Case Study: Lightbox achieves 10x faster response time with New Relic

Video Streaming Service Lightbox Achieves 10x Faster Response Time Using New Relic

Lightbox, a 70‑person New Zealand video‑streaming service owned by Spark New Zealand, was running on a third‑party AWS platform delivered without instrumentation. The team had little visibility into internal behavior, which led to frequent crashes, poor scalability during peak traffic, slow response and video load times, and long, risky deployment cycles.

By deploying New Relic across its entire stack, Lightbox stabilized the platform in about four weeks, identified and fixed major bottlenecks (for example, adding caching to cut database queries), and optimized AWS usage. The results: average response time dropped from ~500 ms to <50 ms, video load time from 40 s to 2 s, capacity to handle 4–5× peak traffic, deploy‑to‑live time reduced from ~600 hours to ~20 minutes, lead time cut from 6–8 weeks to ~1 week, and cloud spend fell by more than 50% through autoscaling and serverless adoption.

Lightbox

Mike Robinson

Chapter Lead IT Applications and Development