In the hurry-up-and-wait world of media production, anything you can do to speed through the hurry-ups and avoid or shorten the waits is not just a gift—it’s an advantage that can mean happier team members, delighted clients and fans, and more revenue.
Backblaze Event Notifications can help.This new B2 Cloud Storage feature can help you streamline a range of your production tasks—like automatically starting transcoding of video and distributing new images—across your preferred workflow tools.
Today, I’m sharing five ways you can use Backblaze Event Notifications to operationalize media production efficiencies. If you’re interested in Event Notifications for applications, check out this post; and stay tuned for a future post on how to use Event Notifications for IT backup.
Event Notifications for media production: Simplified automation
Event Notifications monitors your B2 Cloud Storage for data changes that you designate—think raw video uploads, content version updates, deletions, etc.—and delivers near real-time alerts where you want them about these changes. These alerts can be used to create awareness faster, and even more powerfully, to initiate streamlined end-to-end processes that can save you time and hassle, and avoid unnecessary manual tasks and/or the cost of complex intermediaries.
What are webhooks?
Webhooks, if you’re not familiar with the term, are HTTP-based callback functions that enable event-based communications between software applications. Backblaze Event Notifications can uniquely work with any external service that accepts webhooks. This means you can use it to your advantage across your media production workflow—and this is novel when most vendors’ alerts features are limited to closed ecosystems or require significant and sometimes costly workarounds to communicate beyond a limited set of production tools.
Top 5 use cases for media production
Here are specific, practical ways people producing and managing media can take advantage of Event Notifications for immediate benefits.
1. New content processing
Event Notifications can be used to trigger tasks immediately after new content is uploaded. Imagine one of your team members uploads a video or image: Event Notifications can be sent to a transcoding service to format it and a tagging service to categorize it for better content organization. Set up to furthermore extract valuable metadata too—all in near real time, without manual intervention.
General workflow (abbreviated)
By automating these processes, companies can ensure that user-generated content is formatted correctly, appropriately tagged, and moderated without delay. This not only saves time but guarantees a consistent user experience.
What’s more, you can even go full Jedi Knight and handle errors programmatically with Event Notifications logic that triggers reprocessing tasks whenever issues arise.
2. Integrated alerts in go-to tools
Event Notifications can easily integrate with your communication tools like Slack and productivity tools like Zapier, to inform internal and external stakeholders of updates without them needing to check for them manually. Users have told us this is a great way to keep people updated when assets are added, updated, or advanced to key stages in production and post cycles—setting them up to consider taking downstream actions that don’t lend themselves to further process automation.
Asset change announcement workflow
Additionally, for teams using workflow tools such as Zapier to connect various services, Event Notifications makes it simple to trigger actions across multiple platforms, enabling powerful, automated workflows with your data in B2 Cloud Storage.
3. Over-the-top (OTT) streaming automation
Regardless of whether your streaming model is AVOD, TVOD, or SVOD, Event Notifications can help automate processing and distribution workflows. Users can enable them so that every time a new title is added to B2 Cloud Storage, it then triggers alerts that initiate transcoding, compression, and prep for delivery or playback via content delivery network (CDN).
OTT streaming platform workflow
4. Backup completion monitoring
An important (if unglamorous) aspect of managing media is backing it up for extra safekeeping. After all, it’s a precious asset worth a lot of money now and later. So whether you back up nightly, monthly, at project’s end, or on some other cadence, with Event Notifications, customers can set up to receive updates when their media backups are successfully uploaded to a Backblaze B2 Bucket—providing peace of mind when data is protected.
We’ve also had a few users already tell us that not seeing backup completion alerts when expected helped them realize that they had other, previously unknown workflow hiccups to address.
Backup complete workflow
Tangentially related, media organizations are also using Backblaze Cloud Replication to programmatically store their content to two or more geographically distributed locations for added protection—this isn’t the same as Event Notifications, but is another automation tool for enhancing your protection posture.
5. Monitor data usage
Since Event Notifications messages are sent within seconds of files being uploaded and deleted, and they contain the size of the file in question, you can easily and reliably track your data usage in near real time, helping you identify trends and potential issues. For example, if you know large raw files are coming in and then messages indicating much smaller than expected file sizes were uploaded, it can alert you to begin to QC it.
We’ve also seen such data monitoring prove highly beneficial to IT personnel who support them because the near real-time monitoring allows faster responses to situations as they are happening, thereby mitigating risks, reducing costs, and/or nipping issues in the bud so the production teams remain disruption and distraction free.
Monitoring workflow
Beyond these example use cases, Event Notifications opens up a wide range of possibilities for automating and optimizing workflows. This flexibility makes it easy to automate how your infrastructure interacts with and reacts to file changes in B2 Cloud Storage, simplifying workflows across your distributed services. So go ahead and get creative—and please do share with us the cool things you’re doing with Event Notifications.
Why Event Notifications matter for production workflows
The benefits of real-time notifications extend beyond simply saving time—they transform the way teams work, automate processes, and reduce the margin for error.
- Awareness: Instant notifications for uploads, updates, or deletions keep everyone on the same page.
- Actionable insights: Real-time alerts provide critical information that helps make informed decisions quickly.
- Flexibility: Direct connections to services like media asset managers (MAMs), transcoding applications, and CDNs mean more choice to stick with your preferred stack and less lock-in to specific vendors or tools.
- Cost efficiency: Automating tasks like media transcoding, data processing, or content delivery reduces the need for manual labor, saving on operational costs and freeing up resources for other strategic initiatives.
Improved security: By instantly alerting teams to changes or unusual activity, Event Notifications help maintain data integrity and support proactive security measures.
How Event Notifications compares
Unlike other offerings like Amazon’s messaging services, which are limited to specific ecosystems, Backblaze Event Notifications integrates directly with any service that accepts webhooks, offering true flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Event Notifications is also designed for at-least-once delivery, ensuring critical notifications are not missed. This reliability is important for teams building workflows that require precision and a level of consistency their end users expect.
The pricing for Event Notifications is simple and transparent. Backblaze B2 Reserve customers enjoy unlimited free Event Notifications, while pay-as-you-go Backblaze B2 customers enjoy 2,500 calls per day free and then $0.004 per 10,000 transactions. This straightforward pricing applies no matter the service receiving the notification. This enables businesses to confidently scale their event-driven workflows, knowing exactly what to expect in terms of costs, regardless of the services they choose to integrate with.
Ready to add automation to your media tasks?
For existing customers working with a Backblaze account manager, Event Notifications is already enabled for you, and your account manager can assist with any questions. If you’re an existing customer not currently working with an account manager, please contact our Support team to request access to Event Notifications.
New customers can contact our Sales team to learn more about how Event Notifications can streamline workflows and how to get started.
Once Event Notifications are enabled, log in to your Backblaze B2 account, navigate to the Buckets page, and click on the Event Notifications section. From there, you can set up notification rules for the events you want to track or configure notifications using our API.
For detailed instructions and best practices, visit our Event Notifications documentation.
