Independent Wrestling TV

Before partnering with Snyder Technologies, IWTV encountered several key challenges. Their existing systems, although effective for traditional video content creation and delivery, were primarily designed for general content. This setup required numerous manual adjustments to adapt to the unique demands of live professional wrestling and the management of a vast video library containing content from hundreds of different rights holders.

One of the most significant challenges was managing the analytics necessary to accurately credit rights holders for the consumption of their content by IWTV’s customers. The complexity of supporting subscriptions from various sources, including their own internally managed applications and in-app purchases from multiple platform app stores, further added to their operational difficulties.

Additionally, IWTV sought to expand their offerings by enabling one-off “pay-per-view” purchases for both live streams and video-on-demand content. The high volume of live streaming events necessitated a standardized method for processing these purchases without requiring third-party app store approval for each event.

Defining the client’s unique needs

To address IWTV’s unique requirements, Snyder’s business analysts conducted extensive research, identifying redundancies and external service dependencies that could be streamlined into a unified administrative system.

Getting the code under control

Our development team migrated reporting, content management, video transcoding, and sales management to Single Sign-On (SSO) microservices. This transition simplified ongoing maintenance and reduced financial overhead, allowing IWTV to focus on content creation. We also transitioned IWTV’s planning, source code version control, and related development processes to the Microsoft Azure DevOps system, enhancing team collaboration, ensuring high code quality, and providing robust security and reliable performance.

We established close working relationships with IWTV’s third-party vendors for content delivery, collaborating with them to implement cost-effective, cutting-edge video delivery and streaming solutions, particularly for the challenges posed by internet streaming content ingestion.

Modernizing and Migration

Throughout our partnership, Snyder’s development team created proprietary solutions enabling IWTV to generate revenue across multiple platforms. Users can seamlessly switch between platforms—for example, starting on a laptop, then moving to a phone, and finally to a set-top OTT device like Apple TV or Roku—ensuring a consistent and flexible viewing experience.

Creating Efficiency

IWTV collaborates with hundreds of partner promotions, receiving source video content in various formats. To deliver optimal performance across a wide range of devices, platforms, and network conditions, each video file provided by a partner must be transcoded into multiple different resolutions and file encodings. This ensures compatibility with various devices and allows users to choose the best quality for their needs—whether saving mobile data on their phone with a lower resolution or enjoying the highest quality on their big screen television at home.

To handle this complex task, Snyder Technologies developed a proprietary in-house transcoding solution that automates the entire process for IWTV. The solution transcodes each video into the necessary formats and encodings, then seamlessly transfers the content to IWTV’s global Content Delivery Network (CDN) for distribution. This system not only reduced the average cost per video by more than 60% but also increased transcoding speed by over 300% by leveraging parallel processing on an unlimited number of virtual servers. This capability allows IWTV to transcode any number of videos simultaneously, reducing their previous transcoding queue times from days to minutes.

Streamlining Workflows

Before engaging Snyder, IWTV’s team spent considerable time creating content and advertisements using their extensive media library, often requiring large downloads for brief clips. Snyder developed an application that allows IWTV’s video editors to quickly browse and identify moments from their vast library of thousands of events. These clips are then automatically created, uploaded to IWTV’s cloud storage, and made available to the video editing team, eliminating the need to download the original source files. This solution empowers all team members, not just video editors, to create clips, thereby distributing the workload more efficiently.

Going Over-The-Top

Snyder worked with IWTV to create modern OTT (Over-The-Top) apps for delivering their live and on-demand content to Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV devices, as well as mobile applications for both iOS and Android. These applications expand the options for IWTV’s customers to view their content on televisions, desktops, tablets, and mobile phones with a uniform experience that remains consistent from platform to platform. Snyder unified the IWTV API to allow significant consolidation of code across these proprietary platforms while still using native code for each platform for improved performance in each of the different applications.