Scaling Up To Manage Event Images

Marathon-Photos.com is a Hamilton based business that specialises in mass-participation event photography e.g. marathons, triathlons, cycle races etc. Arguably the world leader in web-based event images, their global network of photographers and partners capture photos and video footage of sports events in over 30 countries worldwide.

In 2008 they attended over 450 events, shooting more than 6 million images of over 2 million, mostly amateur, athletes. Some of the larger events covered are the Hong Kong Marathon with 50,000 runners and the City2Surf Race in Sydney with 64,000 finishers.

The company was the first to develop the sophisticated software required to identify individual participants within every frame of video. They are able to automatically combine multiple clips from different stages of a race into a single personalised video of any participant in an event. Personalised video footage and images are then displayed on the Marathon-Photos.com websites, making them available almost immediately for viewing and ordering. Once an order is placed, Marathon-Photos.com handles the order fulfilment and dispatch of ordered images and video clips.

With thousands of images and many hours of video captured at each event, the task of transferring this massive volume of data had become a major headache for the company. "I used to take my laptop computer across town from our offices and editing suite to the secure facility where our web servers are hosted", said Francis Kay, managing director of Marathon-Photos.com. "This was a huge time-waster and took several hours of sitting alongside the servers and transferring data across", he added.

One may question why the company didn't simply use a data connection from their office to the web servers. Francis had investigated that option, but the high cost of a dedicated data circuit from their internet provider had ruled it out. A chance meeting with Shane Hobson from Velocity Networks provided an exciting solution for Marathon-Photos.com.

Velocity provided a 100Mbps fibre optic connection from the Marathon-Photos.com office direct to their internet servers, enabling large personalised video files to be made available to their customers within minutes of placing their order online. With their web servers being the critical component in delivering images and video clips to customers, Marathon-Photos.com needed a connection that would be reliable as well as having the flexibility to scale up to meet their growing demands.

The fibre connection provided by Velocity Networks is part of their city-wide Metro-Ethernet fibre network, providing dedicated high speed data connectivity across Hamilton. The Velocity service can be scaled up to 1Gbps (1,000Mbps), providing ample growth capability as Marathon-Photos.com continues to expand their worldwide partner network.

Marathon-Photos.com also took the opportunity to work with Velocity partner Kordia, to move to a better performing internet connection. The new internet access service is well suited to the large amounts of data being uploaded to the internet by their customers and partners and works seamlessly with the Velocity fibre circuit. "We are delighted with the performance of our Velocity connection", said Francis. "The fact that we have a fast, reliable connection that can be increased to meet our growing needs is a critical factor to our future success", he added.

Contrary to many large internet-based companies, Marathon-Photos.com has chosen to host their fleet of web servers in New Zealand, and not in the United States. Having gone down the USA hosting route, Francis Kay and his team found that they could provide a superior delivery from right here in Hamilton.

Contact: Francis Kay. ph 07 838 2968.