Overcast MAX #9: Max Simulator

Cost management 

One of the first things anyone asks when they are moving workflows to the cloud is, “How much is this going to cost me?”

It’s a fair question. And we can all go to the AWS or Azure calculator, plug in 25TBs and understand what it will cost to store that content for a month.

But what about the ingest cost, the egress cost, the transcode cost… and what are all those other parameters that the cloud providers list that can affect the cost?

Well, one of things that you will never get a straight answer to is how much your monthly costs are going to be. Why? Too many factors. Simply put, every application is built differently. 

That’s why we build MAX Simulator.

Cloud digital asset management

Whether you call it a Media Asset Manager (MAM), a Production Asset Manager (PAM) or a Digital Asset Manager (DAM), a cloud digital asset management platform is the secret sauce when it comes to managing video content. The reason? Video was traditionally managed on premise by editors and engineers.  Now social and marketing departments need access, as does corporate comms, product, sales and everyone else. It’s no longer reasonable to let “the video guy” hold the knowledge to the video kingdom.

The popularity of video means it’s no longer about whether you use it in business but rather how to leverage it. 

Remote working

Since coronavirus has forced many employees around the world to embrace remote working, it’s now trickier to collaborate on video projects. But a cloud digital asset management platform provides the solution — facilitating streamlined workflows, fast review and approvals, and easy transcoding to different formats.

Take it for a test drive

Which brings us back to cost: how much does is cost to use a cloud digital asset management platform?

You wouldn’t buy a new car without taking it for a test drive, would you? 

Now you can test drive our video platform to calculate the investment required.

Max Simulator

Max Simulator allows you to run a real-time simulation of your video workflows with more than 20 inputs. This will give you an understanding of the CSP (Cloud Service Provider) costs associated with storing and managing your content in the cloud. 

The inputs include everything from archive size to number of users, concurrent users and activity levels for real pricing.

It’s very accurate since you only test what you plan to use. You can then add new services to project those costs too. 

For example, we had one organization ask us how much it would cost to have 50,000 logins, 1,000 concurrent users working on the system 24 hours per day — and generating 3PB (petabytes) of content per year. To put that in context, it’s equivalent to 700,000 DVD quality videos. With that much content, you want to be fairly sure you know how much it is going to cost you to process it, let alone store it.  

Benefits of Max Simulator

Cost Optimisation

CSP costs can be an enigma — but running your workload over a short period of time using Max Simulator helps you better project cost infrastructure.

Customisable Solutions

We know that your business is unique, so let us customise the inputs in Max Simulator to create an accurate understanding of costs specific to you.

Better than a calculator

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a simple monthly calculator, which is useful for an initial estimate — but you’ll get a better picture by actually simulating a load on a real platform.

Contact us

Max Simulator is one of nine Overcast MAX products that makes video collaboration effortless. If you’d like to learn more about this fantastic suite of solutions, please contact Philippe on info@overcasthq.com or click here to get in touch.