Sports Media Report
Five months prior to Opening Day, Major League Baseball needed to ensure the eCommerce platform and partner they chose would be able to handle the migration of millions of MLB.tv and At Bat subscribers off of a Legacy system. The solution needed to scale to thousands of concurrent service agents, tens of thousands of digital entitlement requests per minute, and hundreds of thousands of subscriptions per day. MLB chose Broadleaf Commerce to be the platform partner on top of Google Cloud.
The custom commerce solution needed to be integrated not only into Disney/ESPN-hosted streaming services across device types and channels ranging from Amazon to Android to Apple, but also into all 30 club teams and stadiums.
With streaming services growing at a rapid pace, MLB realized the need for a performant solution at scale to handle their anticipated growth. “Broadleaf handled a demand spike 57% over last year without breaking a sweat,” stated Radesh Rao, Vice President of Software Engineering at MLB. Leading up to Opening Day, the Broadleaf solution processed 650,000 subscription renewals in a single day. “It was a home run,” said Radesh.
Recognizing the need for a custom, powerful and flexible solution, Broadleaf built next-generation Subscription and Entitlement products using a Microservice-based commerce architecture, proven at capacity. “During the initial 30 minutes of Opening Day, Broadleaf handled 40,000 requests per minute which scaled to a peak of 56,000 requests per minute, with servers at only 25% of load,” stated Kristina Pigneri, VP of Operations at Broadleaf Commerce.
Anticipating continuous consumer growth, MLB and Broadleaf’s partnership signals a digital disruption in the sports and entertainment worlds, which both companies expect to innovate on for years to come.
