Plex

Plex is a global video streaming service based in the United States that offers its audience an expansive content catalog – from Bollywood to Hollywood and everywhere in between. Plex has over 25 million users and over 50,000 on-demand titles in its content library.

As Plex prepared to launch its new TVOD and PVOD offerings, it wanted to deploy a new VOD Encoder to support its wider business aims of maximizing revenue streams without compromising on image quality. Additionally, Plex needed an encoder that supported robust content security solutions, such as forensic watermarking, to license premium content from studios.

Bitmovin’s award-winning VOD encoder deployed on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, stood out to Plex for multiple reasons, including its Per-Title encoding capabilities, flexible deployment options for managed cloud & cloud connect, and its advanced feature support, such as forensic watermarking and ability to reduce streaming operational costs.

The main requests were:

Pain points Bitmovin helped solve:

How Bitmovin delivered:

The highest visual quality without breaking the bank: Bitmovin’s Per-Title Encoding, ensures Plex’s video assets are efficiently encoded, delivering the highest visual quality with the most efficient adaptive bitrate ladder without wasting overhead data.

Improving operational efficiency: Ease-of-use is one of the key differentiators of Bitmovin’s VOD Encoder, it’s straightforward to configure, which means Plex’s engineering team could plug the encoder into their video streaming workflows, and it would require minimal oversight, so the team could focus on other revenue generating tasks.

Advanced feature set supporting future growth

The Bitmovin VOD Encoder is a cloud-native solution integrated within the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and has an extensive feature set that ensures Plex can quickly scale and adapt for any future encoding needs. It was essential that Plex picked an encoder with support for forensic watermarking, and Bitmovin fulfils that requirement with a pre-integration that applies imperceptible video watermarks to content during the encoding process for an adding level of security.

“Plex is on a quest to be the hub for a global community that wants to experience and share the media they love, and that requires a robust underlying video streaming structure to deliver a streaming experience that matches the quality of our content. Bitmovin’s VOD Encoder is a key component in our video streaming workflows, ensuring that we can securely encode content into the highest visual quality while also reducing the operational costs associated with streaming. The Bitmovin team is a valued partner who facilitate a seamless integration, and we are deeply impressed with the visual quality and distribution and storage savings we are already seeing.”

— Shawn Eldridge, VP of business development and Content at Plex