Sky Italia improves X-Factor performance, lowers costs with AWS
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Editor
| 28 June 2023
Leading European media and entertainment company and pay-TV provider Sky Italia has revealed how a deployment of a suite of AWS and Amazon technology has led to a performance boost, ease of setup and cost savings in flagship show X-Factor.
AWS SKyItalyVoting 28June2023
Each season Sky Italia delivers seven live shows of the award-winning TV music competition. One of the biggest draws to is that the home viewing audience votes for their favourite 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 the 2022 season of X-Factor, Sky Italia introduced near real-time results sharing, in which the host shares the temporary ranking onstage with the audience while voting is still in progress, beside opening and closing results onstage as usual. This meant the platform also had to open and close the voting system in near real-time. Closed sessions are checked live by a notary who documents the voting results, with vote accuracy and quick responsiveness top priorities. The new voting solution also needed to support three existing channels— the X-Factor websites, mobile apps (Android and iOs), and Decoder and Glass.

Voters needed to be able to use the authentication service used on Amazon Cognito for support in social logins and via the Sky Ad login. It was also essential that the voting platform kept the interface the same as it was when it was designed 12 years ago, as the API was essentially fixed due to the massive task that would have been required to change set-top boxes across the country.

To support the architecture of the new voting platform Sky Italia uses AWS Fargate to manage underlying infrastructure and Containers to host the voting application, AWS Lambda to run code for applications without provisioning or managing servers, Amazon SQS for managed message queuing, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to stream data coming into the vote services as events in Sky’s ranking system, and Amazon DynamoDB to deliver single-digit millisecond performance at scale.

The new AWS-powered voting platform is said to have delivered the results it needed to, enabling 18 polls across all live sessions facilitating 20 million votes overall across the seven live sessions, and handling 5.7 million total votes over the final live session. The platform realised a performance of 400,000 votes/minute at peak. Additionally, analysing the data captured by the voting platform provided insights that helped the show adjust and build on its success, such as 47-50% of votes come from Decoder, 47-50% from the mobile app, less than 3% from the website, and that users tend to run out of votes sooner than expected.

“By insourcing and re-architecting the platform to managed services, we reduced our costs by 84%,” said Nicola Cremaschini, principal technical architect of digital properties, Sky Italia.

“Our latency is very good under a huge load (142ms latency at p95 under ~56,000 votes/second and ~100,000 RPS). We were able to support near real-time ranking for the first time. That wasn’t possible without AWS. And, before insourcing, we needed days to set up our platform. With the adoption of AWS-managed services, we were able to evolve architecture between episodes with zero operations required to handle the platform. That makes it easy for us to quickly evolve the platform for other use cases. It’s exactly what we set out to do.”