SoftwareOne develops the Operación Triunfo 2023 application on AWS

Gestmusic, a television production company that has revolutionized entertainment programs

Gestmusic is a television production company based in Barcelona (Spain) specialised in the production of entertainment programs. The company was founded in 1985 and its first television production took place in January 1987. Since then, they have produced some of the most popular programs on Spanish television, such as Operación Triunfo, Tu cara me suena and ¡Mira quien baila!

Operación Triunfo is a show created by Gestmusic Endemol in 2001 that has had several editions on different channels, including Spanish public and private television, and this 12th edition has been broadcast on Amazon Prime Video. This programme, which mixes a game show and reality, has transformed musical entertainment programs by captivating the audience worldwide.

The challenge was to make it easier for viewers to vote at each live broadcast, as well as interacting with the contestants

SoftwareOne has faced the challenge of developing a web and mobile platform that would allow millions of viewers to carry out the entire voting process, interact with the contestants and access their social networks, in addition to viewing exclusive videos and content of the Operación Triunfo 2023 contest, which has been streamed on the Amazon Prime Video platform, for all of Spain and South America.

The mobile application designed has been integrated into a management web application that has made it possible for viewers to see the result of the votes, track the progression of contestants, and manage the allowed voting periods, as well as all messages and advertising throughout the contest.

The following requirements had to be considered to carry out the project:

• Highly scalable Cloud architecture that will support high peaks of interactions
• Web application integrated with Mobile App
• Real-time response
• Security against attacks and fraudulent voting attempts
• Design of an intuitive and visually attractive Mobile App for users

SoftwareOne developed the application desired by Gestmusic on AWS

In order to meet the challenges, SoftwareOne focused on two main functionalities:

• Votes - It was critical that the solution was reliable and could handle huge volumes of traffic; enduring large peaks of more than 100,000 votes per second, or more than 7 million during the galas.
• Content Hub - Making it easier for all users to interact with the different social networks and multimedia content of all the contestants.

For the technical development of the solution, SoftwareOne opted for the following services and tools:

• AWS AppSync - A managed service that makes it easy to create GraphQL and Pub/Sub APIs to securely connect to dynamic content and data sources.
• AWS Amplify - Allows clients to easily and quickly build full-stack applications on AWS and help with bi-directional data synchronisation.
• IONIC - Provides a persistent cache on the device to improve the user experience while using the application. In addition, a custom cache has been implemented in AWS AppSync to enable voting, reading social media updates, handling transient network outages, and synchronising data. With this implementation, scalable performance was achieved while ensuring online control of the application on the backend.

In defining the architecture, SoftwareOne used different Amazon Web Services components, which have been critical for the proper functioning of the application.

• Amazon Cognito Identity Pool - Authentication system that allows you to access the platform with your social media credentials.
• Amazon Cloudfront - Gives access to static content such as contestant images, logos, icons, and more.
• Amazon DynamoDB - Stores information from social media feeds and polls to generate configurable content.
• Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate - Handles requests to the platform that require a response with generated content, such as contestant information, OT social media feeds, and open voting.
• Amazon MemoryDB for Redis - Controls online Favorite and Save voting requests where unique votes are guaranteed by device and social media users.
• Amazon Pinpoint - Sends push notifications to the end user.

Amazon Web Services, as the chosen Cloud platform, has provided state-of-the-art computing, database, network and security components with maximum guarantees, which have made this challenge possible.