Streaming Media
Dish Network's live streaming service tackles mass personalization and aggregation in an effort to create something viewers can't get anywhere else.
In preparation for the intensifying
SVOD battle, Sling TV has adjusted its business model and re-engineered its
underlying data stack based around mass personalization.
The
original multichannel live streaming TV service is orienting toward SVOD
aggregation. A year ago, the platform added NBA League Pass to its service.
This followed the integration of science-centric SVOD channel CuriosityStream
(set up by Discovery founder John Hendricks) and Up Faith & Family and
Pantaya as add-ons to its main service.
Last
week the company announced it would offer free trial access to content, without
any registration or credit card hand over, including episodes of popular shows
like Heartland. What’s more, existing Sling TV users can now sign up to a
selection of à la carte options, including CuriosityStream, Docurama, and Stingray
Karaoke, for free.
“It’s
no secret that competition is coming and with quite a few major players already
in the OTT space including DirectTV Now, Hulu, YouTube TV, Amazon, and Apple
there is definitely a time pressure to continue making advances,” says Brad Linder, director of
cloud native engineering at Sling TV.
With
Disney+ and an HBO-anchored WarnerMedia service scheduled to launch this year,
along with Apple’s SVOD entrance and a direct-to-consumer play from
NBCU/Comcast in the works, the battle for OTT video market share could see its
most heated exchanges yet.
It
could be one that pits direct-to-consumer services against content aggregator
models from existing pay TV providers and OTT providers such as Amazon
Channels, Hulu, or, maybe, Sling TV.
Dish
Network’s offering has close to 2.4 million subscribers across 16 platforms,
including a variety of smart TVs, tablets, game consoles, computers,
smartphones and streaming devices like Roku.
“With
so many options available to potential cord cutters it is important to provide
a first-class experience that makes your product stand out in a market that is
becoming more and more saturated,” Linder says.
“As
such, it is critical for Sling TV to provide a highly resilient and highly
available service that is personalized to each user and one that scales on
demand to keep up with our expanding customer base and changes on the internet.
This includes the ability to centralize business logic across our 16 platforms
to deliver a common experience to our customers.”
Personalization
of service is key, Linder stresses. “When I joined Sling TV 3 years ago we had
legacy systems developed in a non-cognitive era and not necessarily web-scale.
What we’ve been trying to do for the past 18 months is to bring in solutions
that scale horizontally to keep up with future growth. Our goal is to deploy in
a datacentre so we reduce the time to market. A datacentre model will allow for
another instance of the Sling TV backend to be built on-demand as needed in a
hybrid cloud environment.
"Part
of the solution was a common data store for core customers and personalized
content that would be available in all data centers serving the middleware
stack.”
The
solution needed media distribution capabilities that included authentication,
program catalogs, and feature metadata storage.
“What
we try to do is give the customer what they want. We try to get relevant
information and content quickly to folk with less friction—fewer clicks to
video.
"We’re
not just paying lip service to customer feedback. We want to solve the pain
points they have and engineer the platform accordingly.”
Sling
TV selected DataStax Enterprise (DSE), a proprietary version of the open source
Apache Cassandra database. DataStax media customers include Comcast, Sky in the
UK and M6 in France, while Apple (with over 75,000 nodes storing over 10 PB of
data), Netflix (2,500 nodes, 420 TB, over 1 trillion requests per day), eBay,
and Chinese search engine Easou all use Cassandra.
“First
and foremost we wanted a partner,” Linder explains. “We don’t like vendors who
charge for this and that. We want a partner with which we can evolve as a
platform. We have a growing customer base and a very elastic business model, so
we have to deliver our software into any public cloud as well as on-premises
private cloud with close to the same tooling. From a technical perspective we
need low latency and high availability. With DSE, we are now able to replicate
data across the country in less than two seconds, which is a big win for us.”
Clues
to Sling TV’s personalized service can be seen by Roku users. It has made
search easier by automatically displaying Popular Searches, allowing users to
quickly browse through the most searched-for content each day.
In
addition, next episodes automatically play to encourage binge-viewing.
Sling
TV is billing itself as "the only live OTT service to allow you to
purchase à la carte channels without subscribing to a base service…. making it
easy to stream all of your favorite content in the same interface."
While
there will be some consumers who are introduced to Sling TV and subscribe to it
through their initial purchase of an NBA League Pass, for example, such a
strategy appears risky unless Sling TV can indeed position itself as the
"new cable TV" by signing up multiple DTC partners.
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