Renault streamed live video from Yandeх Cloud

Renault is one of the most popular and best-selling car brands in Russia. Its dealer network consists of more than a hundred car showrooms, from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.

In 2020, Renault rolled out an updated version of its Kaptur CUV and, to launch sales in Russia, the company needed to make a live broadcast for 83 dealerships. The raging coronavirus pandemic impacted how this would be done. It was decided to broadcast pre-recorded videos. The difficulty was that a pre-recorded video had to be simultaneously broadcast in different time zones and started at the scheduled time while giving the impression of a live broadcast. The presentation couldn’t leaked on the internet before the announcement and the videos were to be provided a few hours before the start of the broadcast.

Renault engaged OpsGuru, a cloud solution provider and a Yandex Cloud partner. The company established itself as a reliable and responsible partner with the necessary expertise, capable of offering non-standard solutions in a difficult situation. Through brainstorming and tough negotiations, the three most suitable solutions to the problem became evident.

Livestreaming the video via YouTube. This required creating 83 virtual machines that would stream the video at a specific time. However, YouTube imposes a variety of restrictions, including licensing restrictions for the video itself (music, video sequences, and so on), and channel verification (you can only go live if your channel has a certain number of subscribers).

Uploading video files to Yandex Cloud object storage. In this case, dealers could be sent a link to the page where the video would start at the specified time. This solved the problem with playing the video, but it wasn’t a livestream.

Adaptive streaming in Yandex Cloud. This option assumed storing video files on the Flussonic Media Server cloud platform.

Renault chose the third option: they felt it best met their needs and removed the lag between the data center and end users.

The following infrastructure for video streaming servers was deployed in Yandex Cloud:

• Yandex Object Storage for video storage.
• A VM with two NVIDIA^® Tesla^® V100 GPUs.

Flussonic Media Server software was installed for video delivery. This made it possible to use adaptive streaming with hardware transcoding on NVIDIA^® NVENC. This solution let Renault broadcast their video to dealerships at the quality that their internet channel and installed equipment allowed. And software customization flexibly solved the problem of starting the video at the scheduled time.

The main difficulties in implementing this project were:

1. Deadlines. We had to develop and make everything ready within two weeks.
2. Checking the hypotheses and performing testing. The reputational risks were too high, and this required a very thorough check of all the system components.
3. Changes. The presentation video was changed an hour before the broadcast.

Thanks to the Yandex cloud solution and involving our partner OpsGuru, Renault managed to implement a live broadcast across Russia with no bugs or interruptions.

An additional advantage for Renault was the transparent pricing offered by Yandex Cloud. They only paid for the resources that were used during the broadcast.