Disney+ Hotstar Blog
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Product and Engineering notes from Disney+ Hotstar, India's leading OTT service.
Disney+ Hotstar Blog
1M ago
Disney+ Hotstar is one of the largest OTT providers in India. The platform also provides live-streaming services to millions of customers nationwide. This is the first article in a series of blogs that will describe how we scaled the Disney+ Hotstar infrastructure to serve record-breaking 59 Million Concurrent streams. ?
Before the ODI ? World Cup 2023, we had hit a peak concurrency of around 25 million — managed on two Kubernetes clusters.
For the 2023 Asia Cup and World Cup events, we introduced the ‘Free on Mobile’ ? offering, to provide a delightful experience to as many cricket love ..read more
Disney+ Hotstar Blog
7M ago
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
Disney+ Hotstar Blog
8M ago
“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
Disney+ Hotstar Blog
1y ago
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
Disney+ Hotstar Blog
1y ago
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
Disney+ Hotstar Blog
1y ago
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
Disney+ Hotstar Blog
1y ago
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
Disney+ Hotstar Blog
2y ago
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
Disney+ Hotstar Blog
2y ago
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
Disney+ Hotstar Blog
2y ago
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