While associated with its long run on UK commercial channel ITV, X Factor is an international format, and as such has become a major draw for Sky Italia.
A key element of the programme is the audience vote and over the last 12 years, Sky has outsourced this to a third party, who provided a robust, well-tested platform.
In 2021, the team behind it began to explore the idea of taking the voting platform in-house to improve performance, lower costs, and re-architect it for use cases beyond X-Factor itself.
“We wanted to have a more generic platform, focused enough for X-Factor but extensible enough to handle other use cases,” explained Nicola Cremaschini, Principal Technical Architect of Digital Properties, Sky Italia. “In addition, in 2022, the TV show introduced temporary rankings on stage with the audience in near-real time. We had a very short time to get our platform ready to support X-Factor live events.”
Sky Italia called on Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed services and in the six months of the start of the 2022 season a new system was deployed, handling millions of votes per session while adhering to competition rules and providing near-real time ranking. At the same time, AWS was able to reduce costs by a staggering 84% when compared to the legacy platform.
Each season Sky Italia delivers seven live X-Factor shows, one per week. Each includes three voting sessions. Votes start when the host from the live stage opens the session, and viewers from home can vote for their favourite performers before they even sing. Viewers can vote up to 10 times during the live show. The voting platform has to identify which votes are coming from each device.
Cremaschini said, “For the first live show, we had to be sure that the platform wouldn’t crash under the votes of real traffic. In July, we performed a huge amount of vote tests and did even better than our goal. We reached 60 million votes in about 10 minutes, which averaged 75,000 votes per second.”
The new voting solution also needed to support three existing channels— the X-Factor websites, mobile apps (Android and iOs), and the Sky Decoder and Sky Glass streaming TV. Voters needed to be able to use the authentication service leveraged on Amazon Cognito for support in social logins and via the Sky Ad login. It was also essential that the voting platform kept the interface the same as it was when it was designed 12 years ago, as the API was essentially fixed due to the massive task that would have been required to change set-top boxes across the country.
The new AWS-powered voting platform delivered 18 polls across all live sessions facilitating 20 millio votes overall across the seven live sessions, and handling 5.7M total votes over the final live session. The platform realized a performance of 400K votes/minute at peak. Additionally, analyzing the data captured by the voting platform provided insights that helped the show adjust and build on its success, such as 47-50% of votes come from decoder, 47-50%from the mobile app, and less than 3% from the website.
