Hudl Leverages AWS to Enhance Video Upload and Analytics Platform

Hudl is a software provider that offers a video and analytics platform for coaches and athletes to quickly review game footage to improve team play. The web-based system serves youth, amateur, and professional teams in football, basketball, soccer, volleyball, and other popular sports. Hudl was named to the 2016 Most Innovative Companies list by Fast Company. The company is experiencing significant business growth around the world, with an increasing number of sports teams using the company’s services to upload game video.

Hudl, a software provider offering a video and analytics platform for sports teams, was facing a number of challenges. The company was experiencing significant business growth globally, with an increasing number of sports teams using their services to upload game video. This growth, at a rate of about 30 percent every year, required scalability to support and maintain. Additionally, Hudl was striving to provide faster video upload speeds to its customers. Many coaches were requesting quicker video uploads and faster access to videos for analysis. This posed a logistical challenge due to the large video files being moved over long distances. On a typical Friday night in high school football season, Hudl was uploading 39 hours of video every minute for encoding and processing. Lastly, Hudl was seeking a better analytical platform for internal data analysis. Their self-built data warehouse was complicated, expensive, and underperforming.

Hudl decided to expand its use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to meet its needs for scalability, faster uploads, and more effective data analysis. The company had been running its platform on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, which it decided to enhance by incorporating Auto Scaling. This provided an automated way to scale storage and compute capacity, helping manage the varying load from week to week. To meet its needs for faster video uploads, Hudl began using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, a feature that enables faster data transfers to and from Amazon S3. Hudl also started using Amazon Redshift as its data warehouse for internal data analysis. The organization also uses AWS to support an additional data analytics and predictive-learning platform, which customers use to analyze opponents’ tendencies and other game trends. Hudl also uses Amazon CloudFront as its global content delivery network (CDN) service for fast delivery of its video platform. Hudl uses Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to provide millions of coaches and sports analysts with near-real-time data feeds.

• By leveraging AWS, Hudl has been able to significantly improve its operations. The company can now easily scale to support its rapid growth, and it has increased video upload speeds, enabling coaches to upload and analyze videos faster. This not only improves the service for the teams using Hudl, but also allows coaches to have more personal time. Hudl's internal data analysis has also improved, with Amazon Redshift providing consistent performance and usability. The company has also been able to reduce the cost of running internal data and predictive analytics, and plans to expand the number of AWS services it uses in the near future to further optimize the performance and costs of its platform.

• Hudl can keep pace with its 30 percent annual growth by running its video platform on AWS.
• The company uses AWS to ingest and encode more than 39 hours of high-definition video every minute during sports seasons, for 4.5 million coaches and athletes on 130,000 teams worldwide.
• Using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, Hudl has seen at least a 20 percent increase in video upload and encoding speeds.