Tracking Millions of Heartbeats on ZEE’s Streaming Platform

ZEE, India's largest media and entertainment business, optimized its ZEE5 OTT streaming platform by migrating to ScyllaDB, resulting in significant cost savings and improved system performance. With ~150 million monthly active users, ZEE5 handles over 100 billion daily heartbeats that track user activity to enhance playback experiences and recommendations. Originally using a complex web of databases, the team sought a cost-effective and scalable solution that supported cloud neutrality and multi-tenancy. The transition to ScyllaDB involved redesigning their system architecture, including a new stream processing pipeline and API layer, leading to a 5X cost reduction and single-digit millisecond latency. The move allowed ZEE5 to efficiently manage metadata and viewership data, handle high throughput with microsecond latencies, and support massive data volumes, paving the way for enhanced scalability and flexibility. Lessons from this initiative highlighted the importance of data modeling, choosing appropriate quorum settings, and optimizing partition and clustering keys to achieve low latency and efficient data processing.