Cutting video infrastructure costs on a platform built for doctors

The product gave doctors a single place to learn and talk to each other: a video education library, a social feed, and consultation between practitioners. Each of those carries a different technical demand.

Video was the expensive one. The education library meant continuously processing video into deliverable formats, and the managed cloud transcoding service handling it had become a significant line item on the running cost of the product.

At the same time, the consultation and feed features needed to feel immediate — which a conventional request-response backend does not provide on its own.

The video cost was examined as an engineering problem rather than accepted as a fixed cost of doing business. The question was what the managed service was actually providing that the platform needed, and how much of it was general-purpose capability this product would never use.

The real-time requirements were scoped the same way: which interactions genuinely needed live updates, and which only appeared to.

A video transcoding service was built in-house, mirroring the behaviour of the managed AWS transcoder for the specific formats and workflows the platform actually required. Purpose-built for one product's needs, it avoided paying for a general-purpose service's full surface area.

Real-time features were delivered using NodeJS with socket-based communication alongside the Laravel API, so data changes reached users immediately where that mattered.

The role spanned both engineering and product. Working as a core developer and product manager meant technical and product decisions were made with full knowledge of each other — including this one, where an engineering choice was driven by a commercial constraint.

The in-house transcoder brought the video processing cost of the running product down while continuing to serve the education library.

Doctors got a platform where education, discussion and peer consultation worked together, with real-time behaviour where it counted.

Three years of continuous ownership meant decisions were made by someone who would still be there to live with them.