Headquartered in Hong Kong, Television Broadcasting Company Limited (TVB) is recognized as one of the world's largest producers of commercial entertainment and television programs. With a vertically integrated model encompassing content creation, broadcasting, and distribution, TVB remains a pioneering force in the industry.

Leveraging its established production expertise, TVB launched myTV SUPER in April 2016, a platform that would swiftly rise to become the largest OTT service in Hong Kong. With more than 10.5 million registered users, myTV SUPER delivers a wide variety of self-produced content and hosts an expansive range of on-demand services. The platform allows users to consume content through several channels, including set-top boxes, smart TVs, computers, tablets, and smartphones.

myTV SUPER offers TVB's terrestrial and thematic channels, international branded channels, and an extensive selection of VOD content, making available exclusive and original first-run dramas and variety shows to a wide audience. The platform has revolutionized television viewing in Hong Kong by providing a user-centric, anytime, anywhere access to a diverse array of programs, thus transforming how viewers engage with digital entertainment.

As myTV SUPER continues to expand its rich content offerings and sophisticated viewing options, the company faces a series of data-related challenges pivotal to its digital transformation journey. Managing an immense collection of diversified data incurs high costs and presents complex operations and maintenance challenges, which are significant in maintaining a competitive edge.

Specifically, the current infrastructure struggles with hot cold data splitting, a critical issue for an entity like myTV SUPER, as it requires advanced analytic capabilities to stay ahead in the dynamic market. This gap not only increases the daily operational burden for the marketing team but also consumes a significant amount of time intended for analytical jobs. Furthermore, the absence of advanced data management tools – crucial for processes such as data transfer, capture, conversion, and interception – restricts the rapid development of applications necessary to meet the evolving demands of the viewing audience.

An additional challenge is the high costs associated with storing in-demand data. Balancing these expenses while ensuring high accessibility and reliability of data storage is crucial to cater to the ever-growing needs of myTV SUPER’s audience, and is thus integral to maintaining the platform's market dominance.

Addressing these challenges is vital for myTV SUPER to continue providing a seamless viewing experience and to maintain its position as one of Hong Kong's most innovative digital entertainment platforms.

To effectively address the complexity of data management and the high costs associated with storing in-demand data, myTV SUPER has sought the expertise of Alibaba Cloud. By utilizing Alibaba Cloud's robust database products, myTV SUPER is able to support the rapid development of its diverse businesses, which is crucial in maintaining its dominant market position. The one-stop data solution offered by Alibaba Cloud has streamlined data management methods, enabling more efficient operations. This collaboration has provided myTV SUPER with the advanced data management tools it was lacking, such as improved data transfer, capture, conversion, and interception capabilities. Leveraging Alibaba Cloud's solutions has thus proved indispensable in overcoming the previously mentioned data-related challenges and ensuring the continuation of myTV SUPER's innovative and seamless viewing experience for its audience.

myTV SUPER's architecture leverages a suite of Alibaba Cloud data management and processing products to handle its complex demands. At its core is Alibaba Cloud PolarDB, a cloud-native relational database service that provides high performance and auto-scaling capabilities. With PolarDB, myTV SUPER achieves rapid elastic scaling to accommodate viewer traffic surges, ensuring a stable experience during peak periods. Its high compatibility with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle syntax, along with large volume storage capacity, aligns with user’s needs for seamless, real-time data analysis and decision-making.

Complementing PolarDB, myTV SUPER employs AnalyticDB for MySQL, a real-time data warehousing service capable of processing and analyzing terabyte-level advertising data. This service provides the much-needed hot-cold data segregation at the storage level, optimizing cost and performance balance.

The architecture is further strengthened by the Data Transmission Service (DTS), which supports high availability continuous data replication and facilitates efficient data migration and synchronization across different database engines. Whether it's relational databases, NoSQL, or OLAP, DTS provides myTV SUPER with the flexibility to maintain data integrity and availability across their data architecture, enabling scenarios such as real-time backups and cache refreshes.

Together, the combination of PolarDB, AnalyticDB for MySQL, and DTS empowers myTV SUPER to fulfill its online and real-time analysis requirements for large-scale data, ensuring the platform can continue to deliver its innovative and customer-centric viewing experience.

Notice: ApsaraDB for Redis and Tair have been merged and renamed to Tair (Redis® OSS-compatible) since September 2024.

Implementing AnalyticDB for MySQL for hot cold data splitting at the storage level significantly reduced myTV SUPER’s storage costs by over 20%. By leveraging PolarDB in conjunction with DTS and AnalyticDB for MySQL, myTV SUPER efficiently met the demands for online and real-time analysis of terabyte-scale data, thus enhancing operational efficiency and decision-making.

This strategic use of Alibaba Cloud solutions adeptly met myTV SUPER’s challenges, enabling continuous delivery of superior streaming services to their audience.

Looking ahead, myTV SUPER is eager to deepen its partnership with Alibaba Cloud, pursuing even more innovative solutions to elevate their OTT platform. They anticipate harnessing AI technologies to tailor content recommendations more precisely to individual viewer preferences, enhance the user interface interactions, and continuously improve streaming quality.

These future initiatives are expected to significantly augment the intelligence of the myTV SUPER journey, delivering a smarter and more enjoyable viewing experience. The synergy between myTV SUPER’s industry insights and Alibaba Cloud's technological prowess stands poised to set new benchmarks in digital entertainment.