Custos will be at the AWS Summit in Cape Town tomorrow — come say hi!
At Custos, we use the combination of blockchain technology and AWS cloud infrastructure to deliver seamless content protection services to enterprise-level clients are as far-flung as India, the UK, US, Norway, Canada, Japan, Namibia, and Germany.
Piracy is a global problem, and — thanks to bleeding-edge cloud and blockchain technologies — we’re now solving that problem for content owners and distributors on a global scale.
How we first made friends with AWS
Custos was developed at the MIH Media Lab at Stellenbosch University in 2014. In early 2016, with our local MVP successful, we needed a way to demonstrate the blockchain tracking technology that we developed and patented could scale globally.
So, we launched the first version of the product that is now called Screener Copy — a secure video-on-demand (VOD) hosting and distribution platform, built to protect filmmakers and distributors from online piracy.
Since then, we have built a full stack of modular products on AWS that we can combine to meet the needs of a range of media customers in different markets and regions.
Why we love working with AWS
As our CTO, Herman Lintvelt explains below, we benefit from our relationship with AWS in more ways than one:
We changed our infrastructure to make use of AWS Spot Fleet instances last year November, and we saw a 70% reduction in cost, without losing any performance.
The biggest benefit we get is that we can have a very flexible architecture, and still experiment with aspects that we are unsure about (experiments are fundamental to a successful startup), and pay only as we use, no upfront capital expenditure.
In terms of scalability, our platform’s processing load fluctuates a lot, and AWS allows us to scale from zero to hundreds of instances quickly, allowing us to deal effectively with these fluctuations.
When it comes to deployment, AWS makes it easy with technologies like AWS Gateway, Elastic Beanstalk, Cloudwatch, ECS to deploy and monitor complex backend systems. This helps us to spend more of our time on building our product, and less on deployment.
We’re also working towards enabling our API platform to be available on the AWS marketplace. It can potentially be integrated into the AWS Elastic Transcoder service in order to embed watermarking and anti-piracy protection services as part of the AWS offering.
Where to find Custos at the AWS summit
Visit the Startup Showcase at Startup Central anytime between 9am and 6pm tomorrow (12 July, 2018), at the CTICC in Cape Town.
We’ll be hanging out with the guys from Luno, Snapt, Aerobotics, CloudOne.mobi, and FilePounder. You’ll also have the opportunity for a 1:1 session with a member of the AWS Startup team to learn more about the go-to-market programs they’ve designed specially for startups at all stages.
We’re looking forward to meeting you there!
