HBO is the oldest and longest operating pay television service in the United States. With seven 24-hour networks, two streaming services and almost 150 million subscribers worldwide, it is one of the biggest and most popular premium cable and satellite television networks in the world.

CHALLENGE
With its traditional cable content offerings, HBO did not have access to detailed data from their cable providers, making it impossible for them to perform in-depth analytics on the performance of their media.

Following the creation of its subscription platforms, HBO Go and HBO Now, HBO received unprecedented amounts of data on its users. For the first time, HBO’s analysts had in-depth data on user behavior and watching patterns and could judge how their content was performing. However, these internet-scale datasets added a whole new level of granularity to their analytic processes, which exceeded the bandwidth of their traditional analytics systems. In addition, HBO’s analysts did not know how to handle the new data with the analytic processes they had in place.

HBO needed a system that was capable of handling huge internet-scale datasets, extreme elasticity requirements, and rapid innovation and product development in order to compete with established streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu.

SOLUTION
Faced with the deluge of new customer data from their HBO Go and HBO Now subscriber platforms, HBO turned to Caserta for a strategy that would evolve their data engineering program and support their business transformation from liner cable TV to a digital video streaming powerhouse.

Following a strategic assessment of their data landscape, Caserta came up with an architecture and design that identified opportunities for the improvement and innovation of HBO’s data and analytics program. Caserta provided HBO with an in-depth roadmap for their data reference architecture and analytics practices transformation, which included a plan for loading all of their subscriber data onto a new, cloud-based platform that would allow for detailed analyses of user behavior and watching patterns.

OUTCOME
HBO leveraged our strategic assessment and implementation plan to jumpstart their data architecture and establish analytics processes for their new lines of business. Our strategy has enabled them to analyze and understand in-depth subscriber insights in order to deliver content informed by analytics and better tailored to its viewers.