On the Showmax Engineering blog, we try to explain solutions to a pretty specific problem: how to deliver a high quality video streaming in Africa. To make our stories more intelligible, we started the series The Showmax engineering story, with the... »
Video on Demand (VOD) platforms usually support a wide range of devices. Despite the attempts to unify streaming protocols, DRMs, and other parts of the tech stack, it’s almost impossible to have only one playlist/manifest that fits everyone. The... »
On our blog we usually discuss our work in pretty in-depth terms, or terms that we set on our own. At times, we may speak a language that is unfamiliar, or even unintelligible, to some people. So, we decided to put together a vocabulary resource to... »
Showmax delivers a top-shelf VOD service across the African continent. On top of Hollywood hits, TV series, and local telenovelas, we offer news, music and live sports. Here on the Showmax tech blog, we write about the many challenges that we encounter... »
When you subscribe to a VOD service, you expect the best visual quality possible. For our customers across Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s no different. But, in a region with developing infrastructure and expensive data, OTT services like ours face an inevitable... »
This is the second (and final) part of our blog mini-series about boosting encoding speed. In the first part we wrote about how we managed to maximize the power of our encoding farm via parallelization of the encoding pipeline. Here, we will give you... »
Here at Showmax, we’re addicted to speed and performance. In this post, I’ll go through a few techniques we used to improve the speed of our encoding pipeline, maximize the computing power of our encoders, and shortening our encoding time. When it... »
In the first part of this series, we explained how Showmax got into the live streaming business and the problems we faced while developing our redundant setup. Now, the fun stuff - here’s a little dive into why our live encoding checker was sometimes... »
This is the first in a series of articles about how Showmax made a radical departure from its video-on-demand roots and took a live streaming platform from scratch to production in less than three months. In particular, we’ll share some of the key... »