Our target audience does not watch content thrown at it randomly

Working in the background, it drives the platform’s content management strategy as well as its advertising programming so neatly that it shines even when it is not visible. That’s data in the hands of smart databases and architectures at Sony LIV. And here’s how it plays out.

- By Pratima H

Data is, almost, turning into the Scam 1992-BGM for this OTT Major. Seldom does one get the itch to compare a developer to Achint Thakkar. But Sumon Mal, Vice President of Backend Engineering at SonyLIV gives you that vibe when he explains just how deftly, and precisely, his team and tech partners strum up possibilities using various strings of data at this OTT major. I almost asked him about the next season of ‘Rocket Boys’ but it turned out that there is a lot more thrilling than that which he could give a peek of in this chat. And it looks as nail-biting as some of the shows we gulp hungrily. Binging on data, on the right couch can mean a lot. Let’s press the ‘play’ button.

What role does data play in the OTT space? What tools do you use?

There is content on one side and there is consumer on the other side. Data helps us manage both in a very intelligent way—from content management to customer management based on subscriptions, packages, choices, taste and real-time consumption. With a wide global reach, there is a lot of diversity on that front, and data becomes quite useful for the insights we need. We realised that structured data strategy will not help much so we leaned towards the unstructured models and MongoDB came as a category-killer top choice when we were looking for NoSQL solutions.

Tell us more about this in-house CMS project built on MongoDB.

The in-house CMS system aka Blitz provides fast error-free publishing, while it brings a one-stop solution for operators. Earlier it was juggled between three different systems. It brings a series of validations in place to ensure error-free publishing, while we are using a moderate number of metadata for each content, its actual performance comes when it required bulk updates. On Mongo persistence overall data handling is robust and simplified.

What has changed with this shift?