Fastly: Building a high-quality video delivery service for Vimeo
About Vimeo
Vimeo gives video creators the tools to host, share, and sell videos of the highest quality possible. It reaches viewers in over 150 countries who can watch content anytime, on nearly every Internet-connected device.
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About Fastly
Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust the Fastly edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.
With Google Cloud Platform and Fastly’s content delivery network, Vimeo is delivering more high-quality videos than ever while reducing costs and focusing engineering talent on continuous platform improvements.
Google Cloud Platform Results:
- Improves video streaming speed and quality
- Increases the number of high-quality videos delivered to users
- Frees Vimeo engineers from IT management so they can improve video delivery platform
- Reduces costs and removes challenge of scaling servers and storage
Empowering over 60 million video creators
Vimeo is a video-sharing platform that’s home to imaginative video creators and hundreds of millions of viewers. Sixty million people create, host, and sell high-quality videos on Vimeo, including more than 800,000 who subscribe to the service’s premium tools. Over 240 million people in more than 150 countries watch videos monthly.
Vimeo was using its own servers to allow users to upload videos to its service, a cloud storage platform for storing videos, and as an alternative solution for streaming. It was looking for a solution that would do away with its own servers for uploading. Vimeo built a new adaptive video-delivery service on Google Cloud Platform and the Fastly edge cloud that can scale on demand to meet Vimeo’s growing needs for video streaming.
“Our business is dependent on delivering high-quality video; that’s our competitive edge,” says Naren Venkataraman, Senior Director of Engineering at Vimeo. “Thanks to Fastly and Google Cloud Platform, we’re delivering more high-quality videos than ever at less cost, leading to our continuing success and growth.”
Tuning video delivery
Building a great video experience begins with a fast, reliable upload service. Vimeo replaced its servers for accepting video uploads with Google Cloud Storage, fronted by the Fastly edge cloud to help ensure regional routing and low-latency, high-throughput connections for Vimeo’s publishers. Multi-regional Google Cloud Storage offers fast, resumable upload capability that helps make for better user experience.
The video delivery service transcodes videos and streams them to users—videos are customized depending on network traffic and the devices to which the videos are delivered. The goal is to deliver the highest-quality, smooth playback experience across all platforms over varying network conditions and device capabilities.
“We’ve chosen Google for Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator because at Google innovation happens faster, and Google Cloud Platform is driving cloud computing and cloud storage in the right direction.”
—Lee Chen, Head of Strategic Partnerships, FastlyGoogle Compute Engine packages the videos, which are stored on Google Cloud Storage. Google Compute Engine can automatically scale to allow Vimeo to deliver videos on the fly, even when demand spikes and many users stream videos simultaneously across a very diverse library. The low latency of Google Cloud Storage helps with fast startup times, while providing scalable storage to host millions of videos from Vimeo’s loyal community of content creators.
“Fastly and Google Cloud Platform enabled us to build a low-latency, highly scalable, on-the-fly adaptive video streaming packager in a short period of time with a small team,” says Naren.
High-quality video means more users
With Fastly and Google Cloud Platform, Vimeo is delivering more and higher-quality videos to its users because of the platform’s low latency, high bandwidth, and ability to scale. Because of the system’s reliability, fewer users stop watching videos because of delays and glitches. Vimeo engineers do not have to spend their time managing infrastructure and now focus on improving the video delivery service, leading to improved customer satisfaction. Costs are reduced because Vimeo does not have to manage the infrastructure in-house.
“We’ve chosen Google for Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator because at Google innovation happens faster, and Google Cloud Platform is driving cloud computing and cloud storage in the right direction,” says Lee Chen, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Fastly.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Vimeo
Vimeo gives video creators the tools to host, share, and sell videos of the highest quality possible. It reaches viewers in over 150 countries who can watch content anytime, on nearly every Internet-connected device.
About Fastly
Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust the Fastly edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.