Case Study: Sling Media achieves rapid, scalable viewer insights with Amazon Web Services

Sling Media - Customer Case Study

Sling Media, a subsidiary of EchoStar that builds multiscreen smart-TV hardware, cloud services and apps (best known for the Slingbox), was collecting terabytes of customer-event data but lacked the scalable analytics and visualization tools needed to turn that data into actionable business insight. Their on‑premises data center could not flexibly handle growing volumes or support fast, ad‑hoc exploration to answer questions about device usage, viewership patterns and reliability issues.

Sling moved its analytics pipeline to AWS—feeding Hadoop-processed events into Amazon S3, loading them into an Amazon Redshift cluster (backed by EC2 scripts) and using Tableau for visualization, with long-term archives in Glacier. The result: a rapidly scalable, cost‑effective platform that delivers partner-facing dashboards and minute‑scale ad‑hoc queries, supports spikes for events like the Super Bowl, and lets the company iterate on features, packaging and monetization based on fast, sliceable insights.

Sling Media

Dmitry Dimov

Director of Online Service