From Monolith to Modular: Replatforming OTT Without Breaking Production

Every over-the-top media (OTT) replatforming pitch promises the same thing: more speed, more features, more scale. But for operators running massive, high-availability services it’s not just about what’s new. It’s about what stays online.

When we joined an enterprise level media providers replatforming initiative, they were staring down a mountain of technical debt. Legacy services couldn’t keep up with viewer demands or internal innovation cycles. But ripping and replacing wasn’t an option—millions of users were counting on uninterrupted access.

Balancing Technical Debt with Business Continuity

It’s a classic engineering dilemma: How do you overhaul the machine while keeping it running?

“The key is not thinking in terms of one big migration,” said Michael Jones, DevOps Engineer at IT PODS. “It’s about building an upgrade path service-by-service, with safety nets at every stage.”

Instead of refactoring everything at once, we mapped dependencies, identifying critical paths where we could deploy safely and validate in parallel.

CI/CD Pipelines That Move Fast — and Don’t Break Things

Using a robust Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) strategy, we created containerized builds with pre-deployment testing baked in. Every update passed through a staged pipeline with:

• Automated QA gates
  
• Blue-green deployments for zero-downtime cutovers
  
• Live monitoring across all service endpoints
  

This let us ship faster without firefighting.

“One of the biggest misconceptions in replatforming is that speed and stability are opposites,” noted Chris Bentz, CIO & Principal Architect. “But if you design your DevOps pipelines right, you get both.”

Service by Service: A Safer Path to Modernization

The phased rollout allowed us to:

• Replace legacy services across the platform
  
• Double engineering velocity within four months
  
• Improve system reliability by 40%
  
• Maintain full availability across TV, mobile, and web platforms
  

Behind the scenes, platform traffic surged—but thanks to distributed tracing, real-time logging, and incident automation, users never saw the work in progress.

Supporting Scale With Modern DevOps

With new backend architecture in place and legacy code retired, the over-the-top media (OTT) systems are now ready for rapid growth. We’ve helped create a foundation that can:

• Support millions of concurrent users
  
• React to real-time analytics and user behavior
  
• Deploy new features weekly, not quarterly
  

For any over-the-top media (OTT) operator with high-stakes uptime and a long tail of legacy code, the path forward isn’t a leap—it’s a precision roadmap.

Want to discuss your own replatforming challenge?
Let’s talk about how we build Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) and modular delivery pipelines that move at the speed of media. Visit itpods.com/success-stories or connect directly with our Broadcast Systems team.