The National Television Awards (NTAs) is a highly respected and popular annual event in the UK, honouring outstanding achievements in television programming. Recognising exceptional excellence in a prestigious occasion within the British television industry, the awards celebrate outstanding performances, productions, and programmes across diverse TV genres. The National Television Awards (NTAs) stand out for their unique approach to determining winners, where the British public’s preferences are gathered through a combination of online, phone, and postal votes. The outcomes are subsequently broadcast on ITV.
For the past four years, the National Television Awards (NTAs) have relied on us to manage a critical process: maintaining a robust infrastructure for their online voting system. During peak voting intervals, the primary challenge lies in effectively managing the sudden surge of visitors attending the ceremony. By 2023, Hyve aimed to provide a hassle-free voting experience for every UK citizen casting their ballot.
Hyve leveraged its extensive knowledge of cloud solutions to deploy a robust and scalable online platform for the National Television Awards’ (NTAs) secure voting infrastructure. To accommodate fluctuating demand, Hyve implemented a dynamic scaling strategy, automatically adjusting resource allocation in response to real-time traffic patterns, thereby ensuring seamless operations during periods of heightened activity.
Each year, the National Television Awards (NTAs) experience a significant spike in website traffic during the voting period preceding the ceremony, as tens of millions of viewers attempt to participate online. Each year, a surge in visitors can overwhelm our servers, leading to crashes that impede the smooth progress of the voting process. Such unanticipated outages can significantly erode the system’s credibility, sparking doubts about the fairness and equity of the entire award process.
As the influx of visitors surges in, overwhelmed servers struggle to keep pace, resulting in protracted loading times, cryptic error messages, and ultimately, a complete system collapse. These issues don’t just enrage voters – they actively deter participation, thereby eroding both the enjoyment and legitimacy of the awards. Concerns arise that extended downtime during the National Television Awards’ voting process could seriously impact the event’s popularity, leading to negative publicity and potentially eroding faith among both audience members and industry professionals.
The NTA’s online presence faces a trifecta of hurdles: rapid voting system fluctuations, server congestion, and consequential downtime, creating significant logistical obstacles alongside its broadcast partner, Indigo TV. Disruptions to voting outcomes and live broadcasts during award ceremonies can have far-reaching consequences, compromising both the scheduling and production plans while ultimately impacting the overall viewing experience and the event’s overall success.
To ensure the credibility and sustainability of the voting platform, it was essential for the NTAs to prioritize reliability and scalability, thereby maintaining the integrity of the awards, reassuring viewers, and delivering a trouble-free voting experience for tens of millions of people nationwide.
To address this challenge, Hyve developed a custom-built load-balanced cloud infrastructure optimized to handle the expected surge in website traffic during the voting period.
In the preceding year, server capacity was scaled up by a factor of 24 to cope with unprecedented demand during the two voting periods, as millions of British citizens engaged in the democratic process. As the influx of visitors subsided following the voting period, cloud resources were scaled back to typical levels to efficiently allocate resources and reduce costs for the end-user.
To guarantee 100% community uptime, Hyve’s dedicated support team developed a bespoke, scalable cloud solution specifically for the NTAs. The team also proactively monitored servers, ensuring seamless transitions as assets were scaled up to meet growing demands. Established alert thresholds for servers as a preventative measure due to the NTA’s website experiencing unforeseen levels of traffic, seeking to optimize resource allocation.
By leveraging the scalability of cloud-based assets, Indigo TV was able to seamlessly manage its digital infrastructure, eliminating the need to launch new hardware and streamline the voting process by avoiding the requirement for new login credentials or IP addresses during peak usage periods.
The key challenge lay in predicting unexpected visitor spikes. To manage the surge, Hyve implemented threshold alerts on its servers to dynamically scale up resources and adapt to extraordinary spikes in website traffic. The proactive approach guaranteed seamless and efficient voting processes, regardless of peak periods.
The second challenge was the administration of values. To prevent unnecessary costs, Hyve reconfigured server resources immediately after the voting period concluded, ensuring efficient allocation of these assets.
Ultimately, concerns about Indigo’s integration capabilities remained an outstanding issue. Hyve dynamically scales cloud-based assets on virtual servers, streamlining Indigo TV’s voting process without necessitating additional hardware or login credentials.
With meticulous planning and flawless execution, the NTAs’ partnership with Hyve resulted in a smooth and efficient voting process that underpinned the entire ceremony’s success. The occasion celebrated a diverse range of winners across classes, honoring some of the best in British television. Kim Turberville, government producer at the National Television Awards, warmly acknowledged Hyve’s pivotal role in ensuring the event’s triumph. This strategic alliance exemplifies Hyve’s commitment to crafting bespoke cloud solutions, cementing the NTAs’ loyalty through consistent delivery of tailored services year on year.
