Hotstar scales with Firebase and increases engagement by 38%
Introduction
Hotstar, India's largest entertainment app with over 150 million
monthly active users around the world, provides live streaming of
TV shows, movies, sports, and news on the go. In May 2018, Hotstar
set a world record in online streaming when 10.3 million users
simultaneously tuned into its Android, iOS and web apps to watch
a nail-biting cricket match in the VIVO Indian Premier League.
The company's mission is to offer fast, high-quality entertainment
on-demand as an alternative to TV.
Challenge
Looking to scale, the Hotstar team developed a brand new version
of its app with better architecture and more robust features that
would increase watch time, its key performance metric. However,
they wanted to test each new feature and safely roll out the most
engaging ones without disrupting users. Initially, they were using
in-house APIs to configure these experiments, but found that they
were not flexible enough. They also wanted to move to a
comprehensive platform with established solutions.