Analytics gets the vote for general election

The 2015 UK General Election featured a series of UK and country-specific live televised leaders debates. The Scottish leaders debate attracted a lot of interest given the high profile nature of the Scottish referendum debate the previous year. The 2014 referendum debate generated 450,000 digital stream start requests, with 340,000 requests coming within the first minute of broadcast.  This formed the backdrop against which STV had to prepare its digital media platforms for the 2015 Scottish Leaders debate. 

 

“While the Scottish referendum debates of 2014 had provided valuable insights about our online platforms, the Scottish Leaders debate presented a new set of challenges. A key issue was the ability to manage huge spikes in traffic over a matter of seconds and minutes as people logged in and registered to view the debates. The other issue was the continued uncertainty over the dates and frequency of the debates. That made planning for the debates incredibly difficult as it effectively narrowed the window that we had for assessing the performance capabilities of our digital platforms to a matter of weeks. SOASTA were the only company that put forward a viable proposition that delivered a robust and scalable performance-testing platform at an affordable price point.  Critically, SOASTA delivered a level of support and value-added services that enabled us to prepare and undertake a range of performance tests rapidly and with a high level of confidence in the outcome,” said John Catnach, Service Delivery Manager, STV.

“Live debates have a tendency of throwing up controversial comments that are picked up on social media. It can result in a corresponding spike on our digital platforms as viewers log on via their smartphone or tablets to view what has happened. We had a matter of weeks, if that, to complete complex tests to ensure that our online digital player and platforms could deal with these spikes, both at the beginning of the debates and at any point in between. We ran two tests within days of each other that consisted of 10,000 concurrent users. This highlighted a few issues that were quickly addressed and we moved on to run a 100,000 concurrent user exercise that validated the login, registration and live stream functionality.  The 100,000 user test also included driving traffic to the dedicated election website.  SOASTA were able to create and map various user journey scripts that helped us gain valuable insights,” added Catnach.

 

“Overall, the few weeks in April demonstrated the robustness and flexibility of SOASTA’s platform and its ability to adapt to a highly fluid environment. Standardising on the SOASTA platform was an inevitable conclusion. Indeed, the decision has allowed us to create a benchmark against which STV can measure and manage its growth as it continues along the path to become a leading digital player as well as driving our online revenue.  We utilised the SOASTA platform to performance test the latest version of STV Player that we launched in May,” concluded John Catnach, Service Delivery Manager, STV.

 

“When we were appointed by STV to support their preparations for the Scottish Leaders debate and General Election campaign, the only certainty was the date of the election itself.  It is a testament to the professionalism and expertise of our technical teams and our cloud-based technology that ensured we met STV’s pressing deadline.  Harald Wilson (former Labour Prime Minister) famously once said that a week is a long time in politics.  When it comes to performance and load testing, our work with STV speaks volumes as to what can be accomplished in such a short period of time,” said Chris Addis, General Manager & VP EMEA, SOASTA.