Powering A Next Generation Streaming TV Experience
Brad LinderDirector, Cloud Native Engineering
Sling TV is an over-the-top (OTT) live streaming content platform that instantly delivers live TV and on-demand entertainment via the internet and customer owned and managed devices. This includes a variety of smart televisions, tablets, game consoles, computers, smartphones and streaming devices (16 platforms total). It is currently the number one live TV streaming service with approximately 2.3MM customers.
Outperforming the Competition
With so many options available to potential “cord cutters” (ie, people seeking a wireless- or Internet-based service over a paid TV subscription service), 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.
As such, it is critical for Sling TV to provide a highly resilient service that is personalized to each user and scale on demand to keep up with our expanding customer base and changes on the internet. This includes the need to be highly available and resilient while having the ability to centralize business logic across our sixteen platforms to deliver a common experience to our customers.
We also want to reduce the time to market for features in a continuous deployment model and ultimately enable a deployment unit of “datacenter” allowing for another instance of the Sling TV backend to be built on demand as needed in a hybrid cloud environment.
On the backend, we needed a common data store for our core customer and personalized content that is available in all data centers serving our middleware stack. The solution would need to provide media distribution capabilities that include authentication, program catalogs and feature meta-data storage. We had a big list of needs to fulfill, and we wanted a proven solution that would support our next-gen architecture goals.
Why Sling Chose DataStax and DSE Built on Apache Cassandra
We chose DataStax Enterprise (DSE) for three main reasons:
- Not only was it important for us to have a proven solution to support our goals, we were also looking for a partner—as opposed to just a vendor—to help us achieve the success we had envisioned.
- Having a database designed for hybrid cloud infrastructure was a key part of our strategy, as we needed to be able to replicate data across remote data centers.
- DSE would give us virtually an unlimited ability to scale horizontally to keep up with future growth.
DSE has become a key part of our hybrid cloud strategy and has enabled our software to run in private and public clouds with close to the same tooling. With DSE, we are now able to replicate data across the country in less than two seconds, which is a big win for us. We look forward to leveraging DSE to power the future growth of Sling TV.
