hayu adopts AWS to add personalisation, data analysis
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Editor
| 11 March 2021
NBCUniversal International’s reality on-demand OTT platform hayu has tapped AWS services to enable greater personalisation data analysis an ensure international viewers have access to new episodes of their favourite programmes on the same day as their US broadcast.
hayu devices Europe18Feb2021
Launched in the UK, Ireland, and Australia in 2016, the hayu service is now available in 27 countries across a full variety of mobile, tablet, and TV devices, as well as the web. The service, from NBCUniversal International, provides more than 8,000 episodes from more than 300 of the best reality shows.

Targeting viewers who are fans of the reality genre, hayu offers over 8,000 episodes of reality TV content including all seasons of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, from the very beginning to the upcoming final season, as well as its spin-offs – along with numerous other franchises, including the popular The Real Housewives, Below Deck and Million Dollar Listing franchises. The service also offers a variety of unscripted sub-genres in English language including: home and design, dating, cooking, crime and fashion. And, subscribers don’t have to worry about spoilers as the vast majority of US shows are available on hayu the same day as their US broadcast.

Over the past 18 months the service has been upgraded – working closely with European-based media software solutions developer Merapar Technologies – to include new navigation functionality and dynamic content presentation. By deploying virtualised media processing tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS), hayu is said to have enjoyed business benefits such as boosted in performance, viewer retention and subscription revenue of its service.

Merapar received a request from the hayu team to build a custom multi-layered content management solution that adds viewer personalisation and user data capture capabilities. The OTT platform generates several billion data events per month that now flow through Amazon Kinesis, a real-time data streaming service that can continuously capture gigabytes of data per second and which is used to collect, process, and analyse real-time, streaming data to give hayu timely user insights that the team can then react to quickly. hayu also makes extensive use of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to house their data lake.

“The benefits of using AWS include security, scalability, and reduced maintenance, and these factors were so critical to building the solution that many content providers are seeing AWS as the solution,” commented Chris Birkinshaw, technology principal and solutions architect at Merapar and the project lead. “We have been able to move to a different way of developing new features for the platform. We can experiment, spin up, and spin down services as required, without having to worry about the cost.”

hayu is also using Amazon Personalize to provide a better customer experience via tailored recommendations that leverage machine learning algorithms, making it easy to create individualised title suggestions for subscribers of the service. This customization is based on viewing history.

The new platform – for which Merapar developed and delivered a prototype “serverless” content management systems in 21 days, and a finished product in 20 weeks – is claimed to be a huge leap forward for hayu, and no less than a game changer, said Andy Clarkson, vice president of technology operations for the OTT service. “The system provides increased editorial flexibility, allowing us to present a mix of editorially curated content and algorithmic recommendations (segmented and personalised) to users,” he said.

“So far our data has shown significant increases to views of recommended shows. It’s all about flexibility and personalisation. The new platform gives us the ability to present users with a balance of editorial, segmented and personalised content, enhancing the overall customer experience. Increased viewing was the main aim of the project and we are pleased with the results and how quickly we achieved them.”