July 2022

If you missed it, read the first part here. Now, onwards. Hotstar has always put a huge premium on building for Bharat. Building for Bharat starts with making content accessible in the language of choice for our customers. The platform has always been able to auto-start content in the language best suited for our customer,

Photo by San Fermin Pamplona — Navarra on Unsplash We recently wrapped up our wildly successful COVID edition of the Dream 11 Indian Premier League; This year was different from the previous years, since we had switched our business model, to make the event, pay-only. This meant, new, never before seen traffic patterns while at

Photo by Philip Myrtorp on Unsplash Hotstar as a platform deals with more than 1M RPS of pure API calls from various clients (this excludes calls for images/video). At peak, the volumes go up to 5M RPS. Hotstar is a global platform with more than 200+ micro-services working together to give our customers a smooth

Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash RxJava 2 introduced the concept of back-pressure. Back-pressure is nothing but a way for the subscriber to limit the number of items emitted by the emitter. In this blog, we’ll deep dive and review the mechanics. The concept of back-pressure is that if the subscriber cannot accept

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash The smallest room for improvement in user’s experience is an opportunity, when you are dealing with payments. Our payment page is a web experience, shared on Android, m-web/web. A poorly performing page can impact millions of Hotstar’s potential subscribers and will have revenue impact. Janks and Layout Shifts —

Photo by Stefan Lehner on Unsplash We want our customers to know what the most popular, most watched content is and potentially entice them to start to watch that content as well, to help them making a viewing choice on our platform. The problem is simple enough, the solution is anything but! We discuss how

Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash Creating a strong subscription business means protecting the product from being accessed without the right entitlements. With great power comes great responsibility, and with high growth comes even higher risks. Given our premium Disney content and live events there is always a risk of piracy, account sharing, account takeover

Put out the fire, before you investigate why it happened With Covid-19, a lot has changed around us. The concept of remote incident management is not new. Though, remote or hybrid teams are not new, teams were split across locations and some people were working from home. What has changed between then and now is