StarTimes - Alibaba Cloud Customer Success Stories

Media

Africa

Enterprise/Public Sector

“As a leading global cloud service provider, Alibaba Cloud has always been at the forefront of the industry with its outstanding technology and innovation capabilities. As the leading digital TV operator in Africa, StarTimes has developed over 18 million Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) subscribers and over 28 million Over the Top (OTT) users. Through the collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, StarTimes will further enhance its core technological advantages and provide customers with more efficient, flexible, and reliable digital TV services.”

---StarTimes

About StarTimes

Founded in 1988 with a global vision, StarTimes began to expand its oversea business to Africa in 2007. To date, StarTimes has established subsidiaries in more than 30 African countries, including Rwanda, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, Guinea, D.R. Congo, South Africa, etc., and has begun digital TV and online streaming operation in most of them. With more than 16 million digital TV subscribers and 28 million mobile subscribers, StarTimes has now become the fastest-growing and the most influential digital TV operator in Africa.

OTT business is the core business of StarTimes Internet STRATEGY. Its “StarTimes ON” APP provides content subscription service, providing users with multi-network, multi-terminal, and multi-service Internet video services (live broadcasts, on-demand, short videos, etc.). In the recent Qatar World Cup 2022, OTT services effectively supported the needs of the audiences in the pan-African region.

Challenge

Chaotic IT Architecture:
In the early stage of business development, due to the lack of unified IT architecture planning, StarTimes’ existing cloud resources were chaotic, and system management could not be carried out. It truly affected the elasticity and high availability of the business.

Data Environment Issue:
The customer’s data analytics environment is open-source and self-built, which has high maintenance costs and is very troublesome to use. The existing data was stored in a cloud vendor's data lake, and the company needed to use the data frequently, but the data interconnection was fragmented, which was a huge challenge.

Why Alibaba Cloud

Cloud services are essential for businesses, involving highly important aspects (such as data security), which are heavily scrutinized worldwide and subject to significant policy risks. For sizable enterprises venturing into international markets, the best strategy to mitigate risks is to choose excellent partners. As Alibaba Cloud expands its operations in Africa and achieves industry-leading benchmarks for fundamental services, it has become one of the best choices of cloud service partners for StarTimes.

As a representative of an enterprise that ventured overseas to expand its business, StarTimes has been using cloud services from another cloud service vendor for a while, and its entire business was bound to those vendor-related cloud services. In particular, at the level of some middleware, customization development was carried out around the original cloud technology service vendor, and the customer technical team had never used Alibaba Cloud. In the early stage of project promotion, there was some resistance from the technical side of StarTimes about using Alibaba Cloud, but the superior customer experience provided by the Alibaba Cloud Team convinced them to change.

During the promotion process, the Alibaba Cloud Team actively introduced various production and research departments to resolve StarTimes’ product-related questions and dispel their doubts about Alibaba Cloud technology. The Alibaba Cloud Team formulated a set of detailed steps and strategies for StarTimes’ business migration from the original cloud technology services vendor to Alibaba Cloud to ensure their business had no switchover issues.

In terms of business plan design, the Alibaba Cloud Team matched the Alibaba Cloud Saving Plan with the competitors’ Saving Plan and RI as the benchmark according to StarTimes’ usage habits. Finally, the Alibaba Cloud Team won the trust of StarTimes and the competition among various cloud service vendors.

Architecture

IT Architecture Optimization:

Alibaba Cloud helped StarTimes reconstruct its cloud architecture and realize business elasticity and high availability. The Alibaba Cloud Team utilized Alibaba Cloud’s leading computing platform and data governance services to provide StarTimes with a one-stop, global media processing platform. At the micro-service level, the Alibaba Cloud Team helped StarTimes carry out container transformation and construct an integrated micro-service governance platform around ACK, improving resource utilization.

Big Data Migration:

Alibaba Cloud Team planned the data integration link of the data lake with StarTimes. Alibaba Cloud read data from the original cloud service vendor’s database and wrote it to Polar DB, RDS, and ElasticSearch PaaS in real-time using the Spark engine deployed on Alibaba Cloud ACK. At the same time, Alibaba Cloud completed a smooth migration of data from the self-built Elasticsearch on the original cloud service vendor’s server to Alibaba Cloud ElasticSearch PaaS.

Looking Forward

StarTimes has a vision to ensure that every African family can access, afford, watch, and share the beauty of digital TV. StarTimes Group remains committed to providing high-quality and affordable entertainment to homes across Africa and looks forward to many more years of success and innovation in the broadcasting industry.

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