How we helped an African concert equipment provider go international online: The case of Stage Audio Works

Stage Audio Works is Africa’s largest provider of audio, video and lighting equipment serving event companies as well as large corporations, and religious organizations.

The situation

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of Stage Audio Works customers have begun moving their events online and are looking for optimal ways to host live conferences, product launches, training events, church services, and concerts.

Stage Audio Works’ customers have begun broadcasting for many well-known corporations, including financial, automotive, media, and other successful Fortune 500 companies.

Why was the StreamWorks platform launched?

In the past, Stage Audio Works customers used public platforms for broadcasting with mixed results.

However, given the remoteness of South Africa from the main receiving servers located most often in Europe, it wasn’t possible to establish stable streaming.

Stage Audio Works then decided that it was better to give its users the opportunity to conduct stable live broadcasts not only within Africa, but around the world.

This is how a new service, StreamWorks, appeared, providing customers not only with equipment, but also with a convenient tool for full-fledged streaming.

The task

Providing StreamWorks customers with a convenient and high-quality service required a reliable contractor with broadcast experience and a strong infrastructure around the world, including PoPs in South Africa.

“For security and scalability reasons, we decided right away that we wanted to

Nathan Ihlenfeldt CTO of Stage Audio Works

Why were our CDN and Streaming Platform chosen?

“Gcore provided us with not only quality infrastructure, but also excellent technical support when connecting the service.”

Nathan Ihlenfeldt CTO of Stage Audio Works

Thanks to our streaming platform and powerful content delivery network, we were able to implement three important additional features for Stage Audio Works:

• In-memory streaming caching for fantastic video playback performance on all continents.
• Usage of the streaming platform for VOD storage, which makes it possible to simulate events in real time using the playlist feature.
• Optimized Origin Shielding for Stage Audio Works servers located in Africa, which protects the origin server from overload. We used to offer pre-cache servers to our customers in Europe, USA, and Russia, but these locations made the customer’s path to the end user longer. Therefore, to ensure the success of the project, we installed an additional pre-cache server in Johannesburg.

“We are delighted that Gcore continues to invest in Africa, as it’s one of the few CDN providers that offer advantages in wider markets such as East and West Africa. We look forward to further cooperation with Gcore to deliver a low-latency live broadcast solution for latency-sensitive content.”

Nathan Ihlenfeldt CTO of Stage Audio Works

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