NoSQL for Media and Entertainment

Meet user demand while maintaining uptime for your media and entertainment applications

Digital media is a demanding environment, as these applications must be able to handle spiky traffic while simultaneously promising zero downtime. Whether it’s streaming the hottest show on television or providing a personalized customer experience in real time, you need a database that maintains 100% uptime, scales in real time to handle millions of users or more, and provides a data layer that delivers a single view of your customer. This is why companies choose Couchbase to underpin their mission-critical apps as they move away from monolithic solutions to microservice-based architectures, focusing on building engaging, responsive, and scalable applications.

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Comcast uses Couchbase under their Customer 360 solution to enable 61K users to deliver better support across its lines of business.
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Synamedia chose Couchbase over Cassandra and MongoDB™ for the Infinite Video Platform, a multiscreen IP video system, achieving unmatched scalability and consistent 500 microsecond response times at very large scale for users, scheduling, cloud DVR, and more.
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Sky, Europe’s largest media company and TV broadcaster, uses Couchbase to keep compelling content available during peak demand for over 22 million subscribers.
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To deliver new products fast to over 1.5 million subscribers, multinational telecommunications company BT chose Couchbase for its flexible data model and high performance.
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After experiencing network outages and replication issues with SQL Server, media giant and publisher of USA Today Gannett moved to Couchbase to support over 3,000 content creators and over 100 million unique visitors per month.
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Red Bull TV powers its global video platform with Couchbase, providing a seamless viewing experience for extreme sports and lifestyle entertainment for over a million over a million concurrent users.
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Why Couchbase NoSQL for digital media applications

Scale: Easier, more affordable scalability

Couchbase’s network-centric architecture with a high-performance replication backbone allows the database to be easily extended while maintaining performance at scale. Unlike relational databases like Oracle and MySQL, Couchbase supports ever-increasing workloads and spikes in throughput demands. Couchbase scales (in, out, up, or down) easily and without disruption to meet these demands. BT scales to meet product demands in real time for its 1.5M+ customers.

Blog: Scaling a Couchbase cluster for increasing and decreasing demand
Learn more about Couchbase’s Multi-Dimensional Scaling which gives you the option to separate, isolate, and scale individual database services

Performance: Better performance than any other database

While other NoSQL databases like MongoDB™ require a third-party cache – adding to both cost and complexity – Couchbase has a fully integrated read-through and write-through caching layer. Couchbase’s memory- and network-centric architecture consistently delivers the sub-millisecond responsiveness that today’s users expect. Frustrated with the scalability and performance limitations of Oracle, Europe’s leading entertainment provider Sky moved to Couchbase to cope with the growing demand and spiky traffic patterns of their streaming services.

Get the competitive NoSQL performance benchmark

See how Couchbase outperforms on enterprise workloads

Availability: Built-in high availability and disaster recovery

Couchbase provides five-nines availability with built-in high availability and flexible cross datacenter replication (XDCR) capabilities that supports disaster recovery and data locality requirements. With Couchbase, you have full control over the topology – unidirectional, bidirectional, or any configuration you need.

Blog: Couchbase high availability and disaster recovery: Setting up XDCR step by step

Documentation: Couchbase availability

Presentation: Next Level High Availability with Couchbase Server 5.5

Flexibility: Lower costs and faster time to market

Couchbase drives the flexibility and increased operational efficiency you need to keep up with the constantly updated and changing digital communication data. Couchbase’s powerful query language allows developers to easily query JSON data using familiar, SQL-like expressions. Tightly integrated full-text search, real-time analytics, and powerful eventing services make it easy to add new features to your application on the fly without moving data into and managing dozens of database technologies, finally putting an end to database sprawl.

Learn more about N1QL, our SQL for JSON query language

Take the N1QL tutorial

Mobile: Integrated mobile capabilities support omnichannel experiences

Couchbase is the only NoSQL database with built-in mobile support. Couchbase Mobile extends Couchbase Server to the edge with an embedded NoSQL database (Couchbase Lite) and a web gateway (Sync Gateway), enabling apps to work offline regardless of network availability, and powering use cases at the edge such as personalization, peer-to-peer messaging and sharing, and more.

Build a sample app with Couchbase Mobile

Tutorial: Getting started with data synchronization using Couchbase Mobile for offline-first apps

Analytics: Integrated analytics capabilities for real time data insights

The Couchbase Analytics service reduces the time to insight on operational data and simplifies operations for analytical data pipelines. Run ad hoc queries on data for real time results and apply real time analytics to monitor your applications.

Blog: Using Couchbase Analytics for complex and efficient queries in a Java application

Documentation: Deploying the Analytics Service

Digital media applications with Couchbase

Content entitlement

Manage entitlements for media content, video recordings, streaming services, and more. Subscription-based access controls, content encryption key access and management, and parental controls can all be managed with Couchbase. Cisco, DirecTV, and Sky all use Couchbase for managing content entitlements.

Location manager

Send targeted content to users based on the location of their devices. BT uses Couchbase to power their customers’ set-top boxes, allowing BT to send personalized program guides and content recommendations for streaming.

Program guide

Manage subscription-based program content based on user access levels. BT and Sky both rely on Couchbase to ensure subscribers are getting access to the correct content.

Personalization

Provide real-time, personalized updates and offers at every customer touchpoint, including cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Comcast leverages Couchbase as its source of truth within their call centers, giving call agents a single customer view and the ability to personalize customer engagement.

Upsell/Cross-sell

Deliver relevant, real-time offers and content to your customers through the use of beacon technology. Couchbase supports data management at the edge, enabling beacons to collect, store, and move data securely back to the datacenter.

Real-time viewer tracking

Collect real-time data from the streaming devices and applications to power operational analytics, usage tracking, and restartability.

Mobile messaging

Store user profiles and messages with Couchbase, and scale to meet demand as user activity increases. Viber relies on Couchbase as their system of record when it comes to their mobile messaging application.

User profile

Deliver fast and seamless login, authentication, and profile management including user preferences. As the number of users, complexity of user profile data, and user experience expectations accelerate, Couchbase handles the workload and scales to meet those demands.

Mainframe offload

By caching frequently used data, response times are improved and costs are substantially lowered through reduced workloads. If your app runs on a relational database like Oracle which requires costly hardware in order to scale, or a mainframe like Db2 which charges you by the MIP, a scale-out cache that runs on low-cost servers is more cost-effective.