Firstlight Media, Google Advance Cloud OTT Capabilities

Firstlight Media has achieved key milestones in its collaboration with Google Cloud to create the next generation of cloud-native OTT capabilities.

Advancing development activities announced at NAB 2022, Firstlight Media will be showcasing at IBC:

• Personalized FAST (Free Ad-Supported Television) channels running on Google Cloud and ready for scalable CTV monetization via pre-integration with Google Ad Manager across client, and server side environments.
• Analytics dashboards built on a proprietary, unified data model, bringing together user engagement, content performance, and quality of experience metrics to help drive the business. Leveraging the Firstlight Media analytics platform, built on top of Google BigQuery and Looker, media companies can identify and target users at risk of churn to improve retention and identify new revenue opportunities.
• Linear streaming through HLS and DASH on Google Cloud Media CDN, with an early version of low latency streaming using the LL-DASH protocol.

“As we’ve plunged more deeply into our R&D collaboration with Google Cloud, two things have stood out,” said Juan Martin, CTO and Co-Founder of Firstlight Media. “First, our innovation velocity has dramatically increased with Google Cloud, which will be transformational for the media industry. Second, a tight integration with leading CTV focused services like Google Ad Manager and Google Cloud Media CDN will have a direct impact on the bottom lines of OTT providers.”

As the Google Cloud Industry Solution Media & Entertainment Partner of the Year for 2021, Firstlight Media is working across its partner ecosystem to preview at IBC 2022 tools that can help accelerate OTT’s shift to cloud-native platforms.

“At Google Cloud, we continue to explore new ways for our customers to build better businesses with cloud technologies,” said Anil Jain, Managing Director, Media & Entertainment Industry Solutions for Google Cloud. “By working closely with partners such as Firstlight Media, we can accelerate the streaming industry’s transition to a new generation of solutions by advancing capabilities and products that can drive business success and consumer satisfaction.”

Firstlight Media’s OTT platform is designed to build and run scalable applications in the cloud using cloud-native technologies, including containers, microservices, a service mesh, APIs, and immutable infrastructure. The OTT technology stack provides significantly better performance, a modular approach for feature expansion, continuous delivery for rapid iteration, and built-in scalability, observability and security.

Forward-looking OTT providers such as aha 2.0 in India, PLDT’s Smart in the Philippines and others are using the Firstlight Media platform to deliver services with the flexibility and the agility of the cloud, while equaling or exceeding the reliability and high performance of broadcast.