The #1 live TV streaming service with approximately 2.3 million customers, Sling TV, was looking to provide more personalized service for its users.

They recognized the need for a highly available, scalable, and centralized data solution for their 16 platforms to deliver a great customer experience. They also wanted to build the Sling TV backend on-demand in a hybrid cloud environment with operations running across both public and private cloud.

Sling TV was looking for a proven solution to stay competitive and provide a first-class customer experience. They wanted to personalize the user experience on a grand scale and also be able to scale on demand.

Sling TV needed to have the ability to build out a backend in the hybrid cloud environment and a distributed database with a continuous deployment model. With data centers on the east and west coasts, Sling TV put customer-specific data into a common store that can be shared across sites, thanks to Cassandra’s ability to be deployed across regions.

The new platform needed to be highly available and resilient while centralizing business logic over 16 different platforms across the country. They wanted to be able to deliver a seamless experience to all customers.

It was critical for Sling TV to provide a highly resilient and available service that is personalized to each user, that scales on demand to keep up with their expanding customer base.

“Apache Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise has become a key part of our hybrid cloud strategy and has enabled our software to run in private and public clouds with close to the same tooling. We are now able to replicate data across the country in less than two seconds, which is a big win for us,” says Brad Linder, Director of Cloud Native Engineering at Sling TV.

The solution needed media distribution capabilities that included authentication, program catalogs, and feature metadata storage.

“What we try to do is give the customer what they want. We try to get relevant information and content quickly to folk with less friction—fewer clicks to video,” according to Linder. “We’re not just paying lip service to customer feedback. We want to solve the pain points they have and engineer the platform accordingly.”

“We have a growing customer base and a very elastic business model, so we have to deliver our software into any public cloud as well as on-premises private cloud. From a technical perspective we need low latency and high availability.”