Media and Entertainment
With the emergence of multiple delivery channels and revenue models, traditional media and entertainment companies are looking at new approaches to engage their customers through rich, compelling and interactive experiences. Delivering high performance and an optimal user experience presents a challenge because of potential latency issues with rich media and online streaming applications. Performance and reliability is must for sites that focus on gaming, electronic publishing, broadcast, web portals, events and social media.
Activision — With just a month to go before the 2007 holiday season, Activision used CloudTest to ensure their website would be ready to launch the newest edition of its biggest selling game, “Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.” Activision continues to use CloudTest help to optimize the performance of their site. Read more
Boylesports — Based in Ireland, the gaming site BoyleSports was gearing up for a busy weekend. The NFL Super Bowl and high-profile Premier League matches were occurring on the same day and betting would be at peak levels. CloudTest allowed BoyleSports to test well beyond their anticipated peak user levels; enabling the site to perform perfectly on the big day.
Churchill Downs — The Kentucky Derby may only last a couple of minutes but the stress on the Kentucky Derby website lasts for hours around race time. How did they prepare for the onslaught of horce racing fans? Read more
Media General, Inc. — This major media outlet, which runs a number of newspapers, television stations and web sites primarily in the Southeast, launched a new CMS used by all their web properties. In the deadline driven news world, Media General needed to make sure the platform performed well at peak times as to not impact their readers.
Netflix, Inc. — Streaming video is coming to more devices than ever before, from smart phones to gaming systems. SOASTA is helping address not only the bandwidth challenge, but the complexities of authenticating users without adversely affecting the user experience.
Newsday — needed to test up to 3000 VUs for their online customer subscription application and did not have the pre-requisite licenses from their current vendor. They did several rounds of testing to improve the performance of the application, resulting in the confidence they could scale to meet expected demand.
Newsweek — One of the Newsweek value-added services are quizzes and polls about topics ranging from President Obama to lifestyle. Such interactive applications need to perform in order to engage the user. CloudTest has also been used to test auto-scaling of the applications on the site.
Radio network While we can’t use their name, this is a particularly interesting customer because of the Apple iPad. Mobile apps, particularly those that offer a rich experience, are driving more users to websites than ever before. This network released one of the first, and most popular, iPad apps and used CloudTest to ensure they could scale.
SNL Financial — SNL is the premier provider of breaking news, financial data and expert analysis on the business sectors critical to the global economy. The company was in the midst of relaunching their platform and came to SOASTA to perform baseline testing on both versions to make sure V 2.0 performed as well as its predecessor.
St. Petersburg Times — When a high traffic web site such as Yahoo! links to a story on their site, the huge spike in traffic could potentially bring the site down. St. Petersburg Times uses CloudTest to make sure they can hold up under the stress.
The Street — Launching a new site can be a stressful time, particularly when you have high expectations for traffic. For TheStreet.com, knowing the precise level at which they would encounter slowed response times, and why, along with identifying appropriate caching schemes helped them launch the site with confidence.
theRoot.com — A site run The Washington Post, theRoot team rolled out a new application that required hitting their main page, verifying load times for javascript and testing registration and log in flows.
THQ Inc. — a leading worldwide developer and publisher of interactive entertainment software, utilized SOASTA’s CloudTest solution for load testing the launch of a UFC Community website to quickly identify bottlenecks and ensure confidence with performance under high capacity traffic. THQ appreciated the flexibility and monitoring capabilities to identify issues and ensure performance of the web property.
VentureBeat — Over the course of testing you learn what actions will lead to better performance, assuming you have a service like CloudTest. For VentureBeat, hardware and caching changes helped them achieve their goal of handling the maximum amount of traffic that their incoming bandwidth could support.
Washington Post — The team initially engaged with us for the Newsweek testing. Impressed with the results and the responsiveness provided by SOASTA, they began using CloudTest for their own projects, eventually investing in a block of hours to be used throughout the company. They continue to use the pooled hours for testing throughout the organization.
