The Strategic Approach

Stockholm Code Group helped Warner Bros. Discovery understand that a new technical solution was required in order to meet the future needs of the organisation.

A Proof of Concept (POC) of a video streaming API was created in three weeks time with the help of a top team from Stockholm Code Group. A successful demo was held for important stakeholders and they liked what they saw. Warner Bros. Discovery formed a development team with the objective to build a new streaming platform. Stockholm Code Group were entrusted with leading roles such as head architect and lead developers. Everything was coded from scratch, with the help of a number of open source frameworks.

Following the success, the development team has become global and grown to over 1 000 developers.

The Platform Scope

The API and the platform contained Micro Services for most things that a modern Streaming OTT system would require, including:

• A Video Management System (CMS), handling all the metadata for videos, shows, series, and channels

• Orchestration of video-on-demand transcoding and live streaming

• A complete Content Management System (CMS) for publishing pages, videos, shows, and articles. All objects can be A/B-tested.

• A User Management System (UMS), to manage the users and their subscriptions

• A Product Management System (PMS), to manage products, packages, and campaigns with vouchers

• An Entitlements system to handle the rights to watch a video, considering things like geo origin, max concurrent streams, bought products and packages

• A Payment gateway for the paid subscriptions

• APIs for serving personalised content, tv-listings, and scaled images Integrations with Ad serving systems

The API was agnostic to the client platform and used by web sites, mobile apps, ChromeCast, Apple TV, TV Sets and Set-top-boxes.

Pillars for the Technical Solution

The API and its corresponding Micro Services platform was designed and coded from the ground up to achieve Speed, Flexibility and Stability. Every solution in the system had to satisfy all these three main requirements.

Speed

The speed, in terms of very fast response times, is achieved by only choosing modern technologies that are inherently fast in themselves, like non-blocking servers and memory databases. All code is written in a non-blocking and asynchronous fashion.

Flexibility

Every single API-call can be personalised. This can be achieved because we have banned all forms of timeout caches. Instead, all data is cached at a deeper level, and the caches are refreshed only when the underlying data has actually been changed. Since every API-call can be personalised, it is very easy to implement any feature that the different client products around the world can come up with. There are basically no dead ends.

Stability

To achieve stability, we don't allow any runtime dependencies on services outside the platform. We always prefer having full control over the code, to be able to correct it quickly. If an external dependency is absolutely necessary, we always embed that service in a circuit breaker, i.e. a switch with a reasonable fallback behaviour, in case the external service is not performing well.
Aside from this, we also use all the modern DevOps technologies for CI/CD, containerised cloud deployment, self-healing, auto-scalable systems, graphed monitoring, centralised logging etc.

The team has a zero tolerance for errors in any of the logs in all the Micro Services. Long term fixes are always applied immediately, so we don't have a need for a Troubleshooting Guides containing Fixes to Common Problems or similar.