Case Study: BBC achieves 100x faster, scalable personalized streaming with MarkLogic

Team USA Fans Cut Cable Cord for World Cup

BBC iPlayer faced a sudden surge in live streaming as viewers increasingly cut the cord and demanded on‑demand access across phones, tablets, consoles and other devices. The challenge was to move from one‑size‑fits‑all broadcasting to mass customization: handling complex metadata, personalizing delivery by location and device, and scaling to spikes in traffic without slowdowns.

The BBC retooled its infrastructure so every request is a custom query and adopted MarkLogic Enterprise NoSQL to unify and flexibly model metadata in a single data store. The result was a dramatic performance and scalability boost—queries that once took ~20 seconds on SQL now run in ~200 milliseconds—enabling reliable, tailored streaming at massive scale.

BBC