The Customer
South West Screen is the largest organisation that supports and develops creative media industries in the South West. SWS offer funding and assistance to encourage innovation, grow creative businesses, develop talent, reach new audiences and develop the skills necessary to move forward.
South West Screen’s website mission was “whether you’re an animator or a games designer, whether it’s your job to produce, to direct or to design, and whether you work in film, broadcast, digital media or - as is increasingly the case - across all three, we’re here to represent your interests and to offer you useful support and advice.”
The Challenge
South West Screen online portal had become the ultimate destination for huge numbers of visitors interested in creative media industry. It’s success lead to huge volumes of traffic to the portal, at peak times, generating thousands of impressions every minute. Digitalisation and broadband connectivity have fundamentally changed how entertainment and media is produced and consumed. To enjoy continued success, South West Screen had to:
- Protect revenues yet deliver high performance figures when serving content to the visitor
- Ensure a superior browsing experience with no delays
- Manage the content lifecycle effectively
- Thwart piracy and threats to security
Faced with unprecedented demand for content, a one-stop virtual shop for downloadable videos, interactive content and movies, South West Screen needed to ramp up its backend infrastructure for the storage component of its content delivery network – and fast.
The results
Using Helastel to meet portal performance and availability goals was a logical choice for South West Screen. Helastel brought together the foundational building blocks of content distribution network powered by its data centres. In initial testing, using Helastel CDN reduced loading times for Web pages accessed in UK by almost 90 percent. Beginning with that success, the company now relies on Helsatel to handle more than 90 percent if its total Web traffic, from enhanced model configurators to product launches and promotional microsites, including iFeatures, confident in Helastel’s ability to maintain performance under any load generated by national advertising and events.