Sky Italia improves performance, lowers costs 84 percent by insourcing its voting platform for live TV productions with AWS

With five million subscribers, Sky Italia is one of Europe’s leading media and entertainment companies and the largest pay TV provider in Italy. One of the biggest draws to the service is “X-Factor,” the award-winning TV music competition. A key part of the show is that the home viewing audience votes for their favorite performers, with the results tabulated and shared during live broadcasts. Given that viewer interactivity is the foundation of the experience, the technology driving the voting platform is mission-critical.

For 12 years, Sky Italia had outsourced its voting platform to a third party, which delivered a solution that was robust, well-tested, and reliable, but was a black box. So, given the criticality of voting for the TV show, in 2021, the team behind it began to explore the idea of taking the voting platform in-house to improve performance, lower costs, and re-architect it for use cases beyond “X-Factor.” The massive audience and social media echo would put Sky Italia’s voting platform under the spotlight, so the new platform had to deliver robust performance, fault tolerance, and low latency.

“We wanted to have a more generic platform, focused enough for ‘X-Factor’ but extensible enough to handle other use cases,” said Nicola Cremaschini, Principal Technical Architect of Digital Properties, Sky Italia. “In addition, in 2022, the TV show introduced temporary rankings on stage with the audience in near-real time. We had a very short time to get our platform ready to support ‘X-Factor’ live events.”

With Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed services, Sky Italia was able to re-platform in just six months. It launched for the first episode of “X-Factor” season 2022, handling millions of votes per session while adhering to competition rules and providing near-real time ranking. Best of all, it delivered better performance and reduced costs by 84 percent compared to the previous single-purpose outsourced “X-Factor” voting platform. BCS Bureau