Viacom’s Journey to Improving Viewer Experiences with Real-time Analytics at Scale

With over 4 billion subscribers, Viacom is focused on delivering amazing viewing experiences to their global audiences. Core to this strategy is ensuring petabytes of streaming content is delivered flawlessly through web, mobile and streaming applications. This is critically important during popular live events like the MTV Video Music Awards.

Streaming this much video can strain delivery systems resulting in long load times, mid-stream freezes and other issues. Not only does this create a poor experience, but can also result in lost ad dollars. To combat this, Viacom set out to build a scalable analytics platform capable of processing terabytes of streaming data for real-time insights on the viewer experience.

After evaluating a number of technologies, Viacom found their solution in Amazon S3 and the Databricks Unified Analytics Platform powered by Apache Spark^TM. The rapid scalability of S3 coupled with the ease and processing power of Databricks, enabled Viacom to rapidly deploy and scale Spark clusters and unify their entire analytics stack - from basic SQL to advanced analytics on large scale streaming and historical datasets - with a single platform. Viacom can now proactively monitor video feed quality enabling their teams to reduce the time to first frame by 33%.

To learn more, watch our on-demand webinar How Viacom Revolutionized Audience Experiences with Real-Time Analytics at Scale led by Mark Cohen VP of Data Platforms at Viacom.

The session covers:

• Why Viacom chose Databricks, Spark and AWS for scalable real-time insights and AI
• How a unified platform for ad-hoc, batch, and real-time data analytics enabled them to improve content delivery
• What it takes to create a self service analytics platform for business users, analysts, and data scientists

Watch this session now.