"By utilizing cloud technology, TVB built a reliable infrastructure to overcome application scalability and performance-related issues and delivered a world-class viewing experience to customers."
01About TVB
Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) is one of the most prominent TV broadcasting and on-demand video streaming service providers in Hong Kong. The company has multiple lines of businesses, ranging from content creation and licensing to broadcasting and distribution. TVB's product portfolio includes a terrestrial television broadcasting platform containing five digital channels and on-demand video streaming services, myTV SUPER and TVB Anywhere. TVB's terrestrial TV channels (Jade, J2, TVB News, Pearl, TVB Finance & Information) deliver round-the-clock entertainment to millions of viewers in Hong Kong and around the world.
As part of its business growth and expansion plans, TVB has established strong ties with local and overseas TV stations, licensed content distributors, production studios, and social media and video sharing platforms. The company is a leading digital content provider in the media & entertainment space with its extensive network of global partners.
02Challenge
TVB’s digital content has global viewership, with customers using OTT applications and direct-to-home services to access the content worldwide. The high-quality content and multiple streaming options offered by TVB resulted in exponential growth in its customer base. However, with the increase in viewers, delivering the highest quality of services during peak traffic hours became a significant challenge for the company. TVB needed additional performance and stability by leveraging elastic scaling and load balancing solutions.
03Why Alibaba Cloud
TVB was looking for a reliable cloud technology partner who could provide an auto-scaling solution to address its application performance, scalability, and cost-related issues. TVB selected Alibaba Cloud as the preferred partner considering its proven cloud expertise, quick turnaround times, and dedicated local technical support capabilities. Furthermore, Alibaba Cloud's long-standing experience in the media & entertainment industry, hybrid cloud capabilities, and cost-effective solutions encouraged TVB to collaborate with Alibaba Cloud.
04Architecture
Leveraging Alibaba Cloud's Auto Scaling service, TVB successfully handled the sudden increase in its applications traffic levels. Auto Scaling allowed TVB to intelligently provision the computing resources in its server farm to manage fluctuating demands. It also enabled TVB to minimize resource wastage and optimize IT costs by automatically removing the surplus computing resources during off-peak hours. In addition, Auto Scaling improved TVB’s application performance and availability by smartly distributing the incoming traffic among multiple backend servers.
In addition to Auto Scaling, TVB also deployed Alibaba Cloud's PolarDB relational database, which can help to address the high stability, data security, and automatic scaling requirements of TVB. PolarDB delivered top-grade performance during scale out events and reduced data storage costs for TVB.
As part of its digital transformation journey, TVB will continue to seek support from Alibaba Cloud to identify new opportunities for optimizing costs and operational efficiency and delivering a superior customer experience.
05Looking Forward
TVB is investing heavily in new-age digital platforms and infrastructure modernization to become a leading linear TV and on-demand video streaming services provider globally. By utilizing cloud technology, TVB built a reliable infrastructure to overcome application scalability and performance-related issues and delivered a world-class viewing experience to customers.
As part of its digital transformation journey, TVB will continue to seek support from Alibaba Cloud to identify new opportunities for optimizing costs and operational efficiency and delivering a superior customer experience. TVB also looks forward to further enhancing the performance and usability of its television broadcasting and video streaming platforms through Alibaba Cloud services.