OSN Group, a Dubai-based multinational premium entertainment provider, offers a diverse selection of entertainment to subscribers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. They stream the latest Hollywood blockbusters, HBO and Paramount TV shows, as well as Arabic, Turkish, and Pinoy content.
Being a household name as a premium cable TV company in the Arabic world, OSN partnered with Supercharge to expand its service offering and build a futureproof streaming platform competing with the strongest international players.
As OSN operates in more than 20 countries with unique cultures and backgrounds, our goal was to build a robust platform that is able to adapt its service to local tastes and streaming habits.
To get ahead of big international streaming players, we wanted to show the most relevant content to local audiences in their own languages.
We also aimed to make the streaming experience seamless for users across many different devices, including Smart TVs, laptops, and mobile phones often used by multiple generations of viewers in a single household.
While the goals were ambitious, speed was a key factor in getting leverage in the intense competition for subscribers in the region.
The Supercharge team undertook an extraordinary challenge: design and build a robust, future-proof streaming platform from scratch and deliver it in just 7 months.
The digital bedrock of OSN’s streaming service is what we call the Customer Experience Builder (CXB). We designed this system to be a single interface where OSN’s editors can build up and manage the user experience and content presentation of all the OSN+ streaming devices, be it Smart TVs, mobiles or laptops.
CXB allows OSN to create a highly customized experience by flexibly targeting specific screens and content groups to certain countries, devices, or user groups.
By integrating a content recommendation engine into the system's core, the platform can now deliver personalized offerings to each user, matching the users’ tastes and preferences based on their watching history, location, and behavior on the platform.
Besides offering a personalized streaming experience, OSN needed to empower its marketing teams to experiment and optimize every stage of the subscriber journey, starting from the initial visit to OSN's website to the process of becoming an active subscriber and even re-engaging users who may have discontinued their subscription after completing their favorite TV series.
Therefore, the Customer Experience Builder also enables OSN's marketing team to customize the experience for potential users, tailoring the subscription process with appropriate messages and content offerings in relevant contexts. This tool enables content and marketing teams to execute campaigns and promotions that assist the platform in acquiring new subscribers, reactivating users, and maintaining their active engagement.
No solution is complete without a rock-solid technological foundation. The systems that power OSN’s functionalities are designed for high availability and snappy performance, which is a crucial user experience question in the case of a streaming provider that receives a sudden surge in traffic at every popular content release.
Given the limited bandwidth of internet services in the MENA region compared to other regions, optimizing performance across all platforms posed a significant challenge for our tech teams. However, we successfully tackled this challenge and achieved the desired results.
Snappiness is provided by careful API design, broad reliance on industry-leading content delivery networks, and by moving computations as close to the customers as possible to the edge of the internet. The systems build heavily upon public cloud infrastructure that allows automatic scaling of the services to keep hosting costs at bay.
As a result of our work together, we have built a platform with an enhanced experience that led to a growing subscriber base and successfully helped OSN reach its business ambition: becoming the leading streaming hub throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
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