In the great ocean of Internet, while OTT platforms deliver content to customers, digital pirates are constantly trying to steal from them. Piracy is one of the biggest challenges for any OTT provider and it becomes a catastrophe if piracy happens on the back of their content distribution networks(CDNs). Not only do they lose viewership, but also pay for CDN cost that is actually used by the pirate apps. In this three-part blog series, let’s delve into how Disney+Hotstar (D+H) secured content from pirate applications re-streaming its content to millions of users. Let’s first lea ..read more

“Are we just going to try and change almost 90 years of broadcasting history?” We were. It’s just that every once in a while you get a chance to innovate beyond people’s imaginations and potentially shake things up for years to come. In the moments that you do, you pounce. https://medium.com/media/5bcf855de015adddfb4b539d39e83d70/href Innovation has always lain at the core of Disney+ Hotstar’s DNA, and the sport of cricket has often served as a vehicle for it. We live-streamed cricket way back in 2015, revolutionising the sport and the market. We were also the first in India to introduce ..read more

They say that product design is 30% design and 70% communication. We learnt how true that statement is during our efforts to bring Disney+ Hotstar’s most significant update Hotstar X to life. https://medium.com/media/27e81f3f20ef4c42ab3d837976e50913/href Hotstar X didn’t start a few months or a year back, it started way back in 2018 when we put the idea of a new version of Hotstar in our organisation’s mind. We were aware that Hotstar had room for improving the customer experience, but in an organisation of this size, having the intention to bring change is not enough. Hotstar in 201 ..read more

Encoding at Disney+Hotstar Transcoding is one of the fundamental pillars that define the quality of the watch experience for an OTT platform such as ours. The efficient transcoding of videos is crucial for handling the large volume of daily content ingestion, which can range from hundreds to a few hundred hours, including several tens of hours of 4K content. At the Video Center of Excellence @ Disney+ Hotstar, we are on a mission to redefine encoding and to deliver the best quality video at most reasonable costs with the best in-class video experience. Over the years, the Disney+ Hotstar Video ..read more

Fortifying your API Gateway: Defending Millions of Requests per second Against Potential Exploitations Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash Disney+Hotstar is the largest OTT provider in India and powers the Disney+ app in the MENA, SEA, and SAARC regions. One of the key challenges faced by the platform is authenticating requests to origin APIs, while also preventing any potential exploits by hackers or malicious users. Authentication exploits can result in financial losses, availability issues, and a negative impact on the user experience. In this blog, we’ll explore our journey of buil ..read more

Photo by Roshni Sidapara on UnsplashIntroduction Payment service is a Tier-0 service that orchestrates payment transactions at Hotstar — critical for the purchase and renewal of subscriptions. The throughput and availability aspects are paramount, considering its importance in accepting payments across multiple payment methods and payment gateways. As part of our routine high-velocity event readiness, we ran benchmarks to certify the throughput of the system. We discovered, to our surprise, that the system cannot scale to our target transactions per second (TPS). We will detail below ..read more

In the previous instalment, we wrote about our tenets for building widgets and how the server vended widget response allows the client apps to paint a delightful UX. In this post, we’ll unravel our server side architecture that provides us: ? Mad Agility - An agile platform that allows 200+ engineers to concurrently build and manage hundreds of widgets within the set guard-rails of performance and quality. ⚙️ Mad Flexibility - Dynamically change page layouts, control the widgets in a page, their order and other widget properties like orientation, styling, etc. ? Performance — A ..read more

ChatOps : Cloud Resource Explorer Cloud Resource Explorer using simple ChatOps Need to know your cloud dependencies in a pinch? Yes, we’ve been there. Here’s how we leveraged ChatOps to make our lives easier. Photo by Amy Elting on UnsplashThe Problem We’ve got cloud, and we’ve got a 99 problems about what’s residing in our clouds. On most days you might have the luxury of time to unravel this dependency graph, however, if you’re chasing down an incident, you need to know in a hurry! Here’s how the Sentinels, which is our security team @ Hotstar, solved this using  ..read more

Our previous post outlined key motivations on why it was imperative for us to think about a rewrite of our stack. In this post, we will geek out on key fundamentals of how we represented visual elements of our product for deployment via our server architecture. We wanted greater agility in releasing new features and experiences for all our customers across all our platforms, without being tightly coupled to app release and adoption cycles. This pushed us towards server driven UI (SDUI) and reusable UX components (aka widgets) that could be built once but composed and reused multiple times ..read more

Rate Limiter : Protecting Hotstar APIs from abuse As Hotstar scales to hundreds of millions of customers, we need to protect our APIs from “unwanted” usages. Here we will discuss how we implemented a custom rate limit system which scales for Hotstar and protects our APIs. Why we need rate limits? NOTE: This section will talk in length about the story behind the need for a “custom” rate limit system which our API Gateway couldn’t suffice for. You can skip and go ahead to the implementation section if you want to. Initially, the rate limiting system was introduced for a ..read more