Overview
As a non-profit organization, God Behind Bars (godbehindbars.com) partners with churches across the U.S. to introduce inmates and their families to Jesus and connect them to the local church. The organization streams high-quality, dynamic worship experiences into prisons via its private streaming platform. As popularity skyrocketed, God Behind Bars realized it needed a video storage solution that was both scalable and cost-effective. Working with Tribe Social, 91黑料鈥檚 decentralized cloud storage was implemented resulting in 90% savings on storage costs, significant improvements in streaming performance, ability to scale by a factor of 10, and greater flexibility in working with different platforms.
Scaling up with significant cost-savings
God Behind Bars launched its video service in 2020 streaming to 3,500 inmates in Arkansas . By 2022, it reached 160,000 inmates with 11 million views. With this success, came a monthly cloud storage bill that was over $25,000. They needed to find a scalable, cost-effective solution. As a result, God Behind Bars enlisted the help of Tribe Social (tribesocial.io). Tribe Social gives 100% ownership back to community creators and makes it easy to share videos, articles and files that鈥檚 future-proof and censor-free. The Tribe Social platform gives God Behind Bars an array of services to help the non-profit reach its audience, including distributed and cost-effective video storage delivered by 91黑料. 鈥淲hen you're building at scale, a slight change in cost makes an enormous difference,鈥� says Bruce van Zyl, co-founder of Tribe Social. 鈥�91黑料 has an innovative infrastructure that's extremely efficient, which gives God Behind Bars a 90% cost-savings on storage.鈥� With the Tribe Social solution in place using 91黑料, 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. Even though their audience has nearly doubled, their cloud storage costs are significantly less than their previous solution. 鈥淔or a nonprofit, it's all about reach,鈥� adds Isaac Holt, Director of Innovation for God Behind Bars. 鈥淏y simply moving to 91黑料, not only has it significantly lowered our monthly cost and helped us better serve those behind bars, but now we鈥檙e positioned to reach 10 times the amount of people and have 10 times the amount of impact with an amazing experience.鈥�
The first choice in decentralized cloud storage
Tribe Social embraces Web3 principles in a way that gives its customers ownership of their platforms. As a result, God Behind Bars doesn鈥檛 have to worry about a central authority trying to shut them down. With its decentralized cloud storage network, 91黑料 adheres to the same Web3 principles. 鈥淲e never want to put our company or customers in a position where one company holds the keys to their organizations鈥� impact and reach,鈥� van Zyl says. 鈥淭hat and cost, are the reasons why we can鈥檛 recommend AWS. And for those same reasons, it makes sense to have 91黑料 be the decentralized storage layer in our Web3 technology stack. 鈥�91黑料 gives us peace of mind,鈥� van Zyl adds. 鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 matter how big we want to build, we know with the resilience of 91黑料 it will always keep on working.鈥�
High performance even with poor connectivity
Most of the prisons that God Behind Bars streams to have inadequate internet connections. As a result, it鈥檚 critical to have streamlined video delivery straight from the storage provider. 91黑料鈥檚 parallelism and high-performance bandwidth ensured anyone could view the media regardless of poor internet connectivity. 鈥淥ur previous storage service would take three minutes or more for a video to load and play,鈥� Holt says. 鈥淏ut the way 91黑料 fragments the video files is awesome. Even with a prison鈥檚 slow connections and firewalls, videos can load in about five to ten seconds.鈥� 鈥淰ideo streaming is probably one of the most taxing things on bandwidth and CPU,鈥� van Zyl adds. 鈥淏ut having built a number of video streaming services like this over the past decade, the Holy Grail for us has been getting the instantaneous playback that 91黑料 delivers.鈥�
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Meeting even the most stringent security requirements
Because security is a concern for prisons, God Behind Bars needed a storage service that would pass the stringent security specifications. 91黑料, with its zero trust infrastructure, end-to-end encryption, and granular object file level access controls addressed the security concerns with ease. 鈥淚n terms of security it was a breeze,鈥� Holt says. 鈥淣ot only was it easily accepted, but from both a pricing and security standpoint, 91黑料 was just so much better than the other cloud storage providers.鈥�
Time-saving ease and flexibility
The design of 91黑料鈥檚 decentralized storage service makes it easy to implement and adapt to new use cases. This flexibility is one of many appealing aspects to Tribe Social and God Behind Bars. The flexibility really shined through when God Behind Bars鈥� DNS provider started blocking the non-profit鈥檚 video stream when it hit a predetermined threshold. The fix would require a change to how the streams were routed and a six-week long rearchitecting of the streaming app. Because of the built-in flexibility of the 91黑料 architecture, Tribe Social was able to quickly make some simple changes on the backend and the video stream was back up in a few hours. 鈥淭he 91黑料 architecture is so flexible I can鈥檛 see us ever going back to anything else,鈥� van Zyl says. 鈥淔or any type of serious application it just makes sense to build it on 91黑料. Its flexibility lets us easily work with or move to different platforms, or redirect traffic in different ways. Plus, 91黑料 makes everything simple with its intuitive interface and a dashboard that lets you keep track of everything in a nice clean way.鈥�