Client
A media company running an OTT sports broadcasting platform
Industry
Services
Back-end development, Front-end development, Data management, DevOps, Maintenance & support
Tech
Azure Front Door, Redis, Next.JS, Node.JS, MS SQL

Project background

On the verge of the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship, a media company approached ITRex. They were looking for over-the-top (OTT) platform development specialists to optimize and support their sports streaming platform during the championship. The platform had a monolithic architecture, relied on a legacy technology stack, and lacked documentation from the previous vendor, with whom our client had a falling out and, subsequently, severed all ties. As a result, the media company was left with an outdated PHP-based content management system (CMS) and a poorly configured cloud infrastructure, which had been previously migrated from AWS to Microsoft Azure. Specifically, the legacy CMS became a major bottleneck for the client’s content management team, which required ongoing assistance with the media content publishing and distribution during the tournament broadcasts. Having dived into the project one month before the championship, our software maintenance specialists fine-tuned the OTT streaming solution’s performance for the tournament — and safely got through it, albeit in a semi-manual mode. Afterwards, the ITRex team carried out regular maintenance activities and developed additional features, enabling the OTT solution to operate satisfactorily in standard mode. In early 2021, however, the client gave us a new challenge.

Our task was to:
Devise a new platform architecture based on a modern, high-performance technology stack
Take the pain out of the content publishing process
Turn the single-region sports broadcasting service into a next-gen OTT platform for global content delivery
Optimize the OTT platform cloud infrastructure costs
Create extensive documentation for future development and maintenance activities

Challenge

Our dedicated team, which included software architects, DevOps engineers, and front-end and back-end developers, suggested an efficient architecture for the OTT platform. This architecture featured:
Kentico Xperience, a cloud-based headless content management system with a rich text editor, versatile media libraries, and built-in support for multi-lingual content
A microservices-based cloud architecture driven by Microsoft Azure services, including Azure Front Door, a high-performance content delivery network (CDN) A modern-looking multi-regional website
Custom APIs supporting the OTT platform integration with media broadcasting services, such as Dailymotion, and mobile applications
The client gave us the green light, and the development process began. As part of the project, we undertook various activities, which included:
The development and implementation of custom Kentico Xperience modules for simplifying the content authoring flow.
Overriding the CMS limitations, such as considerable maintenance costs for high-traffic websites. We solved this problem by introducing effective cache mechanisms and multi-media file storage using Azure services.
Communication and collaboration with the Microsoft Azure team, who had previously offered an exclusive deal to our client. The Microsoft team gave suggestions on how to configure and optimize the OTT platform, working closely with our DevOps specialists. Although our visions did not always align, we always reached common ground to find an approach that worked best.
Data migration, which was preceded by a thorough audit, database configuration, and the deletion of incomplete and duplicate data.
Given the project’s ambitious scope and limited timeline, it became apparent the new version of the OTT platform would not be ready in time for the FIFA World Cup 2022 broadcasts, as our customer had originally planned. To deliver a five-star viewing experience during the major sports event, the ITRex team resurrected the legacy platform, overcoming its inherent scalability and performance shortcomings. In particular, we had to manually configure the Varnish web accelerator to improve caching, delete over 20 million erroneous or incomplete entries from the OTT platform’s database, and implement sufficient DDoS protection by writing custom scripts for the Nginx server. Despite a minor downtime at the beginning of the championship, the legacy platform could successfully serve several million users daily. You can find more information about the ad-hoc project in this OTT platform optimization case study.
sport broadcasting solution
ott solution development

Impact

The ITRex team launched the new OTT solution several months after the FIFA World Cup and discontinued the old platform. The media company has already registered improvements in both the OTT platform performance and the content publishing process, as well as increasingly positive user feedback.

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