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Industry: Media & Entertainment
The Challenge
Radio Becomes Subscription-based, and More Popular than Ever.
Radio. From FDR’s fireside chats and Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, to Casey Kasem and A Prairie Home Companion, to Howard Stern and Ryan Seacrest, radio has informed and entertained us for generations.
From the first AM station in 1920, to the higher fidelity sound of FM radio in the late 1930s, to the introduction of satellite radio in 2001, radio evolved with the times. Today, 90% of Americans over the age of 12 said that they listened to the radio weekly, making US broadcast radio an estimated $24 Billion market.
The introduction of mobile devices and streaming services caused media consumption to explode with 60% of Americans over the age of 12 tuning into both weekly. Globally, this $21 Billion market is expected to grow to nearly $77 Billion by 2027.
Shifting from a Broadcast to an Online Distribution Model.
Technology isn’t just changing what device we use for media, it’s changing the way we want to listen. Streaming services, with 60 million US subscribers and growing by 1 million subscribers per month, enable listeners to curate their playlists. While 90% of Americans still say they listen to the radio, 41% say they listen to online radio through their phone while in the car. For SiriusXM, the world’s largest radio company with 35 million subscribers using in-car and mobile unit receivers, aligning with this trend was mission-critical.
Extending their programming from satellite broadcast to online and mobile platforms also gave SiriusXM an opportunity to extend its offerings from purely audio to include video and live video events as well. Using TIBCO Businessworks, a framework technology that utilizes plug-ins and results in a complex data architecture, the challenge went beyond migrating their programming. SiriusXM needed Software Engineers who could also create new services able to flex with listener demand.
The Solution
Problem Finders. Design Thinkers.
Initially, the SiriusXM team needed additional TIBCO developers and QA experts, but to get from where they were to where they were going required experienced software engineers who were not just experts at getting things done, but at anticipating the issues integrations inevitably cause and developing solutions that enabled efficient integration and scalability required for growth.
BairesDev used its proprietary skill-matching software StaffingHero™ to identify an initial team consisting of a scrum master, TIBCO developers, and QA engineers who excelled at automating procedures. The unifying trait of the team was a design thinking approach, essential for large-scale projects.
What started as an integration project quickly turned into a platform migration to enable scaling our services globally. Each member of the BairesDev team made an instant impact. They did the programming we asked for, and gave us the tools we didn’t know we needed to do the work better. This continues to be a complex project, and with this team, I know it will go smoothly.
Scott Greenstein,President and CCO, SiriusXM
The Outcome
Delivering on a Singular Goal:
To Deliver a Better User Experience.
Transitioning from a broadcast company to a provider of cloud-based streaming services required a dual-path approach – maintain and improve the legacy platforms while designing and implementing a new architecture, migrating all applications to the flexible and scalable AWS platform, and adding new features.
BairesDev engineers aided in the development of new video streaming capabilities and actively improved development processes for SiriusXM by codifying best practices, automating deployment, automating the testing in support of new deployments, and installing a user-centric approach to improve the overall experience.
The listener experience is at the center of everything we do at SiriusXM, and migrating to the AWS platform is the keystone of our transformation plan from a satellite radio company to a streaming media provider. It is a hugely complex project, but ultimately it will enable us to bring better services to market faster which is great for both our user base, and our shareholders.
Scott Greenstein,President and CCO, SiriusXM
Improved Listener Experiences
+ Scalability = Profits
The migration to AWS was a strategic move to give SiriusXM both short and long-term impacts. BairesDev helped improve the listener, and developer experience by delivering:
- Documentation, tools, and new processes
- Automated deployments – which shorten release time from 8 hours to just 1
- Automated testing
For SiriusXM Listeners
- Uninterrupted access to the music and podcasts they want, whenever and wherever they want it
- New features like video streaming
For SiriusXM
- 4.8* on the app store and 4.5* on Google Play
- 900K net subscriber increase
- A fully scalable infrastructure ready for expansion to the global market
