Norwegian Association Football Club turns to the Cloud
May 10, 2018
Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, has announced that Odds Ballklubb, an association football club in Norway’s top professional league, used AWS Media Services and the Crystallize e-commerce platform from Snowball Digital to cut time to market in half for its new Gullpila paid subscription video streaming service. AWS and Crystallize enable Odds Ballklubb to have full control over its video monetization strategy with a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use platform.
Launched in March at the start of the 2018 Eliteserien season, Gullpila offers subscribers exclusive access to match highlights, player interviews, tips and tricks, and other fan-friendly content streamed live or on-demand to connected devices. Subscribers have unlimited access to content and can choose a monthly subscription or pay a one-time fee for the full season. Within weeks of launch, Gullpila recorded hundreds of subscribers, establishing a new source of significant recurring revenue, and its subscriber base continues to grow steadily.
“Thanks to AWS and the Crystallize platform pioneered by Snowball Digital, we are able to efficiently deliver a variety of live and on-demand content, provide high-quality user viewing experiences, easily capture and manage subscriptions, and create new revenue opportunities.,” said Einar Håndlykken, Managing Director, Odds Ballklubb. “Crystallize truly automates the business and technical aspects of delivering paid video services, allowing us to focus on serving our subscribers with fresh, dynamic viewing experiences.”
Gullpila is built on the cloud-based Crystallize platform created by Snowball Digital. Crystallize offers customers a comprehensive, platform-as-a-service approach to building and managing subscription-based video services. It combines a robust e-commerce engine to manage subscriber access and process payments with a complete video processing and delivery solution, all powered by AWS services. Designed as a “headless” e-commerce solution, Crystallize lets customers like Gullpila customize the user experience for their audiences and easily integrate with back-end services via REST API, GraphQL, and webhooks. E-commerce functionality is executed with the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), AWS Lambda, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk services.
Snowball Digital selected AWS Elemental Media Services for cloud-based video processing and delivery for the Crystallize platform‘s video workflows. For Gullpila’s on-demand content, AWS Elemental MediaConvert transcodes file-based inputs from the Odds Ballklubb video team for distribution through the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN). Crystallize enables Gullpila’s live streams with AWS Elemental MediaLive, which processes real-time inputs, and AWS Elemental MediaPackage to prepare streams for delivery to connected devices via Amazon CloudFront.
“Today’s sports teams and other content providers are increasingly looking for new ways to connect with fans, enhance their brands, and monetize the uniquely compelling content they’re able to produce,” said Bård Farstad, CEO, Snowball Digital. “Crystallize lets forward-thinking organizations like Odds Ballklubb customize video services to their audiences, while taking advantage of a virtually turn-key solution for distributing OTT video at scale. We’re delighted by the capabilities of AWS solutions to enable services like Gullpila – and any Crystallize customer – to engage their audiences in new ways and generate new revenue streams.”