About Firstory

Launched in 2019, Firstory is Taiwan’s leading podcast hosting platform to empower podcasters to distribute the content globally and to connect with audiences. Now, they have covered 190+ countries and hosted 300K+ episodes. As for podcast hosting service, Firstory provides unlimited storage and bandwidth for creators to grow without restrictions. Furthermore, Firstory published membership mechanism and DAI ads function to help podcasters monetize more efficiently and dynamically. The number of active shows powered by Firstory has a monthly growth rate of 10%

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Customer Needs

Firstory strives to grow the audience with podcasters and offer dynamic alternatives to monetize

        Monetization - Ads & Membership

• The demand for ads insertion fluctuates from time to time.  
• The retrieval of data for ads analysis occurs at the same time.
• The membership mechanism includes monthly subscription, and Firstory needs to verify whether the charge is successful every month.  

       Podcast Hosting

• The audio files from different shows are stored in Firstory and the speed of reading an episode differs in every region. 
• Firstory has to collect listening behavior data from different podcast clients.

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Going Cloud Solution

        Monetization - Ads & Membership

• Use Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2 node group and Amazon ASG to deploy enough machines to meet the peak-hours demand for ads insertion.
• For ads data analysis, Going Cloud uses Amazon DynamoDB to deal with the huge data retrieval demand at once.
• Through Amazon AMI to build Crawler for different podcast clients (e.g. Apple Podcast, Google Podcast) and through Amazon ASG to deploy machines at the specific time to collect user listening data from platforms.
• AWS Step function and AWS Lambda can trigger automatic payment and retry pattern to solve the need of human auditing.

       Podcast Hosting

• Using Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 to speed up the reading time for listeners from different regions.

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Outcome

• Turning off redundant machines during off-peak hours results in 90% cost reduction.
• The time for analyzing ads data can be saved up to 40% with the implementation of Amazon DynamoDB.
• Through Amazon AMI Golden Image, the development cost of deploying Crawler to different podcast clients decreases around 30%.   
• Save 80% human workload to audit and check monthly payment. 
• Amazon CDN allows the speed of reading audio files increasing 60%.

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