Powering internal innovation

The Recipe for Succeeding

How did Hulu succeed at understanding what the preferences, needs and pain points of people around the world are, when they watch their movies, series, live cable and video‑on‑demand services? The answer is by enabling a real‑time, computer-assisted data analysis system supporting critical decision making processes across the company.

The body

Before being acquired, mainly by Disney, Hulu travelled a long road before evolving into a data-driven company. They had a platform ingesting video streaming data from their watchers. Data such as, tracking user interactions with the product, users who have received the ‘are you still watching?’ prompt (and for how long), as well as items such as system errors. All of this data fed a variety of internal automated systems and Business Intelligence (BI) tools designed to help stakeholders from different departments make decisions.

Having too many sources of truth made it difficult for the company to build a coherent real time narrative of events, slowing down their ability to react quickly; either directly (e.g. by creating a marketing campaign for a specific audience), automatically (e.g. by shutting down user sessions that didn’t answer the aforementioned prompt on time), or just simply to learn from its customers in order to better adapt to an ever changing business environment.

In order for Hulu to connect its body (e.g. the internal mechanisms that ingest and process ‘sensorial’ data coming from user interactions) with its brain (human and automated decision making), they promoted an innovative transformation within the company.

Hulu utilized Moove It’s software development services to succeed in its goal of turning itself into a data‑driven company.

The Spinal Cord

The first step toward building a centralized single source of truth was to connect the data feed and processed information coming from many sources into a usable data portal that visualized valuable data for upper management.

A team of Moove It backend engineers integrated with the internal Hulu team to develop a custom ETL process that extracts (E) the data from the sources, transforms (T) it in a way that could be queried and analyzed, and loads (L) it into the final database that sources the data portal.

The Nerves

Internal stakeholders from different departments consuming various data analytics needed to be notified about events related to areas of the company they are accountable for.

Our devs worked closely with the Hulu team to design and develop a notification mechanism that keeps decision makers in the loop via email, Slack messages, Jira as well as via the data portal. It was designed for extensibility; to be utilized across the company, across many platforms, web and mobile clients.

The Brain

Imagine an ultra-fast stream of bits of data coming from different sources. Each bit contains information about an event that has just happened in the system. For example, information that a user has stopped the movie soon after it started, that someone received a 500 error, or that a TV show has been played 45 million times plus one.

In order to make sense out of gigabytes of this user-centric time stamped sensorial data, Moove It partnered with Hulu to build an internal system that groups semantically-related information into indicators that are valuable to stakeholders in different company departments. For example Marketing might be interested in play counters broken down by audience type. These indicators help departments and people within the organization react to change, analyze trends, make long term decisions, and much more.

Managers are Humans

Hulu’s UX and UI designers understand that design and aesthetics are an integral part of generating and communicating insights across an organization. Difficult to use systems, where data is hard to find in a timely fashion do not get utilized so it is critical to make the design align with the goal of providing timely data at the right time.

Moove It’s frontend engineers who built the data portal are adept at creating engaging UX and UI artifacts, like user flow diagrams, service blueprints and other carefully crafted design interactions.

Why Moove It?

These are just a few examples of the benefits that we provide day in and day out to our customers.

Clients like Hulu, Disney Streaming Services, and OneSignal praise us for our:

Consultative approach
Seamless integration into their internal teams and processes
Ability to understand and relate to their problems
Diverse talent pool and specialized teams
Capacity to reconcile existing systems with current industry technology standards
Strong and consistent commitment to quality

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