About
Inovo Studios is a social engagement agency that connects brands to customers through social media and content. The company’s client, God Behind Bars, streams high-quality, dynamic worship experiences into prisons via its private streaming platform. God Behind Bars realized it needed a video storage solution that was both scalable and cost-effective.
Storj’s decentralized cloud storage was implemented resulting in 90% savings on storage costs, significant improvements in Inovo’s streaming performance, ability to scale by a factor of 10, and greater flexibility in working with different platforms.
Challenge
Most of the prisons that God Behind Bars streams to have inadequate internet connections. As a result, it’s critical to have streamlined video delivery straight from the storage provider.
“Video streaming is probably one of the most taxing things on bandwidth and CPU,” Isaac Holt, Director of Innovation for God Behind Bars. “Our previous storage service would take three minutes or more for a video to load and play.”
Inovo also knew that God Behind Bars needed a cloud storage service that would pass the stringent security specifications.
Solution
Inovo embraces Web3 principles in a way that gives its customers ownership of their platforms. With its decentralized cloud storage network, Storj adheres to the same Web3 principles. The choice was clear to Inovo: deploy Storj.
“We never want to put our company or customers in a position where one company holds the keys to their organizations’ impact and reach,” van Zyl says. “That and cost, are the reasons why we can’t recommend AWS. And for those same reasons, it makes sense to have Storj be the decentralized storage layer in our Web3 technology stack. Storj gives us peace of mind.”
Result
Storj, with its zero trust infrastructure, end-to-end encryption, and granular object file level access controls addressed the security concerns with ease.
“In terms of security it was a breeze,” Holt says. “Not only was it easily accepted, but from both a pricing and security standpoint, Storj was just so much better than the other cloud storage providers.”
Deploying Storj also brought significant savings.
“By simply moving to Storj, not only has it significantly lowered our monthly cost and helped us better serve those behind bars, but now we’re positioned to reach 10 times the amount of people and have 10 times the amount of impact with an amazing experience,” adds Holt.
With the Inovo solution in place using Storj, in February of 2023 God Behind Bars expanded their network and now reaches over 300,000 inmates that view over 3.5M videos each month consuming as much as 100TB of bandwidth each day.
“For any type of serious application, it just makes sense to build it on Storj. Its flexibility lets us easily work with or move to different platforms, or redirect traffic in different ways,” says van Syl. “Plus, Storj makes everything simple with its intuitive interface and a dashboard that lets you keep track of everything in a nice clean way.”