Japan Football Rugby Union flies to the cloud

The Japan Rugby Football Union is transitioning its live video workflows to the cloud.

The JRFU is the governing body for rugby union in Japan, and organises all domestic and international matches for its national team. It has decided to move its media workflows to AWS Cloud, adopting AWS Media Services, and used M2A Media to manage and optimise its use of cloud infrastructure.

Live streams are a priority for the JRFU, due to a need for match content rapidly after events. M2A Media supplied a combined offering of its live IP transport product, M2A Connect, along with live capture feature, M2A Live Capture and managed operations service, to this end. 

Connect is deployed by JRFU to manage the transport of its live video streams over AWS Cloud. M2A’s live capture feature then automates the capture of the live video feeds from Connect, which are exported for ingest by the JRFU media asset management system and then on to third parties in multiple output formats, as required. 

In addition, M2A Operations schedule JRFU events via M2A Connect to ensure that AWS Cloud infrastructure is scaled in relation to match times.  M2A Live Capture resources are used as and when required based on the event schedule and, on completion of an event, a custom integration invokes the export of the VOD asset to other service providers. M2A Operations also provide JRFU with pre-event infrastructure provision checks, feed QC and real-time alerting of transport issues.

Yutaka Muroguchi, head of media business division at JRFU, said: “Our objective was to be fully up and running in the cloud prior to season kick off, so as to optimise costs and future proof our broadcast workflows. We have been extremely impressed by the solution that M2A proposed to meet our needs and the fact that they were able to deploy it and get us up and running so quickly. Our transition to the cloud has been seamless and we thank the M2A team for its expertise and continued support.”

Marcus Box, founder and CEO of M2A Media, added: “It has been great to work with JRFU on the transition of their important broadcast workflows to public cloud.  We are delighted that they have been able to experience the benefits that our service brings so quickly, and we look forward to a long relationship with the team in Japan as they continue to explore cloud-based video technologies and future possibilities.”