Streaming Wizard produces live webcasts for Procter & Gamble, Citroen, the NHS, government bodies and universities, including satellite launches and broadcasts to the International Space Station. They needed bandwidth that could burst hard for a single event without locking them into a permanently high commitment.
Meet Streaming Wizard
Established by James Cunningham in 2002, Streaming Wizard is a leading provider of streaming solutions to brands and organisations including Procter & Gamble, Citroen, the NHS, and across local government and university sectors.
The team has produced live webcasts for everything from satellite launches in northern Russia to pupils at The King's School Canterbury chatting live with a British astronaut on the International Space Station: the kind of one-off broadcasts where the infrastructure absolutely has to hold up.
What they needed
Streaming Wizard's clients have wildly different needs: live event streaming to global audiences, on-demand TV channels, and video conferencing. Some events are predictable, others are not.
James needed a hosting partner that could provide flexible, burstable bandwidth without locking him into a permanently high traffic commitment that would have made competitive pricing impossible for one-off broadcasts.
How we built it
RapidSwitch was the only provider James found that could offer a high burst rate of bandwidth suitable for live streaming, while only charging in line with the traffic he actually used. As Streaming Wizard's audiences have grown, RapidSwitch has scaled bandwidth and infrastructure in step.
Streaming Wizard now runs a combination of dedicated and customer-supplied servers in our Maidenhead data centre, which carries ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certification. The facility is connected to the wider iomart network of fully owned and managed data centres by a 20 Gb fibre ring, with automatic monitoring of network, transit links and servers, and a NOC team on site around the clock.
“The hosting that we get from RapidSwitch is critical to our business. We're fully on top of our streaming services all the time.”
Where they are today
The combination of low-latency network, flexible bandwidth and the MyServers control panel keeps Streaming Wizard's team on top of their streaming services in real time. Hardware is built in-house from hand-picked components, and customers can upgrade as they grow without paying for capacity they don't need yet.
"We specialise in the optimal delivery of media content for our clients, some of whom are very famous names," James concludes. "They demand, and we expect, that our streaming is flawless."
