Delivered Work &
Measured Outcomes

Situation and Challenge

The broadcaster's streaming platform had been built incrementally over several years by multiple contracted teams, resulting in an architecture with no coherent failure management strategy, inadequate monitoring instrumentation and a CDN configuration that had never been formally reviewed against actual audience patterns. The primary symptom was high buffer ratios during peak audience events — sports fixtures, local news and scheduled programming with predictable demand spikes.

An initial architecture audit, conducted over two weeks, revealed three distinct failure mechanisms. First, origin infrastructure was operating as a single-region, single-instance configuration with no redundancy or failover path. Second, the CDN edge configuration was using generic settings that had never been calibrated to the broadcaster's specific content characteristics, resulting in inefficient caching behaviour. Third, there was no real-time monitoring visibility into playback quality events — meaning degradation was only identified after audience complaint volumes rose to a threshold that triggered internal review.

Solution Design

FAMORENOVO developed a three-layer remediation approach. Origin redundancy was addressed through a geographic distribution design that introduced a secondary origin in a separate availability zone with automated failover — reducing single-origin dependency from 100% to effectively zero under normal operating conditions. The CDN configuration was rearchitected with segment-level caching policies calibrated to the broadcaster's content mix, with specific configuration profiles for live events versus on-demand content.

Critically, a comprehensive monitoring layer was designed and deployed alongside the infrastructure changes. This instrumented every stage of the delivery chain — from origin health checks through CDN cache hit ratios to playback client quality metrics aggregated from the broadcaster's player implementation. The monitoring layer enabled the operations team to identify degradation events in under sixty seconds rather than the previous situation where issues propagated undetected for extended periods.

An adaptive bitrate encoding pipeline was redesigned with codec profiles tuned to the broadcaster's typical audience device distribution — a mix of smart TVs, mobile devices and desktop browsers — with explicit quality rungs calibrated to the bandwidth characteristics of their audience's network environments based on geographic data analysis.

Implementation and Delivery

The full implementation was completed over fourteen weeks, with production transition occurring during a scheduled low-audience window to minimise risk exposure. A parallel running period of three weeks was maintained before the legacy infrastructure was decommissioned, allowing the new architecture to be validated under real audience load before full commitment.

Handover documentation included full architecture diagrams, CDN configuration run books, monitoring dashboard documentation, incident response procedures and a capacity planning guide based on the broadcaster's historical audience data and stated growth projections.

Requirements and Scope

The initial requirements gathering phase, conducted through structured interviews with IT leadership and department heads, identified the key operational requirements: consistent security policy enforcement across all three office locations, predictable WAN performance for client-facing service delivery, unified network monitoring and management tooling, and a physical and logical infrastructure state that could be fully documented and handed to an internal team for ongoing operations.

An existing-state assessment produced a complete inventory of active infrastructure components, documenting configuration inconsistencies, undocumented network segments, obsolete equipment in active service and several security policy gaps across the WAN boundary. This assessment document became the baseline for scope agreement and was referenced throughout the design process.

Architecture Design

The network architecture design addressed LAN segmentation across all three sites using a consistent VLAN strategy aligned to the organisation's functional divisions, eliminating the flat network segments that existed across two of the three locations. A SD-WAN overlay was designed for the inter-site WAN, providing predictable performance allocation for business-critical applications while retaining cost efficiency for general internet traffic.

Data centre infrastructure at the primary site was redesigned with full redundancy at the access, distribution and core layers, with a structured cabling specification that complied with current standards and provided headroom for the organisation's projected ten-year growth. A unified management and monitoring platform was specified and deployed, providing single-pane visibility across all three sites for the first time in the organisation's history.

Security architecture was redesigned with a zero-trust segmentation model, explicit firewall policy documentation, and a network access control framework that enforced consistent device authentication across all locations. All security policy decisions were documented with explicit business justification, creating a policy record that could be reviewed and maintained by the internal team independently.

Documentation and Handover

The project produced an extensive documentation set: high-level and low-level design documents, full network topology diagrams, configuration templates, as-built documentation reflecting the actual implemented state, a management platform operational guide, incident classification and escalation procedures, and a capacity planning document projecting infrastructure utilisation against growth scenarios over a three-year horizon.

Engagement Structure

The engagement was structured as a twelve-week programme with three defined phases: current-state assessment (weeks one to four), future-state architecture definition (weeks five to eight) and transformation roadmap development (weeks nine to twelve). Each phase concluded with a formal review session with the client's leadership team, providing structured decision points and maintaining alignment throughout the programme.

Current-state assessment covered the full technology stack — streaming infrastructure, content management systems, identity and access management, analytics pipeline, and the integrations between these components. The assessment documented performance characteristics, identified technical debt concentrations, mapped vendor dependencies and evaluated the scalability ceiling of the existing architecture against the client's published growth projections.

Future State and Recommendations

The future-state architecture definition produced a component-level target architecture designed around modern cloud-native streaming infrastructure — moving from the client's existing managed hosting arrangement to a multi-cloud delivery model with origin services distributed across two cloud providers for resilience, and a CDN strategy that eliminated the single-vendor dependency that had been a source of recurring performance issues.

Content management and metadata infrastructure was redesigned with an API-first architecture that would enable the product team to move faster on new feature development without each new capability requiring architectural changes to the underlying platform. The analytics pipeline was redesigned for real-time data availability, addressing the existing situation where audience insight data was available only with a 24-hour lag — a material competitive disadvantage in the client's market.

Roadmap and Investment Planning

The transformation roadmap produced in the final phase presented the migration from current to future state as a sequence of five discrete phases, each with defined scope, success criteria, resource requirements, estimated cost ranges and dependency on preceding phases. Risk assessment was integrated throughout — identifying the technical and organisational risks associated with each phase and providing documented mitigation strategies for the highest-priority items.

The roadmap was designed to be used directly in the client's annual planning cycle, with the investment requirements presented in a format compatible with board-level review and approval processes. FAMORENOVO provided a technical advisory session to the leadership team as a post-engagement service to support the internal presentation of the roadmap to the board.