AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

How The Scale Factory Overhauled ITV’s Video on Demand Ad Platform with SaaS on AWS

By Tomaž Perc, SaaS Business Lead – AWS
By Jon Topper – CTO/CEO – The Scale Factory

The Scale Factory

Cloud is the driving force of transformation across industries, and the media and entertainment (M&E) space is no exception.

M&E organizations are reinventing how they handle media workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS) throughout the entire content lifecycle. Companies like Kaltura, Grabyo, Amagi, Ateliere, and others have adapted their solutions to run on AWS and use AWS Marketplace to support go-to-market (GTM) motions.

The other clear trend with M&E companies is delivering solutions using the software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model. One such industry innovator is ITV, creator of Planet V which is a self-service platform for booking TV ad campaigns on ITVX, a network of streaming channels.

After two years in production, Planet V had to be rearchitect to improve customer experience and create a future-proof solution. ITV invited The Scale Factory, an AWS SaaS Competency Partner, to help the team architect, build, and secure infrastructure components supporting the platform.

Now, a year after the launch of the rearchitected Planet V, ITV has rolled out the solution to 50% of its customers, enabled multiple code releases daily, and can automatically test 97% of the codebase.

In this post, you will learn about the benefits ITV derived from rearchitecting its Planet V solution and some of the trends we see in SaaS transformations that are clearly present in ITVs story.

Trends in SaaS Transformation

Key elements of the ITV story relate to a broader set of trends we see in AWS SaaS Factory, an AWS program that helps organizations at any stage of the SaaS journey.

SaaS business and delivery models are emerging in many segments: In the past, there was a rough divide with software companies building software for the market and enterprises building just for their own internal use. We are seeing these lines getting blurred:

  • Enterprise companies are starting to productize their internal software, making it available as a SaaS offering (Carrier).
  • (Digital-native) Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies are looking to repackage their homegrown internal software and intellectual property into B2B SaaS offerings (GR8 Tech, Bento).
  • (Global) Systems integrators that have delivered project or build frameworks are productizing these into B2B SaaS offerings.

It’s common to all types of organizations that they have deep industry/vertical expertise.

SaaS delivery model as innovation driver of business models and decision support mechanism: Some of the data SaaS providers gather are metrics, and these can be roughly put in three buckets:

  • Business metrics used to manage the overall health of the business across different functions within the company.
  • Operational metrics needed to monitor the system/tenant performance, uptime, and resource usage.
  • Application usage metrics that help determine solution adoption, usage patterns, and more.

With the last two groups of metrics, you can start to understand the needs of customers better and explore different business models, such as offering parts of your solution as an API-as-a-service, build or integrate with market places, or create offerings for adjacent markets (such as a down-tier offerings).

Buy versus build: SaaS builders must decide if they will acquire non-differentiating capabilities. They need to focus on the core competencies and unique value proposition they plan to bring to market, or if they want to build everything from scratch. This can have different flavors:

  • Buying third-party ISV solutions to, for example, set up their analytics or metrics platform, or use billing solutions or identity providers.
  • Exchange cloud services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or more managed solutions like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and AWS Fargate.
  • Use AWS consulting partners to address skills gaps or add capacity to their product development team.

Use of tenets: A tenet is a principle or belief that helps teams reach alignment tenets on critical design questions. These can be a great set of guiding principles that reduce decision fatigue. Examples could be: 1) we are serverless first, 2) we buy what doesn’t represent our core competency, or 3) observability is built into every part of the solution.

ITV and Planet V

ITV launched in the UK in 1955 and today is a vertically integrated content producer, broadcaster, and streamer consisting of ITV Studios–one of the biggest global creators, producers, and distributors in the world–and Media & Entertainment, the home of the largest family of free-to-air commercial channels in the UK.

Planet V is a self-service platform for booking TV ad campaigns on ITVX, a network of streaming channels. It allows advertisers to plan and book campaigns according to where they’d like to be placed to reach ITVX viewers. It’s a one-stop shop for all broadcaster video on demand (VOD) advertising and provides maximum freedom of accessibility for the discovery, planning, and transacting of broadcaster VOD.

First launched in October 2020, Planet V is vitally important for ITV’s business. It’s a two-sided business, dealing with both viewers and advertisers, and ITV is transforming both of those digitally. ITV believes the UK broadcasting industry is at its most impactful when working together to build industry-wide solutions. Planet V was built with that in mind and in July 2023 welcomed Sky Media onto the platform for a trial period.

Rearchitecting Planet V at ITV

Planet V had been in production for over two years and was built on third-party tools, proving this was a viable business model. ITV recognized the need to focus on providing its advertisers with empowering and friendly tools to give them the best user experience possible. That meant building a new solution from the ground up using modern software delivery practices to enable experimentation and rapid iteration.

When ITV started building a development team, they needed guidance on how to get the solution up and running on AWS. The Scale Factory helped them architect, build, and secure the infrastructure components supporting the platform. They used a “build and train” approach, sharing knowledge so the customer’s team could acquire the skills needed to maintain and further develop the solution.

The Scale Factory has worked with ITV since 2011 on initiatives, including its first foray into adopting AWS cloud services. When ITV commissioned The Scale Factory to rearchitect Planet V, it was easy for them to provide immediate value as they have intimate knowledge of ITV’s cloud platform, business and IT processes, and application landscape.

This collaboration is a great example of how an AWS Partner with deep expertise in SaaS on AWS can accelerate bringing a SaaS solution to the market. ITV intimately understands video streaming and the needs of their advertising customers, allowing them to build the core of the application. The Scale Factory brought its understanding of how to build and secure a production SaaS platform, and how to remove friction from the development experience so ITV’s software teams can quickly iterate on their product.

“We seek to build deep relationships with key technical partners with complete openness, a strong focus on capability building, and shared engineering values. Not only were The Scale Factory actively open to this, they brought their own ideas and values in a way that helped us grow as a team.” ~ James Hewines, Director of Technology and Change at ITV

During this project, ITV exhibited visionary thinking. Rather than just building a SaaS offering for ITV’s internal use, The Scale Factory decided to build multi-tenancy into the solution from day one. Planet V became a platform ITV can offer to other ad-supported streaming platforms.

Before the beginning of the project, both parties jointly decided to use tenets in order to guide decision-making. The three key tenets were the following:

  • Build a serverless solution to reduce operational overhead and platform costs.
  • Buy existing solutions instead of building where possible.
  • Get to the market more quickly; and prioritize observability to make developer troubleshooting easier.

ITV mentioned that two distinct benefits of its partnership with The Scale Factory were technical expertise and transfer of knowledge. Together, they’ve built a fully automated CI/CD pipeline for application components, and a cloud environment that’s both versatile and rigorous in compliance, with auditability and security best-practices–an important consideration for a publicly traded enterprise.

The Scale Factory team joined ITVs engineering scrum teams, working side-by-side to ensure transfer of knowledge to ITV’s staff.

Benefits and Outcomes of the New Planet V Solution

Almost all of ITVs digital business is flowing through Planet V now, and it’s become a large and fast-growing revenue stream and critical service. Planet V dynamically inserts advertising into the streams of 37 million ITVX viewers, targeted on 20,000 different data points.

  • From 1,000 agencies on the platform, about 50% operate on rearchitected Planet V.
  • Overall, ITV is delighted with the platform and standout metrics include:
    • ITV releases to production around 20 times per week on average, enabled by a large suite of automated tests; they currently have 97% test coverage across our codebase.
    • Since going live in November 2022, the number of issues encountered are extremely low, with just two critical bugs in production and 14 issues in total referred to the engineering team for support and investigation.
  • Their code maintainability tool ranks the codebase as A, and their security score is above 80%. The team focuses on continuous improvement as a means to make progress.

An interesting side-benefit of building Planet V has been the way ITV’s relationship with agency partners has developed: they have taken a collaborative approach to product design, working alongside actual agency users, finding this to be a great way to build deep understanding and trust. This approach shows ITV gaining a strong source of strategic insight, as the company develops proven ways of working and reusable tech assets to power up other initiatives.

About AWS SaaS Factory

AWS SaaS Factory helps organizations at any stage of the SaaS journey. Whether looking to build new products, migrate existing applications, or optimize SaaS solutions on AWS, we can help. Visit the AWS SaaS Factory Insights Hub to discover more technical and business content and best practices. SaaS builders are encouraged to reach out to their account representative to inquire about engagement models and to work with the AWS SaaS Factory team.

The Scale Factory – AWS Partner Spotlight

The Scale Factory is a UK-based consulting partner, focused exclusively on SaaS, and on AWS. They’ve worked with SaaS companies across all industry verticals since 2009, and have a team of experienced AWS solutions architects ready to get hands-on with your SaaS challenges.

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