Case Study: NBC Entertainment Digital achieves scalable, personalized SNL app with 100M views in 3 months with MarkLogic

NBCUniversal Harnesses 40 Years of Comedy from SNL

NBCUniversal launched the cloud-based SNL app to make 40+ years of comedy instantly discoverable, but faced a tight deadline and major technical challenges: integrating decades of varied content, supporting millions of users across devices, delivering personalized recommendations, and ensuring elastic scalability for peak events.

Using AWS and a MarkLogic Operational Data Hub — including a semantics-driven recommendation engine — NBCUniversal built the app in four months. The result: millions of downloads early on and 100 million views in the first three months, up to 50,000 requests per minute at peak, rapid data integration, lower deployment and maintenance costs, and a future-proof platform that continuously adds new sketches and seasons.

NBC Entertainment Digital

Michael Martin

Senior Vice President, Product, Technology & Operations