December 10, 2018
By Tim Siglin Contributing Editor, Steve Nathans-Kelly
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SMP '18: Ellation's Michael Dale Talks Multichannel OTT

Learn more about AVOD and OTT at Streaming Media's next event.

Read the complete transcript of this interview:

Tim Siglin: Welcome back to Streaming Media West 2018, I'm Tim Siglin, 他是《百家乐软件app最新版下载》的特约编辑，也是非营利组织“帮助我”的创始执行董事! Stream. I’m here with Michael Dale from Ellation. Michael, first of all, tell us what your title and role is with the company, and then where did the name come from.

Michael Dale: Sure. I'm VP Engineering. 我与产品和业务团队密切合作，主要围绕订阅和基于avod的业务的几个不同领域. As for Ellation, the name of the company ... We originally were Crunchyroll, as you may have heard of. That's been around for a little bit over 10 years. 当Crunchyroll从Peter Chernin和AT的合资企业获得一些资金时&T, they retitled it as Ellation. It had to do with an iceberg ... 从水里浮上来的冰的一部分，“得意”是下面更大的冰山或什么东西. And then we have the pun of “elated.”

Tim Siglin: Right, exactly. As you say, Crunchyroll's been around for about 10 years. What's new now with Ellation to change the focus? Or is the focus the same?

Michael Dale: With Ellation and the AT&T Warner Media acquisition of Otter Media, which is the parent group that owns Ellation, I think we've really seen Crunchyroll scaling up quite a bit. Likewise, the VRV product, the multichannel offering, 也开始对我们的用户总数产生重大影响吗. We recently crossed 2 million paid subscribers, putting us well within the top 10, or at least what used to be the top 10. 无论如何，作为一个纯粹的OTT游戏，我们的在线订阅用户肯定排在前十.

Tim Siglin: For you, being in that top 10 grouping, especially with your engineering focus, what are the challenges that you face? 因为很明显，当你达到平流层或外逸层的水平时你的订户数量就会增加, everything has to work perfectly.

Michael Dale: We're dealing with more than a billion minutes per month streamed. Not only the 2 million subscribers, 还有每月1000万到1500万的AVOD活跃用户.

It is a fairly massive scale project. We've transitioned a lot of the engineering concerns, 传统的担忧是如何将基于数据中心的庞然大物转变为AWS和微服务，以及我们今天在展会上看到的一些讨论.

这当然是一个挑战，相对于飞机在飞行中更换引擎来说. 事实上，我们必须在整个过程中继续为用户提供服务.

Tim Siglin: When you're talking microservices, 我知道在行业中也有一些争论，如果你只是把它放在一个kubernetes容器中, that's not a microservice. How do you define microservices? I think that's a hot topic these days.

Michael Dale: Microservices are more than just the logical code service grouping; it's also about autonomy of the team, 这样他们就可以在不受组织其他部门阻碍的情况下交付价值. 在升降机和船的背景下，我们对巨石采取的方法, just to get it out of the data center.

We don't call that side of our text stack microservice space. We have been building out microservices from the ground up, relative to the nerve product launch, 现在我们正在整合基于多租户的微服务架构.

Tim Siglin: In terms, of as you talk about not being sort of slowed down by the other groups, 这是否能帮助你更快地推出增强功能和未来?

Michael Dale: You can see things in the old model. In the monolith, there was not ideal an architecture that was in play. I'll give you an example. 基本上，它正在访问数据库以查找HLS流的段名. 这几乎是一个灾难的食谱，因为随着越来越多的人只是想看视频，数据库将会过载. Simple things like that, where that's all now decoupled. 当很多人观看视频时，你不会关闭你的登录服务，等等.

Tim Siglin: That's actually a really interesting point, 如果数据库试图处理两个事务，则会出现单点故障, authentications, and as you say segments for-

Michael Dale: Right. I'm sure you've chatted with other companies that scale up, and they're dealing with Game of Thrones, or some massive cultural event. The video usually works, cause the CDN's are off loading that. 然后playhead位置服务就会关闭你的off服务如果你没有对它进行分段. An ability to scale it appropriately relative to the surge in demand.

Tim Siglin: It is. A matter of fact, I've written articles in the past about for live events, say a big boxing match, it's never the video deliver, it's always the authentication on the front end. If that fails, the customer can't watch the video, and the same net effect is they want their money back for that.

Michael Dale: Same thing for the customer. Right.

Tim Siglin: Awesome. Michael, thank you for your time. Really appreciate it.