CBC
Democratizing Performance Testing and Ensuring Efficiency at Leading Broadcasting Company
How CBC ensures efficiency with the highest technical quality and minimal time investment
CBC
How CBC ensures efficiency with the highest technical quality and minimal time investment
With over €2.1 billion in revenue, Mediengruppe RTL (subsidiary of RTL Group) is the third largest television company and broadcaster in Europe. It’s offerings reach 30.3 million viewers every day. Their streaming service TVNOW is a fast growing key project (100% YoY) reaching over 7 million unique users per month 2021. With so many people relying on these services the technical backbone for TV, online and streaming has to be rock-solid. Cologne Broadcasting Services (CBC) is this backbone and ensures their production readiness with StormForge Performance Testing.
In a rapidly growing organization such as CBC, it is a decisive challenge to ensure that the quality of services being delivered scale with the organization and that production readiness is not jeopardized. To ensure the success of major TV events broadcast on RTL, streaming and online services need to be of the highest quality as well as capable of dealing with unexpected usage peaks during live events.
Automated load and performance testing with StormForge is available to all CBC team members at all times, enabling early troubleshooting and reliable scalability. Production readiness, quality and cost efficiency are assured through continuous, straightforward and repeatable testing.
CBC and, of course, RTL benefit from the assurance of the highest technical quality with minimal time investment. Non-functional requirements can be reliably met and teams are enabled to introduce new technologies more smoothly and release into production with confidence. StormForge provides the flexibility to evaluate our applications from various perspectives and the simplicity for everyone in the team to work with the results.
As part of Mediengruppe RTL, CBC is one of the leading TV production, IT and broadcasting companies in Germany and Europe. CBC Online Services develops and operates innovative platforms for the online offerings of RTL Germany. In addition to classic web offerings, this also includes apps, HbbTV offerings and video streaming services, including the streaming and VoD platform TVNOW.
On TVNOW, among other things, the UEFA Europa League or TV events such as the German version of “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” are distributed. The platform has over 7 million unique users per month and offers over 47,000 hours of entertainment in various genres – from real life shows to sports, documentaries and information, as well as children’s programming and fiction.
"To further expand our market position as the leading German streaming service, we are investing heavily in our product. The goal is to get a little closer to the ideal streaming experience every day."
Henning Nieslony
Co-Managing Director TVNOW (Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland)
With such rapid growth of the organization and teams, products and technical services must be able to keep pace, and testing production readiness becomes a particular challenge. Events and shows of enormous audiences must be reliably prepared and secured. Quality assurance of new features and services and smooth migration to the cloud become critical tasks for success.
The solution is a fully-managed SaaS that is made available to all team members. This enables each individual to run tests of any size at any time. Targeted automation and an appropriately customized toolbox enable a fast “Getting Started”. Manually started pipelines make it very easy to repeat and compare automated large-scale tests. Simple and regular debugging as well as constant learning about your own systems facilitate an efficient new cloud setup.
All of this ensures that non-functional requirements are met as part of production readiness and that the cloud infrastructure is sized according to requirements even before launch. Last but not least, an entire organization gains valuable experience – across team boundaries, the handling of new technologies (e.g. AWS Lambda and Kubernetes) under load is learned at an early stage of the development process.
"With StormForge we have actually become quite confident during show premieres with millions of viewers. By integrating automated load and performance testing into our development process we are empowered to ensure performance and scalability all across the organization – and withstand any stampede of users."
Oliver Kuhn
Head of Operations – Engineering, Cologne Broadcasting Center GmbH (Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland)
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