Gazprom-Media Holding has announced that it has successfully completed the transfer of the PREMIER OTT-service to its own infrastructure and Gazprom-Media’s video platform. The transfer was planned and carried out in order to improve the efficiency of the service. Following the transfer, the project’s infrastructure meets the requirements for a greater load on the service, while flexible software solutions are adapted to the speed with which PREMIER carries out its creative plans.
This was the first time in Russian practice that a “seamless” transfer of this magnitude was planned and implemented in stages, without affecting the availability of the service to its users. The work of the PREMIER services did not stop for a minute and continued during all the necessary technical work. Notably, this was also the time when the number of PREMIER users and content views has grown considerably - there was significant growth in the viewership of its content due to the lockdown measures and also due to the release of the final episodes of several popular series: Soldatki (Female Soldiers), Mir! Druzhba! Zhvachka! (Peace! Friendship! Chewing Gum!), Patriot, Call Center and others. As a result of the transfer, PREMIER got access to live broadcasts in 4K resolution, and there was significant improvement in the stability of the services and user satisfaction - their number increased, while the number of calls to the hotline dropped.
“The media industry across the world - and Russia is no exception - is one of the fastest growing, while the plans of PREMIER’s creative teams are traditionally ahead of the market,” said Alexander Zharov, CEO of Gazprom-Media Holding. “The moment has come when a platform stops meeting the increasing demands of the service and its clients in terms of its flexibility, functionality and speed.”
The task at hand was extremely challenging in the technical sense. It demanded not only a well-thought out transfer strategy for each client application, but also the implementation of intermediate interfaces for the backward compatibility of clients and a large amount of internal tests.
“The transfer of the service from the Huawei video platform required all the specialists of the technical team to work hard,” said the first deputy CEO of Gazprom-Media Holding, Svetlana Balanova. “Now the skills of Uma.Tech engineers, programmers and testing experts are finally fully available to improve user experience. I am confident that our viewers will notice and appreciate these positive changes and PREMIER’s new capacities.”
After its migration from the Huawei platform, the PREMIER service relies on its own program solutions and the Uma.Media video platform, which operates the video player, manages video issuing, its preemptive conversion, etc.
The need to transfer to its own infrastructure became apparent at the end of last year. Works to implement these plans have been carried out since January 2020, with the video output getting switched on March 15 and the final transfer completed at the end of May.