Cloud migration that prepared a VOD platform for 60M+ monthly views
Company
Country
Poland
Industry
Media
System
E-commerce, VOD platform
Executive summary
01
Client
TVN Warner Bros. Discovery, one of Poland's largest and most influential media and entertainment conglomerates.
02
The core challenge
The e-commerce backend for their flagship VOD (Video on Demand) platform, Player.pl, was hosted on on-premise infrastructure. This setup lacked the scalability to handle massive, unpredictable traffic spikes during live events and show premieres, was costly to maintain, and hindered development agility, posing a significant risk to revenue and viewer satisfaction. The company was also planning to scale up its VOD operations and move from the AVOD (advertising-based video on demand) model to the SVOD (subscription video on demand) model, and the existing infrastructure wasn’t ready for this strategic change.
03
Solution delivered
Pretius executed a complex, strategic migration of the entire e-commerce system to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Pretius also implemented a full CI/CD pipeline to automate deployments and improve development velocity.
Key outcomes:
Massive scalability and performance: The new AWS infrastructure automatically scales to handle virtually any traffic load, ensuring flawless performance during peak viewing times.
Significant cost optimization:Rehosting to AWS, coupled with the "pay-as-you-go" cloud model and autoscaling capabilities, led to a substantial reduction in infrastructure and maintenance costs.
Enhanced reliability and high availability: The new cloud-native architecture provides superior resilience and uptime compared to the previous on-premise solution, protecting a critical revenue istream.
Client background
TVN Warner Bros. Discovery is a media powerhouse in Poland, part of a global entertainment leader. Their portfolio includes major television networks, digital news portals, and one of the country's most popular Video on Demand (VOD) streaming services.
This VOD platform is a cornerstone of their digital strategy, offering a vast library of on-demand content, exclusive premieres, and live event streaming to millions of viewers. The e-commerce backend—handling subscriptions, payments, and user access—is the mission-critical engine that powers this entire digital ecosystem.
The Business Challenge: The inherent risks of on-premise infrastructure
For a top-tier streaming service, performance during peak traffic is non-negotiable. The client's e-commerce backend, hosted on a traditional on-premise infrastructure, was becoming a significant strategic liability, unable to meet the demands of a modern media landscape.
Key outcomes:
Scalability problems: The on-premise servers had a fixed capacity. During major events—like the season finale of a hit show, a live sports match, or a major marketing campaign—viewer traffic would spike massively and unpredictably. This created a constant risk of the system becoming overloaded and crashing, leading to service outages, lost subscription revenue, and immense damage to brand reputation.
Prohibitive operational costs: To mitigate the risk of crashes, the on-premise infrastructure had to be significantly over-provisioned, meaning the company was maintaining the maximum server capacity 24/7, even during low-traffic periods like the middle of the night. The costs of hardware maintenance, power, and physical data center management were substantial.
A bottleneck to innovation: The old on-premise architecture hindered the planned move to the SVOD model.
Lack of resilience: The physical infrastructure was vulnerable to hardware failures and lacked the sophisticated, built-in redundancy and high-availability features inherent in modern cloud platforms.
TVN Warner Bros. Discovery recognized that a complete migration to a modern, cloud-native architecture was essential to ensure the stability, scalability, and future growth of their flagship digital product.
Technologies That Powered the Transformation
01
AWS
02
Amazon EC2
03
RabbitMQ
04
Varnish
05
NGINX
06
MySQL
The solution provided by Pretius:
TVN Warner Bros. Discovery chose Pretius as its expert partner to lead this complex and mission-critical cloud migration and application modernization project.
The goal was not just to "lift and shift" the existing system, but to fundamentally re-architect it for the cloud to unlock maximum benefits.
The comprehensive solution delivered by Pretius was a multi-faceted technical transformation:
Strategic migration to AWS: Pretius planned and executed the seamless migration of the entire e-commerce backend from the on-premise data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS), a leading cloud platform known for its scalability, security, and rich feature set.
Moving from MySQL to Amazon Aurora: During the second phase of the project, TVN’s MySQL databases were moved to Amazon’s MySQL-compatible solution, Aurora.
In-depth configuration: Pretius specialists configured the load balancers and auto-scaling groups to allow Player.pl to use as many of the cloud resources as necessary in a given moment – and not more.
Monitoring based on the ELK stack: Pretius implemented automatic backups and OS patching based on the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack to minimize the risk of human error and free up admins’ time.
This deep, collaborative effort between Pretius and the client's internal teams successfully transformed a rigid, legacy system into a dynamic, resilient, and highly scalable cloud-native platform.
Measured outcomes and business impact
The cloud migration project delivered profound, measurable benefits that directly addressed the client's core business hallenges.
Foundational technical and operational improvements
Achieved true elastic scalability: The new AWS infrastructure automatically scales resources up to handle massive traffic spikes in real-time and scales down during quiet periods. This has completely eliminated the risk of performance degradation or crashes during peak viewership.
Enhanced reliability and uptime: The cloud-native architecture, with its built-in redundancy and self-healing capabilities, provides significantly higher availability and resilience than the previous on-premise setup, ensuring a stable experience for viewers.
Strategic and commercial value
Significant cost optimization: By moving from a fixed-capacity, over-provisioned model to a pay-as-you-go cloud model, TVN Warner Bros. Discovery achieved substantial cost savings. They now only pay for the computing resources they actually use, reducing waste during off-peak hours.
Future-proofed digital platform: The modernized architecture provides a flexible and scalable foundation for the future growth of the VOD service, allowing for easy integration of new technologies and services as the media landscape continues to evolve.
M+
Monthly viewers after the migration
% cut
Of cloud costs
AWS certifications
In the Pretius team
Conclusion
This case study demonstrates the immense strategic value of modernizing mission-critical infrastructure. The partnership between Pretius and TVN Warner Bros. Discovery was more than a technical migration; it was a fundamental business transformation.
By moving from a restrictive on-premise environment to a flexible, scalable cloud-native architecture on AWS, Pretius enabled one of Poland's premier streaming services to eliminate performance risks, optimize costs, and unlock a new business model and level of development agility, securing its competitive position for the future.
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