Case Study: NBC Entertainment Digital achieves 100M+ video streams and personalized SNL experiences with MarkLogic

Live on Enterprise NoSQL – It’s the SNL 40 App!

NBC Entertainment Digital set out to reinvent how fans accessed Saturday Night Live for its 40th anniversary. The team faced a huge, multigenerational archive whose sparse, inconsistent metadata (bland titles, missing character names, mixed-era appeal) made it hard for fans to find favorite sketches or connect related clips across characters, cast members and themes.

They modeled the show as a semantic ontology and used MarkLogic’s Enterprise NoSQL to store semantic triples alongside NoSQL metadata documents, then combined that with session and user watch data to drive dynamic, personalized recommendations and an immersive autoplay/swipe app experience. The result: the SNL 40 app delivered over 100 million videos, earned widespread press coverage, and significantly increased engagement and viewing session length.

NBC Entertainment Digital

Michael Martin

Senior Vice President, Product, Technology & Operations