Launching a cutting-edge streaming platform in just 18 months

Accelerating a large and complex digital transformation to enable an organization with millions of subscribers to rapidly adapt to emerging trends

Around the world, industries everywhere are being disrupted by innovative technologies

Our client, a leader in entertainment, recognised it rapidly needed to modernize its business model to adapt to the rise of streaming services and on-demand entertainment. To stay ahead in a fiercely competitive landscape it needed to innovate and provide better digital experiences for its current and future subscribers. But, with legacy systems limiting substantial innovation, a complete organization-wide digital transformation was the only viable solution.

Equal Experts was engaged to accelerate this digital transformation and support the creation of a new streaming platform using cutting-edge cloud technology and microservices. In just 18 months, the client successfully launched the new platform and seamlessly migrated millions of subscribers across 13 device types to the new product. 

With a platform foundation of speed, quality and reliability as well as an improved user experience for subscribers, our client has the tools and agility to build new digital services, adapt to the frequently changing entertainment landscape and maintain its competitive edge in the market.

  • 18 months

    To build and launch a new streaming platform

  • Millions of subscribers

    Successfully migrated to the new streaming platform

  • 23 minutes

    The average time needed to identify and repair the only three priority issues at launch

About the client:

Our client is one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. It provides subscription-based entertainment in North America with many channels and millions of subscribers.

  • Industry:

    Industry icon

    Media

  • Organization Size:

    Organisation icon

    Millions of subscribers

  • Location:

    Location icon

    North America

  • Services:

    Services icon

    Deliver and Scale

  • Length of project:

    Ongoing

Challenge

Embracing complex digital transformation in an evolving entertainment landscape

In the past 20 years, the way people consume entertainment has undergone rapid evolution. The advent of smartphones and streaming services has liberated listeners from the confines of larger devices, offering a world of content within their pockets. 

This seismic shift in the industry posed an opportunity for our client and its business model. Our client knew it needed to act to continue to retain its current subscriber base as well as attract new customers and remain competitive among emerging streaming services and other media providers. 

However, our client knew this process would be difficult within the confines of its current digital infrastructure. A legacy system with years of complexity and changes built on top, this robust, primarily on-prem system limited the opportunities for innovation and growth. 

To thrive in the market, our client recognised a large, complex digital transformation across the organization was required. It needed to overhaul its systems from the ground up, and swiftly develop a modern service which would elevate user experiences while maintaining service quality and reliability.

Solution

Catalyzing digital transformation with expert guidance

We were engaged in July 2022, to accelerate our client’s ambitious and complicated digital transformation journey. Drawing on our technical and delivery expertise, we provided strategic advice about the best ways to build the organization’s new streaming platform and utilize new, modern technologies to meet the needs of the business.

Through close collaboration with the client’s platform teams, we leveraged their extensive domain knowledge to enhance the foundations of their new cloud-native, streaming platform. Together we built new microservices and supported the complex migration of legacy systems to the new multi-region streaming platform hosted in the cloud. 

We provided extensive support across numerous areas of the digital transformation journey including:

  • Platform: Building cloud infrastructure offering a highly scalable, available, resilient; multi-region, multi-tenant platform. 
  • Commerce: Building custom integrations with third parties and creating new underlying services to support e-commerce needs across multiple products and regions, including improving upgrade and cancellation services. 
  • User Management Services: Introducing a custom solution providing single user identity and implementing in-app password management.
  • Content and Content Media Engineering: Creating improved editorial and curation abilities using CMS and personalization across clients. 
  • Client and Customer Experience:  Creating frictionless sign-up and sign-in processes across multiple mobile and web clients, providing personalized and seamless digital listening experiences.

Throughout the engagement, we championed engineering improvements including employing incremental, interactive delivery style and aligning product and engineering groups throughout the various areas of the platform. We also embedded a culture of reliability through observability as code, monthly chaos testing and engineering scorecards. 

Results

Successfully launching a reliable, high-quality streaming platform in just 18 months

With the support of Equal Experts, our client has dramatically accelerated its digital transformation, launching a reliable, high-quality streaming platform in just 18 months. 

All subscribers were successfully migrated to the new streaming platform at its launch in late 2023. Embedding a culture of reliability into the digital transformation also ensured the launch of the platform went exceptionally smoothly. With just three priority issues reported and a mean time to repair (MTTR) of just 23 minutes, the new platform is highly reliable.

As well as providing enhanced user experience and personalized listening experiences, this modern streaming platform can continue to be developed, maintained and built upon. It provides our client with the ongoing flexibility it needs to react to the ever-changing media landscape, remain competitive in the market and provide better customer experiences for legacy and new subscribers. 

Building on the initial success of the new streaming platform, we are continuing to support our client’s ongoing digital transformation journey. By embedding consultants from across our global network within the client’s platform teams and instilling our skills, techniques and knowledge, we can ensure our client can confidently innovate and grow the platform for future success.

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