BT TV now has close to 1.3 million subscribers and is expected to grow in popularity following the acquisition of football rights for the UK Premier League and European Champions League.
BT TV had experienced occasional outages prior to switching to NetApp, which it attributed to its network-attached storage platform. This was not providing the performance, reliability and support needed to deliver consistent quality coverage during peaks and troughs in demand.
BT TV replaced its existing storage technology with NetApp FAS8040 AFF and NetApp FAS8020 storage systems. The lightning fast performance of NetApp FAS8040 AFF supports BT TV’s live streaming, and comes with the NetApp Data ONTAP operating system and advanced data management and data protection tools. This enables BT TV to focus on uptime and availability.
The FAS8020 provides general-purpose support for video on-demand services, which is accelerating business operations, supporting and meeting BT TV’s video on-demand capacity requirements and providing significant performance gains compared to the legacy platform. Both systems are part of the new NetApp FAS8000 series, which is designed to accelerate business operations and deliver superior TCO.
Philip Buckley-Mellor, BT TV Designer, BT TV said: “There’s clearly a growing trend for people watching what they want, when they want. This places a huge demand on VOD, and we wanted to strengthen this service. In the past we have experienced outages, and, given the huge popularity of sports programming and the growth in our customer base, it was imperative that we addressed this issue. Working with NetApp is changing the way we work and the services we offer because we can rely on the technology without hesitation. Our customer base is growing whilst churn has fallen, and this can be attributed to the NetApp platform underpinning and supporting service delivery.”
Elliot Howard, UK & Ireland Country Manager for NetApp said: “NetApp technology has clearly had a positive impact on the quality of video services that BT TV is able to provide customers, which is greatly improving its customer churn rates. Now that the issue of outages has been resolved, BT TV can focus its efforts on continuing to broadcast first class TV to its customers and on growing its subscriber base.”