Case Study: Ex Machina achieves 90% cost reduction and instant elastic scaling for real-time TV gaming with Amazon Web Services

Ex Machina - Customer Case Study

Ex Machina, an Amsterdam-based games company founded in 2001, pioneered second‑screen real‑time gaming with its PlayToTV platform, handling millions of sessions worldwide. Its core challenge was supporting extreme, short‑lived traffic spikes during TV broadcasts—hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users—without the cost or risk of an always‑on fixed infrastructure.

Ex Machina migrated fully to AWS (using EC2, S3, SNS, SQS and CloudFront), re‑architected for redundancy in about a week, and now auto‑scales to meet minute‑by‑minute demand. The move eliminated single points of failure, delivered global low latency, simplified compliance discussions, enabled rapid replication across markets, and reduced infrastructure costs by roughly 90%.

Ex Machina

Jeroen Elfferich

CEO and Cofounder