Hotstar personalized by Yusp breaks world streaming record

Hotstar, India’s largest premium video streaming platform broke Youtube’s world record for the number of concurrent users watching a single online live stream event.

Budapest(09 Jul 2018)

During this year’s cricket tournament the Vivo Indian Premier League Hotstar set a record multiple times for the number of concurrent users streaming a live sport event. The highest peak was during the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) and Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) final, when CSK turned the match around after a miraculous comeback. At the climax of the match, the premium streaming platform saw a massive 10.3 million users simultaneously watching the game.

The last highest recorded concurrency was by YouTube’s live stream of the Red Bull Stratos, in which skydiver Felix Baumgartner dropped from near-space (37 kilometres high) back to the Earth’s surface. At the peak of the YouTube coverage, the number of concurrent viewers reached a previously unprecedented 8 million. To put these numbers in perspective, the number of live streamers during the 2018 Super Bowl were an all time high for this event with 3.1 Million.

Needless to say, Hotstar’s record viewership presented challenges to vendors and providers working together with the streaming platform to preserve the smooth user experience during the highest peaks of concurrent traffic and surges of incoming users generated by the push notifications sent out up to 150 million devices.

Especially when, in addition to the fans watching the game during the world record, another 600 thousand users were browsing content from Hotstar’s immense catalog featuring more than 100,000 hours of series and movies in 17 languages, taking the total number of simultaneous active users on the platform up to 10.9 million.

Just imagine browsing hundred thousands of available movies and TV shows with your TV remote, you could endlessly search for interesting content, therefore personalization is a must have for all content providers to maximize both the time spent on the platform and customer retention, especially for those with a large and diverse assortment of content, such as Hotstar. In order to provide their users with the best experience available while keeping them engaged and loyal, Hotstar evaluated the field of personalization systems and decided to test the market leading technologies in an extensive assessment project in 2016.

Tried and tested across several integration points, Gravity R&D’s personalization engine Yusp outperformed its competition in all previously defined metrics. Based on the assessment carried out with an A/B testing methodology, applying Yusp’s recommendations resulted in a 50% higher click-through rate and a 30% increase in watch time on the platform. Since the test, the utilization of the Yusp personalization technology has been continuously scaling up, so Yusp is also adjusting its infrastructure to serve the dynamically growing user base of Hotstar, providing more than 1 billion daily personalized recommendations during the 2018 IPL matches.

“As Hotstar broke all barriers towards its global achievement, we relied heavily on our partners to keep the platform experience at par with what our users expect. Yusp is deeply integrated into the core browsing experience on Hotstar and the kind of scale up and support provided during IPL was commendable.

The flexibility demonstrated by the Yusp engine in serving different business needs is particularly worth mentioning.”

Shobhit Singhal, Product team @Hotstar

 

Global personalization engine Yusp provided by Gravity R&D made sure that users were provided an uninterrupted personalized experience even during the final moments of the playoff, by calculating and serving up to 251,000 transactions per second including 121,000 real-time, personalized recommendations, and receiving and storing behavioral user events at 130,000 per second at the same time.

Hotstar

Hotstar is India’s largest premium streaming platform with more than 100,000 hours of drama and movies in 17 languages, and coverage of every major global sporting event. Launched in early 2015, it is one of India’s most downloaded apps and has attracted more than 350 million followers on the back of a highly evolved video streaming technology and high attention to quality of experience across devices and platforms. Hotstar has appropriated top spots on the Google Play Store as well as the Apple App Store, named among the most popular apps of 2017 on both platforms.

Yusp  

Yusp is a personalization engine platform which enables its clients increase their revenues by creating more relevant, intuitive, and personalized user experience. Their clients range from e-commerce SMEs, through enterprise platforms and content providers with millions of monthly visitors, to telecommunication companies and large bricks-and-mortar retail businesses that also capitalize on personalization solutions in the physical space.

The aim of personalization is to unearth connections between personal taste and implicit, as well as explicit user preference signals through sophisticated, scalable machine learning algorithms. Yusp has researched and developed more than 100 of adaptive learning algorithms specifically for the different business models of its diverse clientele.