Digital Broadcaster Embraces OpenStack Innovation to Build Rapidly Scalable Infrastructure and Improve Services Time-to- Market

The company’s engineering teams build infrastructure and applications that allow the business to deliver market leading digital content to TVs, PCs, and mobile devices. This requires systems that rapidly scale, speed time-to-market, and protect valued intellectual property; all without exceeding target costs. Agile and immediate expansion of infrastructure is especially important for comprehensive sports offerings. “Demand spikes during important events can place a huge strain on our systems,” says the company’s Director of Cloud Solutions. “To respond to large-scale online requests, we often need immediate and sizable increases in application capacity.” Equally important to business success is enabling rapid development and deployment of new customer services. Continuous integration and deployment, now replacing waterfall programming methods, require elastic system architectures that allow for quick provisioning and deprovisioning of infrastructure based on developer needs. In addition to scalability and speed of development, new systems require strong protection of intellectual property to prevent cyber attacks. This means integration with existing robust security solutions. New infrastructure must also integrate with existing network and storage frameworks, and accommodate software development processes with minimal impact on efficiency.

With over 30 million subscribers in the Americas accessing 200 channels of video entertainment, this company is now a recognized leader in digital television. Fueling growth is the innovative streaming of premium content, exclusive concerts, and original series to PCs and mobile devices. And a recent merger has added wireless and broadband customers to an already competitive entertainment portfolio. To maintain leadership and combat new market entrants, engineering teams use rapid innovation to deliver a superior customer experience. The company deploys leading-edge technologies to meet challenging advertiser and subscriber needs including instant access to live and on-demand content – anywhere, anytime – even in periods of peak demand such as sporting events. In this demanding environment, the company requires massively scalable infrastructure that enables rapid and flexible application development. Important to meet this need is extensive use of open source solutions and innovation including those within the OpenStack community.