Business Situation

Television Broadcasts Limited, commonly known as TVB, is Hong Kong’s leading free-to-air television station. First established in November 1967, TVB transmits over 17,000 hours of programming every year on its Chinese Jade channel and English Pearl channel free of charge to 2.31 million homes in Hong Kong. It is one of the largest producers of Chinese language programming in the world and its programs are distributed to over 300 million households in more than 40 countries.

Thanks to the scalability and the pay-per-usage charging model of Windows Azure, two-way interaction with millions of TV viewers becomes possible at affordable cost … This offers us a new operation and business model for increasing viewers’ loyalty and generating additional revenues for the company. S K Cheong, General Manager (Broadcasting), Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB)

In the old days, TV engaged with its audience unilaterally through broadcasting content to the mass audience. In recent years social media and networking have increased their popularity. The trends of the broadcasting industry will be focusing more on two-way, real-time interaction and social engagement with audiences. However, most TV interactivity has been centered around the TV remote control.

“To innovate beyond the numbers or color buttons of a remote control, we think mobile devices are an ideal platform to interact with our TV viewers. Not only are mobile devices handy everywhere, they can cater for both simple text and complicated multimedia content. However, building a server infrastructure to handle the spike of workload during a TV show, like handling voting on the scale of millions, is cost prohibitive.”, says S.K. Cheong, General Manager (Broadcasting), Television Broadcasts Limited. “When we take into consideration the upfront investment in hardware, software and network infrastructure to set up a server farm to handle millions of votes within only the last few minutes of a TV show, and which would lie unused the rest of the time, this two-way interactive TV project would simply be impossible."

“Another challenge we face is to collect feedbacks from multiple locations, as we have live broadcast programs in more than one country. Take the Miss Hong Kong Beauty Pageant 2011 for instance: we have live broadcasts in 13 countries simultaneously including Hong Kong, China and Australia. We need a platform that can reach out to audiences in different countries and invite their instant feedbacks.”, says Cheong.

Solution

As TVB became aware of the mass adoption of smartphones in Hong Kong and Asia, and the power of cloud computing, they came to believe a user-friendly smartphone app (later named ‘TVB fun’) backed by a Windows Azure (Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure) would be a good end-to-end solution to win penetration and popularity in the market, thus realizing the vision of next-generation interactive TV.

"TVB fun was first introduced to the market in early August 2011. Our target was to develop a user-friendly mobile app which can be launched in time for Miss Hong Kong Beauty Pageant 2011. Through TVB fun, our viewers can easily vote for their preferred candidates for ‘The Favourite Miss Hong Kong Beauty’. The voting result can be published within the program in real time. In this way, we could effectively increase the interaction with the audience and also the overall fun of the program." says Cheong.

This is the first and only such audience interaction in the industry, by integrating end-to-end solutions ranging from phone app technology to cloud computing, paving the way for a new level of interactive TV engagement in the broadcasting industry.

S K Cheong, General Manager (Broadcasting), Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB)

Benefits

Pay by usage to reduce upfront investment; Using Windows Azure, the pay-per-usage model allows TVB to pay for computing resources just for the duration of the show, saving the upfront investment cost of tens of millions of dollars. “During the Miss Hong Kong event we can deploy more web instances to handle the spike traffic simply through online configuration,” says Cheong. “After the event we can simply shut down or even remove the deployment to save costs.”

Massive scalability to handle traffic spikes; Achieving linear scalability has long been the holy grail of software engineering. Microsoft’s China Cloud Innovation Center (CCIC) took the lead in architecting the Azure application design. “Windows Azure achieves massive scalability through scaling out. In the vote-counting implementation used for TVB fun, using one core of Azure, the system can tally 100 votes per second. With 40 cores, the system can tally 4,000 votes per second or 2.4 million votes in 10 minutes. That is equivalent to a third of the Hong Kong population voting at the same time.” says Edwin Cheung, Senior Program Manager, CCIC.

Ease of development and fast time-to-market; “Azure programming only requires regular .NET and SQL skill sets. The whole Azure vote system took only six weeks from design, to implementation, to testing, and all the way to production.”, says Congyu Li, Software Development Engineer from Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business China, R&D team and lead developer of the voting service. “Azure also offers built-in capabilities like distributed cache and Content Delivery Network (CDN) for it to scale with excellent performance out of the box. We can focus on building the application logic instead of the infrastructure and platform capabilities.”

Jason Chiu, CEO, Cherrypicks

Excellent performance to deliver an engaging experience; "If TVB fun users connect through WiFi, the response time is instantaneous. Even with 3 or 3.5G, the delay on the mobile client side is only between 3-6 seconds. This excellent user experience is made possible by the excellent performance of Azure at the backend. Each incoming vote only takes milliseconds to process. The is the type of user experience advertisers demand." says Jason Chiu, CEO of Cherrypicks, the application platform technology partner for TVB Fun and a leading mobile marketing company in the Asia-Pacific region. "We have built many advertising elements into the TVB fun platform. Thanks to Windows Azure, we can deliver an engaging experience to make TVB fun a compelling advertising channel."

TVB’s short-term target is to reach 500,000 viewers, going up to one million by the end of 2011. “We have other interesting ideas in the pipeline,” says Cheong. “For example, TV viewers can vote for their preference for different TV drama endings. In addition, on top of plain text, we can also extend our interaction media to photo or even video through TVB fun. TVB fun now allows us to ‘follow’ the viewer and get to know their behaviors,” says Cheong. “We see that TVB fun will provide a new additional platform to TVB for advertisers.”

Windows Azure

Windows Azure™ is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment. It provides developers with on-demand computing and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® datacenters. Windows Azure is a flexible platform that supports multiple languages and integrates with existing on-premises environments. In addition, it supports popular standards, protocols and languages including SOAP, REST, XML, Java, PHP and Ruby.

For more information about Windows Azure, go to: www.microsoft.com/windowsazure

For More Information

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