Why cloud is integral to Japan Rugby Football Union’s media strategy

Based on this new strategy, JRFU has a business co-creation partner framework with J Sports to produce official videos for League One, and since last year, it also covers the men’s 15-man national rugby union matches.

Partnering with AWS

Amazon Web Services plays an important role in Japan’s rugby media strategy, including AWS Elemental Live, which encodes live video from the matches and uploads it to the cloud, and AWS Elemental MediaLive, a live video processing service that encodes streaming video. Video content is then stored in Amazon S3, and indexing is possible to preview and search.

Agility and better economics are common incentives for organizations to move to the cloud. But the overall appeal of the ecosystem is popular, too, and the fact the services they want to use, such as the remote comment system Spalk, are provided on AWS is another unique feature. This has the advantage of making video transfer smoother. And by realizing an end-to-end system on AWS, JRFU is able to reduce development man hours, such as compatibility testing, and use managed services to reduce the management burden.

In addition, the video and photo archive system built in collaboration with AWS allows media exposure during and immediately after matches. Real-time match footage can be distributed on official SNS accounts and provided to other media. In the 2023-24 season, for example, one match was live-streamed per week on the League One official website. Although the foundation for using video was set, only a few teams used it at first and there were other promotion challenges to overcome.