Fastly > Case Studies > Bell Media Enhances Content Delivery with Fastly

Bell Media Enhances Content Delivery with Fastly

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Sensors - Camera / Video Systems

Applicable Industries

Oil & Gas
Transportation

Applicable Functions

Logistics & Transportation
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Traffic Monitoring
Transportation Simulation

Services

Testing & Certification

About The Customer

Bell Media is Canada's leading content creation company, delivering media to over 22 million customer connections within more than 8 million Canadian households. The company is responsible for sourcing, transcoding, and delivering content to all Canadians, ensuring a consistently smooth and high-quality user experience. As their customer base continues to expand, Bell Media faces the challenge of managing high traffic spikes for video delivery without compromising the quality of their content. The company's video delivery pipeline team is tasked with ensuring that traffic spikes do not affect the quality of the content delivered to their customers.

The Challenge

Bell Media, Canada's leading content creation company, was facing a significant challenge in managing traffic spikes and maintaining the quality of their content delivery. The company delivers media to over 22 million customer connections within more than 8 million Canadian households. As their customer base continued to expand, they began to experience very high traffic spikes for video delivery. These traffic spikes posed a risk of causing slowdowns and server failures, which could compromise the quality of the content delivered to Bell Media customers. The video delivery pipeline team, responsible for sourcing, transcoding, and delivering content to all Canadians, needed a solution that could handle their growing capacity needs and ensure a flawless experience for customers under any circumstances.

The Solution

Bell Media turned to Fastly, a cloud computing services provider, to address their growing capacity needs. Fastly's solution allowed Bell Media to control how they direct their traffic to different sites, enabling them to balance and optimize network availability at each site. They could divert traffic between public and private CDN nodes to maintain a portion of traffic on each. Bell Media also used the programmatic edge at Fastly using VCL, allowing them to expand the capacity of their network and manage traffic for their origin servers. Fastly's VCL at the edge also gave developers the freedom to make improvements and quickly roll back any changes if needed, ensuring no negative impact on customers. Additionally, Fastly's streaming logs provided essential information for identifying and solving problems, enabling Bell Media to quickly remediate any issues.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Fastly's solution has brought about several operational benefits for Bell Media. The company can now scale for peak traffic while maintaining control, ensuring a consistently excellent user experience. Developers have the freedom to make improvements and quickly roll back any changes if needed, minimizing any potential negative impact on customers. Fastly's streaming logs provide essential information for identifying and solving problems, enabling Bell Media to quickly remediate any issues. Furthermore, Fastly's reliable support has helped Bell Media ensure that customer experience is never degraded due to network problems. The two teams stay in frequent contact via Slack, allowing Bell Media to reach out to Fastly support with questions or for advice as they continue to improve their service.

Quantitative Benefit

Significant improvement in first-byte response time, reducing video startup time and the likelihood of buffering for users.
Ability to handle high traffic spikes without compromising the quality of content delivery.
Reduction in traffic to the origin, freeing up origin servers for other uses.