New Way Now: How Bitmovin cut a 24-hour transcoding process down to minutes with Google Cloud

Описание: Featured in this video: Stefan Lederer, CEO and Co-founder, Bitmovin

Executive summary: Video transcoding traditionally takes hours — or even a full day for high-quality HDR content — creating operational challenges for media companies where quick turnaround times are essential. Bitmovin, a streaming infrastructure provider that serves companies like The New York Times, worked with Google Cloud to transform video processing speed. By spinning up tens of thousands of cloud instances in seconds, Google Cloud empowers Bitmovin to deliver 10 minutes of sports highlights in under one minute and enables news outlets to be first to market with breaking stories. The collaboration has brought Bitmovin a 16x increase in compute volume on Google Cloud in just months.

Challenge: Video transcoding creates severe time bottlenecks for media companies. For example, traditional workflows mean an hour of content takes anywhere from one to 24 hours to process, forcing companies to start transcoding in the morning and potentially wait until the next day for completion. For news outlets like The New York Times who need to be first to market, and sports streamers that require instant highlight clips, these delays are unacceptable. Additionally, with video comprising 80% of global internet traffic, companies must compress content efficiently without clogging limited internet infrastructure and last-mile connectivity while still delivering quality to end users.

Solution: Bitmovin chose Google Cloud as its default development partner for the platform’s cloud-native approach, excellent documentation, performance, and expertise. The infrastructure enables the Bitmovin team to spin up tens of thousands of cloud instances in seconds for massive workloads, enabling the company to meet customer SLAs for quick turnaround times and volumes.

Result: Bitmovin experienced a 16x increase in compute volume on Google Cloud, growth so significant that the team initially thought the numbers were a mistake. The collaboration transformed video processing speed from a day-long process to rapid turnaround. Ten-minute highlight reels now render in under one minute, while news outlets like The New York Times can turn around clips instantly to be first to market with breaking stories.

Highlights and key takeaways from our interview with Stefan Lederer, CEO and Co-founder of Bitmovin:

→ “Just in the last few months, we saw 16 times increase in our compute volume on Google Cloud. We looked at the numbers and we thought, wow, there must be a mistake. But it's actually true.”

→ “We want to have a partner who is cloud native in everything they do, and our engineering team is gravitating to partners like that. So from the get go, Google Cloud became our default for our development process for engineers and for the way they're working.”

→ “What we are helping our customers together with our partners like Google Cloud is to reduce this time to market.”

Google Cloud products used: Google Cloud

Learn more:
→ https://cloud.google.com/solutions/me...