Engaging audiences all over the world

Whether it’s an all-hands company meeting being streamed from Singapore or a rock concert being recorded in Chicago, TeeVid strives to give event organizers and attendees a great experience with a blend of live video streams, pre-recorded videos, graphics, and text.

In 2021, TeeVid began using a cloud-based, software-as-a-service model. However, because of its geographical diversity, TeeVid had to sign up with multiple local cloud vendors to deliver its services. That worked at first, especially when events were limited to a single geography. But before long, the organization found that its cloud posture was becoming unwieldy.

For example, if an event spanned several geographic areas, TeeVid’s small team was forced to use multiple cloud platforms with multiple content delivery networks at the same time—a risky proposition, according to Adi Nathan, Chief Executive Officer and Founder. “If an event had participants connected from Australia and the US, the broadcast would have to go through different cloud providers, which put us in a very vulnerable position,” he explains.

Furthermore, using multiple cloud platforms meant monitoring multiple dashboards and driving up expenses very quickly. TeeVid needed to standardize on a single cloud platform—one that could meet its technical requirements, handle automated switching of content delivery networks and support events with minimal latency, regardless of where they occurred or were viewed.

TeeVid found the right fit with IBM Cloud® Bare Metal Servers and IBM Watson® Media solutions. “IBM’s streaming capabilities, along with its AI services and its worldwide coverage, met our criteria very well,” says Nathan.

TeeVid’s online events are typically quite video heavy, whether they consist of pre-produced video footage, live streams, or a combination of the two. For an event to be successful, it must not have any sort of delay. “We have all our development and CI/CD servers in the IBM Cloud too, so it greatly minimizes the time required to deploy new servers and handle dynamic rapidly changing demand in general.” explains Nathan.

The servers are located in geographically diverse IBM data centers, which further reduces the risk of latency. “Video has a very wide bandwidth. If it has too many hops on the way to its destination, latency can accumulate. Distributed data centers are key to our success because we can minimize those hops,” says Nathan.

Even with very low latency, keeping virtual attendees engaged can be a challenge. TeeVid meets this challenge head on with a variety of interactive tools. “We’re doing things in the virtual world that you can’t do in the physical world,” Nathan explains. “Instead of a static presentation, we provide a dynamic experience with tools like polls, votes, and interaction with hosts, panelists and attendees. It’s all aimed at keeping things interesting and engaging.”

To that end, TeeVid delivers events on a customizable video player that allows viewers to switch from streaming to interactive. “You push a button to raise your hand and specify why you want to join. If the host or event administrator accepts you, you’re converted to interactive for however long you’re needed, then returned to streaming when you’re done. The whole lifecycle is based on IBM Watson Media for streaming,” says Nathan.