Case study

How Warner Bros. Discovery puts viewer experience first with Mux

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is a leading global media and entertainment company that creates and delivers premium television, film, and streaming services to audiences worldwide. With nearly 100 million subscribers across platforms such as Max, Discovery+, and Eurosport, WBD is committed to providing each viewer with an unparalleled, high-quality streaming experience.

Exceeding viewer’s expectations

“Although there are many competing streaming services in the market, at Warner Bros. Discovery, we recognize that our biggest challenge is meeting and exceeding our viewers' expectations,” says Mark Ramberg, Vice President of Video Platform Product Management. “Customers want a high-quality experience,” Mark continues, “one without buffering or playback failures and one that supports high-fidelity content.”

Mark and his team knew that the way to ensure that WBD subscribers were getting the best possible product was through monitoring Quality of Experience (QoE). This is why WBD turned to Mux as their trusted partner to provide key QoE metrics and actionable insights.

“Our philosophical approach to improving QoE is to address issues before they become viewer-impacting,” says Mark. “To achieve that, we must look at the sequence of events that lead to viewer impacting issues and be able to observe and assess leading indicators that may lead to a future viewer impacting issue.”

WBD has developed robust alerting systems to detect when QoE metrics are outside accepted ranges and take action accordingly. For example, if metrics such as rebuffering or errors from CDN are detected, playback can switch away from that CDN to another seamlessly. Or if they are seeing a downtrend of health metrics in the server-side video workflow, they can take action before the viewer even sees an issue.

“The data we get from Mux,” Mark says, “may be used for a variety of use cases, including incident detection and alerting, real-time monitoring, trending reports, session debugging, forensics, and preemptive mitigations”

Quality with innovation

This pursuit of providing viewers with an excellent experience with the highest quality content is exemplified with the release of Max. WBD’s goal with Max is to provide a streaming service that has more content than before for the entire household and is easier to navigate — on a global infrastructure that serves experiences today and in the future. As seen with the launch of Max on Apple Vision Pro, WBD strives to provide that quality viewing experience for every viewer, no matter how they’re consuming content.

For Mark and his teams, it means ensuring they’re building a more scalable and stable platform. “To achieve our goals with Max,” Mark says, “we need to have visibility into QoE metrics to ensure the streaming is delivering a world-class experience that would delight our viewers.”

“Mux natively provides data and views of each of our key QoE metrics,” he continues. “We can filter based on many dimensions, such as by device, by CDN, etc. which helps us to quickly identify and mitigate issues ensuring that our viewers could have a flawless playback experience.”

Working with Mux on QoE and analytics and partners like AWS on core infrastructure meant that WBD was confident in achieving stability and scale with their platforms.

A piece of a larger system

Teams from across the company leverage the data provided by Mux, such as WBD engineers who rely on Mux metrics to debug issues. Monitoring data in real-time is critical for WBD’s operation center, especially during premier live and on-demand events. Product managers review metrics to ensure market competitiveness. And WBD management uses QoE reports to understand the viewer’s experience.

“We view QoE data as one input into a larger data set. QoE metrics are then correlated with other data inputs in a sessionized manner so we can get a more comprehensive understanding of our entire system and how the various components contribute to the viewers' experience,” explains Mark.

Mux’s approach to highly interoperable data made it easy for WBD to integrate QoE metrics into their tech stack. Using the Mux SDK, they’re able to provide client-side metrics related to the viewing experience. With Mux’s API, they can integrate their data feeds into more holistic data analysis solutions.

“Mux has enabled WBD to observe the quality of our viewers' streaming experiences,” Mark says. “Being able to filter data across a variety of dimensions helps us pinpoint issues in content and technical systems to ensure that our viewers are enjoying the highest quality experience possible.”