Hyper-Personalized User Experiences Drive Increased Advertising Revenue

The Need

Partnering with over 250 media companies, Tubi has more than 30,000 movies and TV shows globally. As a free ad-supported platform, Tubi is an ideal alternative to paid streaming subscriptions services. Tubi’s platform is fueled by a robust content recommendation engine that pairs viewers with the content they love, which is a huge draw for Tubi’s growing young and diverse audience and the brands looking to reach these audiences. Tubi has low ad loads and frequency optimization offering the ideal ad experience for both consumers and brands.

As Tubi’s popularity rose, the development team was working around the clock trying to scale the existing systems with more hardware. Simultaneously, the development team was trying to improve the user experience by adding layers of machine learning driven recommendations to further individualize the customer experience.

The Challenge

Tubi was in search of a single platform that could:

• provide the always on, responsive experience their demographic have come to expect
• automatically scale on demand
• handle the complexity that comes with a Video On Demand service
• bring together big data and machine learning for hyper-personalized content recommendations
• enable developers to focus on business logic, not break-fix bandaids across a distributed system
• easy and robust integration with numerous technologies already in use such as gRPC, ScyllaDB, Postgres, Datadog, Spark, AWS, etc

The chosen solution also needed to be able to keep up with Tubi’s fast pace of innovation and be implemented quickly to keep pace with business goals.

The Solution

In addition to the list of platform requirements, Tubi was seeking a provider that would work with them as a partner to achieve a common goal: create better software for the video-on-demand marketplace. After researching, it was clear only Lightbend could deliver the technology, expertise and partnership Tubi sought.

Built on reactive architecture, Akka Platform by Lightbend provides the frameworks and runtimes that enable Tubi to build cloud-native applications that can take advantage of the distributed nature of the cloud, are resilient to failure, automatically scale up and down, and are highly responsive. Akka Platform enbles Tubi to easily apply Machine Learning models to real-time streams of data. Providing invidualized content and hyper-personalized user experiences customers crave and increased advertising revenue opportunities for Tubi.

Telemetry provides the advanced system monitoring and management required for Tubi’s highly tuned, massively performant application. Tubi also utilizes telemetry during development to ensure optimal performance before going into production.

“Akka Platform and reactive streams from Lightbend have enabled Tubi to provide customer experiences unlike any other in the video-on-demand space,” states , Marios Assistis, CTO at Tubi. “Tubi is now able to deliver a unique level of hyperpersonalization that resonates with our viewers’ individual tastes and advertiser solutions needed by the world’s leading brands.”

The Results

With Lightbend, Tubi has been able to increase development velocity while attaining the expertise, and confidence, to quickly solve complex issues that arise during development. Telemetry allows for better monitoring of services in production and a rich set of metrics used for smart alerting in production systems and quick debugging of complex interdependencies in the rare cases that issues do arise.