Digiturk provides low-latency, high-availability OTT streaming to MENA region using AWS

Digiturk is one of the largest Turkish pay-TV providers, offering satellite TV and streaming to over 4 million subscribers in 160 countries. Known especially for live sports streaming alongside entertainment and live content, Digiturk is home to globally recognized brands such as beIN Sports, which holds exclusive rights to top-tier sports events. Digiturk provides a seamless OTT service experience and live sports streams for over 600,000 concurrent viewers in Türkiye.

Collaborating with Hepapi, an AWS Partner, Digiturk rebuilt and launched TOD MENA, a streaming service for the MENA region, on AWS. The solution needed to have advanced security features, be reliable, and handle high traffic with a peak pattern, particularly during football matches where fans don’t want to miss 1 second. Digiturk had used AWS in Türkiye and experienced consistent, robust, and scalable performance, so it was confident that AWS would provide a solid foundation to scale the service regionally.

Digiturk worked with Hepapi to build a new microservices architecture on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a fully managed Kubernetes service, to power TOD MENA. Amazon EKS provides flexible, scalable deployment, which Digiturk uses to handle peak traffic during live sports events. Digiturk completed the project in 15 months, estimating that it would have taken over 2 years with traditional methods. By using AWS, Digiturk accelerated development while providing security, reliability, and scalability for its OTT service across MENA.

TOD MENA live streams events to over 140,000 concurrent users in the MENA region, managing traffic by using AWS services such as Amazon EKS and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity. The solution scales automatically, so Digiturk saves money by paying only for the resources that it consumes. Digiturk used Amazon OpenSearch Service, an AWS managed service that lets users run and scale OpenSearch clusters. Digiturk reduced database costs by 30 percent and infrastructure costs by 25 percent.

It also lowered latency by 30 percent using the AWS Region in Bahrain and achieved 99.99 percent uptime. “Being highly available on AWS reassures our customers that when they want to watch an event, we can give them a good quality experience,” says Meriç Can, head of site reliability engineering at Digiturk.

The company also uses AWS WAF, which protects web applications from common bugs and bots. “Using AWS WAF is important for protecting our system and delivering a healthy service with enhanced security features and high availability,” says Selçuk Aydoğan, manager of cloud DevOps and monitoring at Digiturk.

Digiturk worked closely with the AWS Enterprise Support team, which provides optimized cloud services for enterprises. “We went to production confident in the team’s availability, expert advice, and operational guidance,” says Aydoğan.

Digiturk provides high-quality service to beIN Media Group’s customers, and TOD MENA is now live in 22 countries. “Using AWS means that we can be highly available in different regions and rapidly scale during traffic surges, minimizing interruptions and optimizing operations,” says Can.