Watching TV and movies in the cloud – the blinkbox way

blinkbox turns to Microsoft Azure to power its TV and movie streaming service by switching from its own on premises set up. The shift to the cloud has already begun which will see its 20,000-strong movie and TV catalogue transcoded and run from Azure.

blinkbox discusses how the cloud helps them provide a great customer experience

How’s it all done?  
Jon Robinson, Group Head of IT at blinkbox explains: “As our service got more popular we found that running our own data centre was getting prohibitively expensive and we were running out of the computing power necessary to encode our catalogue of movies quickly enough so we could get them to work on the multitude of devices and screen sizes we need to support. Using Microsoft Azure has got this process down from weeks to just days or hours.”

Why Microsoft Azure versus other cloud technology providers?
Robinson explains: “We looked at all of the offerings on the market and felt Microsoft best understood where we wanted to go as a company and the demands of our customers. blinkbox already runs a lot of Microsoft-based systems but a key factor was the ability for Microsoft Azure to work with our non-Microsoft technologies such as Linux. This flexibility allows us to use whichever tools are right for the job.”

 
Read the full story at Microsoft News Centre UK