VideoAmp Saves 90% in Costs and Increases Performance 10x

Founded in 2014, VideoAmp has been re-envisioning how media is valued, bought and sold for a decade. Unlike traditional media measurement companies that may rely on extrapolating small sample sizes for analysis, VideoAmp provides a robust software platform that uses huge volumes of data from 39 million households and 63 million devices that span everything from set-top boxes to smart TVs. Using its proprietary commingling methodology, VideoAmp offers the industry its trusted, high-quality TV data set. 

All that data requires a scalable system to process it so the team can develop a meaningful base for its media currency. In the past, VideoAmp used a traditional data center, which produced viewership tables that were sent to Snowflake for downstream applications. Seeking a robust, easy-to-use data platform with flexible infrastructure, strong data governance and secure data sharing that doesn’t require data duplication, VideoAmp consolidated its data warehouse on Snowflake.

The VideoAmp team had already seen what kind of ROI Snowflake could provide for analytics and insights. But given its exceptional performance during the proof-of-concept stage against their previous environment, the team decided to move fully onto Snowflake.

Working with truly ephemeral workloads in Snowflake also means wasting less time waiting on clusters to spin up. What used to take 10 minutes to spin up a cluster now only takes seconds with a Snowpark warehouse. Shorter latency means VideoAmp can spin up clusters in minutes rather than hours. VideoAmp also saved money on egress charges when moving data between separate environments and Snowflake to run queries, effectively eliminating the hidden costs of “double taxation” for data movement.

With Snowflake’s native application framework, the data quality is more reliable and consistent compared to VideoAmp’s previous environment, giving VideoAmp’s customers more power to use their data effectively. 

Now with Snowflake, VideoAmp developers can also create richer data sets that allow them to unlock new capabilities in their platform without a full re-architecture. And since large data sets are cost-effective to use, they can ask very complicated questions of the data, enrich it, surface it in multiple ways such as Dynamic Tables, and optimize delivery by use case — all without creating new, complex data pipelines.

Thanks to Snowflake and its partner ecosystem, business teams across VideoAmp — from revenue to customer support — now have quicker, easier access to this rich data. After moving its BI tooling provider to Snowflake partner Sigma, VideoAmp delivers more interactive dashboards that both customers and employees use — while also reducing complexity and costs for both the cloud and their BI environment.

Snowflake's robust Horizon Catalog governance features like data masking and row access policies allow VideoAmp to maintain the security they want without having to replicate data for customers. All these improvements have translated to happy teams across the board. Business teams interact more seamlessly with their data versus needing to request bespoke reports or export data in many different ways to surface insights they can use. And developers write less custom code and can prioritize product enhancements. "If we can get insights faster, we can do our job more efficiently,” Adams says. “It’s lower risk and lower latency. Who wouldn’t be happy with that?”

For a media measurement platform like VideoAmp, processing speed is key — along with confidence in data quality. Especially for TV events like live sports, for which organizations invest millions of dollars in ad spend. VideoAmp must be able to turn around billions of rows of data in the span of an hour and still be able to perform quality engineering checks, ensuring that the data can be verified and validated. “Snowflake has been incredibly helpful in that, and we can surface our content ratings and be confident in them,” says Adams. 

Data processing speed also matters when VideoAmp has to do foundational tasks like updating methodology for how they measure impressions. When undergoing those processes, the team has entire years’ worth of data to reprocess, which used to take five whole days. With Snowflake, VideoAmp can reprocess a year’s worth of data in mere hours, allowing them to quickly see and verify their outcomes. The speed ultimately frees up two full-time DevOps engineers, who can work on more impactful product enhancements for VideoAmp customers.

VideoAmp is excited to continue exploring Snowflake capabilities. From model monitoring, registry and training to unlocking more use cases with dashboards and data reporting, the team is expanding functionality across the board. VideoAmp continues to streamline its infrastructure with Snowflake as a trusted service provider.