The consumer shift toward Over-The-Top streaming and cord-cutting has accelerated the need for both broadcasters and traditional media companies to move to an OTT-based delivery format. As content providers and distributors continue to incorporate OTT streaming products into their long-term strategies, PDG is helping them to better monetize these products, expand their streaming footprint, and improve customer satisfaction.
What does OTT Software Development look like at PDG?
PDG has experience across all facets of streaming services and specializes in building platforms that put user experience first. Our experience includes development of Live and Video-on-Demand streaming services with millions of subscribers, custom video streaming applications, and even music streaming applications. Our approach focuses on platform reliability, secure delivery of high-quality content, reduction of distribution costs, and automation of technical operations.
Starting from content acquisition and delivery, we ensure your content is encoded and packaged appropriately to reach users with any device. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is applied to secure your content.
Reliable video delivery is ensured utilizing state-of-the-art Content Delivery Networks (CDN) architectures or edge computing technologies. Content and Metadata Management services are developed to ingest, store, and distribute accompanying data to any and all consumers.
Many streaming solutions also include Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) that utilize Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) to provide tailored ad solutions that avoid ad blocking technologies.
Data analytics are considered throughout the design and development process. Use data from your applications and customer devices to trend customer behavior and aid in business decision making, as well as monitor key performance indicators to ensure platform stability.
How can PDG Consulting help?
Whether your company is building an OTT streaming service from scratch, or using a combination of streaming vendors, we have the holistic experience to help build an optimized platform. PDG has leveraged over a decade of media and entertainment experience along with a partnership-based approach to drive business growth for clients that include DIRECTV, CBS, Sony Pictures, and 21st Century Fox. Contact us and let us know how we can help.
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Project Name
DIRECTV STREAM Content Provider DAI
Overview
We led the initiative by designing, integrating, and testing an upgraded technology stack from the Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) vendor used in the over-the-top streaming platform at DIRECTV. The design allowed us to synethically separate the National (Content Provider owned) and Local (Distributor / DIRECTV owned) avails within a single commerical break, and request for ad decisions for each avail separate from the Content Provider ad decision services and DIRECTV's own ad decision services.
This involved iterative cycles of functional, integration, client, and load testing with focus on platform stability and user experience once the new content provider ads entered the system. We project managed this effort across numerous cross-function DIRECTV teams, external vendors, and content providers.
Tech Stacks
Elasticsearch | Kibana | Splunk | New Relic | Yospace | INVIDI
Project Name
Converged Ad Delivery
Overview
PDG spearheaded the multi-year effort by leading the project design, test management, and launch planning across DIRECTV and vendor teams. PDGC designed and developed the central measurement platform for reporting Hard Interconnect (HIC) ad placement success metrics back to the ad sales teams, as well as internal DIRECTV monitoring services and systems alerting. We previously led the Hard Interconnect deployment on DIRECTV Satellite and were looked to as experts on the DIRECTV STREAM rollout.
Tech Stacks
Go | Kubernetes | Elasticsearch | Kibana | Prometheus | Grafana | Sumologic | Couchbase | AWS S3 | AWS SQS | Kafka
Project Name
DIRECTV Advanced Advertising
Overview
PDG designed and oversaw a complete re-architecture of the DIRECTV satellite advertising platform, which more than doubled the number of ads that could be targeted to customers and brought down the amount of required lead time to play out a targeted ad from 24 hours to under 4 hours. This re-architecture enabled DIRECTV to enter the advertising interconnect managed by Comcast/NCC which doubled DIRECTV's yearly advertising revenue. PDG also designed and developed two critical applications in the advertising platform and built out real-time alerting and reporting dashboards used by the 24/7 advertising operations teams. PDG continues to lead incremental architectural changes for the satellite platform and is also assisting in architecting the next-generation advertising platform for streaming services such as DIRECTV NOW.
Tech Stacks
Java | Angular | Oracle SQL | Microsoft SQL Server | Microsoft IIS | SOAP | REST | Kafka | Hadoop | Splunk
Project Name
AT&T TV and HBO MAX Technical Support
Overview
PDG led the functional analysis, technical design, and implementation of web applications used by agents to support AT&T TV and HBO Max. For AT&T TV, PDG enhanced ReactJS based agent portals and Java/Spring microservices to pull in and render STB hardware and home internet diagnostics. These diagnostics were supplemented with technical support procedures, driven by Nokia SMP workflows. For HBO Max, similar agent portals were enhanced to support customer issues related to AT&T packages and offerings of HBO Max, eligibility rules, pricing, and provider-based authentication on the HBO Max app. These efforts were complemented with real-time analytics and reporting to gather insights on support case management and agent effectiveness.
Tech Stacks
ReactJS | Java | Nokia SMP | Teradata | Tableau
Project Name
AT&T TV Program Scheduling
Overview
PDG fully migrated the DIRECTV TV / VOD Guide metadata pipeline to the cloud. This included movie poster images, celebrity headshot, aggregated guide schedules & celebrity biographies over a satellite using Kafka, Couchbase, GoLang, & Kubernetes.
Tech Stacks
GoLang | Kubernetes | Amazon S3 | Couchbase NoSQL Database | Java | Kafka