Gemini and Google Cloud capabilities, Vidio now has the ability to provide AI-generated subtitles, particularly for the numerous Indonesian regional languages, which was previously commercially impractical. For the audience, this means having a better viewing experience and providing them with the opportunity to enjoy content in their native languages, whether for entertainment or educational purposes.
“It has enabled something that wasn't possible, that wasn't enabled before,” shared Sullivan. “It's supporting these mother tongues and people who want to learn them, or people who want to maintain their understanding of those mother tongues.”
As for the Vidio team, the increased speed in generating these subtitles means costs have gone down for this component, helping otherwise inaccessible content to reach over 1M viewers seeking a more localized experience. In cases of imperfect translations, it also adds an element of fun that users have enjoyed through trying to figure out the nuances involved.
Driving personalization and ad effectiveness with data and AI
Vidio applies machine-learning algorithms on Google Cloud and the MLflow open-source platform to analyze customer data, predicting what users want to watch based on their preferences and behavior. This is crucial for engaging Indonesian viewers with relevant content, including local drama and sports events.
For its Advertising Video on Demand (AVOD) business, Vidio launched its Emtek Digital customer data platform on Google Cloud, hosted in the Indonesia cloud region for data sovereignty. This platform analyzes behavioral data from over +45M monthly users interacting with Emtek entities such as ecommerce marketplace Bukalapak, digital media company KapanLagi, and Vidio itself.
Emtek Digital helps the sales team query this data and build customer segments based on user viewing and sharing habits, enabling advertisers to promote their products or services to the desired audience. Google Cloud Storage provides the scalability to ingest and process growing amounts of user data, currently storing 660TB of data such as play, pause, playback event and user watch behaviors, and streaming over 2B events daily through Pub/Sub. This commitment to data-driven insights aligns with Vidio's broader goal of evolving into a 'Data-Driven, AI-enabled content company.'
Discovering more possibilities with AI
Vidio also uses Google Cloud AI for internal operations and business insights. Gemini's in-depth research capabilities support informed decision-making processes and effective brainstorming for product features and roadmaps. The company’s management actively encourages the use of Gemini in daily workflows, such as creating sales decks. Additionally, its text-to-SQL capabilities enable more accessible data analysis, allowing for quicker insights into metrics such as the "most played video yesterday."
Vidio continues to experiment and innovate, providing users with an improved experience on the platform. Generative AI is a key area of focus, as the company looks to utilize Google Cloud tools for advanced features like image refinement and generation independent of Vidio’s current models.
Similarly, there is also an effort to leverage AI to automate the process of creating sports highlights, editing shorts and clips from long events and making them available shortly after a game. With the help of Google Cloud, Vidio has made significant strides in enhancing its offerings to users, both on the front end and back end, with more features set to arrive in the future.
Vidio, a subsidiary of Emtek Group, is a leading OTT streaming service in Indonesia, offering a complete streaming service with a vast library of local and international content, including live sports and drama series, to over 45+M monthly active users.
Industry: Media and Entertainment
Location: Indonesia
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, Dataflow, Gemini, Google Analytics, Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Workspace, Pub/Sub, Vertex AI
About Google Cloud partner — Devoteam
Devoteam, a Google Cloud partner, has more than 650 Google experts with 10 Google Cloud specializations. The company has helped hundreds of organizations grow with Google Cloud, and moved over 1 million users to Google Workspace.
