Rapid growth needs a partner that knows how to scale.
Discovery+ was a rapidly growing online video-on-demand service operated by Discovery, Inc, before their explosive growth throughout the EMEA region and eventual acquisition by AT&T and merging with Warner Media.
Having already amassed a few million subscribers across the United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in a few months their meteoric rise is indisputable. With new exciting additions to their bouquet and the expected tripling of subscribers, they needed to rapidly expand their engineering capacity and skills.
From early in Discovery+ platforms’ Journey, Sigma Digital was a critical partner, building highly capable agile teams across the platform, from web and native mobile development, to devOps and QA.
One of the best agencies I’ve worked with…
– Andrew Winnicki Head of Development Discovery+ Europe
From suppliers, to partners, to custodians of the code base
Our globally available Sigma Digital team members provide a time zone agnostic network able to start, grow and respond quickly. With several highly flexible and managed teams, we were able to first solve the capacity concerns, build domain knowledge, and start sharing expertise, all the while, supporting their engineering departments journey of growth and continuous improvement.
Sigma helped to establish sound software development practices quickly, such as, CI/CD infrastructure, an extensive automated and manual QA practice, and overall improved development operations from TDD to nightly builds and improved observability.
Working with the Sigma Digital team has been extremely positive. Their ability to source technical talent within a very short time frame helped us create new features for our product, fast, improving the customer experience of millions of users . Their team is deeply embedded …and closely collaborates with us on every single project we throw at them.
– Luca Sales Discovery Channel CTO
The Results
High Velocity Releases
Establishing the infrastructure, process and culture around nightly builds and high frequency releases.
Fast Scaling Team
Scaling capacity and expertise in the right areas at the right time, with some 25+ team members across web, android, iOS, QA and DevOps.
QA & Test Automation
Established new QA processes and teams, as well as extensive automation across mobile, web and smart devices to ensure smooth rollout to millions of users.
TDD & Technical Debt
Bringing our years of experience in solving hard problems and implementing best practices, we ran multiple initiatives to improve test coverage, and reduce technical debt, establishing ongoing cultural change in their engineering approach.
1.3 Billion Minutes of Seamless Streaming
By working to anticipate and avoid interruptions during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, we helped Discovery+ win the ‘Best New Platform’ award of SportsPro Media’s OTT Awards 2021.
I would have no hesitation recommending them to my network or my future self.
– Alister Cooper Platform Development Manager (Android)