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.

Customer success spotlight
Comcast uses Couchbase under their Customer 360 solution to enable 61K users to deliver better support across its lines of business.
Learn moreto deliver better support
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.
Learn moreresponse times
Sky, Europe’s largest media company and TV broadcaster, uses Couchbase to keep compelling content available during peak demand for over 22 million subscribers.
Learn moreTo deliver new products fast to over 1.5 million subscribers, multinational telecommunications company BT chose Couchbase for its flexible data model and high performance.
Learn moreAfter 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.
Learn more>100 million unique visitors per month
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Industry use cases & solutions
Content entitlement
Manage entitlements for media content, video recordings, streaming services, and more.
Location manager
Send users targeted content, like personalized program guides or streaming recommendations, based on their device locations.
Program guide
Manage subscription-based program content based on user access levels.
Personalization
Provide personalized real-time updates and offers, including cross-sells and upsells, at every customer touchpoint.
Upsell/Cross-sell
Deliver relevant real-time offers and content to your customers at the edge using beacon technology.
Customer 360
Capture omnichannel engagements to create a single view and provide real-time, personalized data, updates, and offers at every touchpoint.
Catalog & inventory management
Deliver catalog and inventory data at scale to keep up with changing content.
Field service
Give field technicians the ability to service customers in person, anywhere, at any time.
IoT data management
Leverage connected devices like set-top boxes to deliver content and personalized offers to users in real time.
Related resources
Whitepapers
Blogs & videos
- Couchbase and Sky identity: Gateway to the OTT streaming platform
- How Cvent is building a microservices deployment with Couchbase
- Scaling a Couchbase cluster for increasing and decreasing demand
- Couchbase high availability and disaster recovery: Setting up XDCR step by step
- Next level high availability with Couchbase Server 5.5
- Getting started with data synchronization using Couchbase Mobile for offline-first apps
- Using Couchbase Analytics for complex and efficient queries in a Java application
Documentation & tutorials
- See all digital media & entertainment customers
- How Comcast creates a single view of Customers with NoSQL
- Supporting 100B+ user sessions per year for cable companies around the world
- Learn more about Couchbase’s Multi-Dimensional Scaling
- See how Couchbase outperforms on enterprise workloads
- Couchbase availability
- Learn more about N1QL, our SQL for JSON query language
- Take the N1QL tutorial
- Build a sample app with Couchbase Mobile
- Deploying the Analytics service