Olympics Digital Operations at CBC

This post is part of a series on “How do we get ready for a big event at CBC” continuing in 2024 with the Paris Summer Olympics. In each blog post, individuals and teams will share how we create the personal, relevant, and engaging experiences that Canadians expect. Our goal is to make sure all Canadians see themselves reflected in our digital services while connecting them to the many communities and voices that make our country great.

Q: Who are you and how long have you worked at CBC?

• Carrie Yuen, Senior Manager, Agile Quality Engineering & Systems Health. Worked at CBC for 5 years.
• David Viscomi, Product Manager on Analytics Team and A/B Testing & Search teams. Worked at CBC for 6 years.
• Lavanya Singh, Product Owner on Content Distribution team. Worked at CBC for 5 years.

Q: Icebreaker: What is your favourite Olympics sport?

• Carrie Yuen — Diving, and breakdancing was really cool to see this year!
• David Viscomi — Biathlon (the winter one)
• Lavanya Singh — Track and Field

Q: How did you and your team prepare for the Olympics with Incident Management and what was the outcome?

• Carrie Yuen — We gathered the contacts for all the people that would be supporting throughout the games from all the departments and set up the “timbits” Slack channel and incident management meetings. [The timbit, Tokyo Incident Management Backing IT Slack channel was originally used for the Tokyo Olympics]
• David Viscomi — You don’t know what you don’t know. We made sure that we had group discussions on our most likely points of failure, and made sure they were documented and actions to take were highlighted, so those on call had a reference to follow. These exercises helped highlight to folks on the team the areas we were collectively weak in knowledge on, and because we were prepped ahead of time we were able to investigate/experiment to better understand our systems and how they react to different inputs.
• Lavanya Singh — Since we finished MPX replacement [for Cloud Video Platform] just over a month before the Olympics, it was important to make sure we were monitoring systems for any weaknesses or bugs during the period leading up to the Olympics. My team went on-call about 3 weeks before the Olympics started in case the content producers ran into any issues while testing the systems. Our main goal was to ensure system stability from the backend. Thankfully, thanks to the high development and testing standards, no issues came up during or after business hours.

Q: How did you and your team prepare for the Olympics with Quality Engineering and testing? What was the outcome?

A: David Viscomi — extensive testing — for analytics and metadata we needed to help other teams with ensuring that analytics is firing correctly on their products. We also collaborated with:

• Audience Research (responsible for CBC Radio-Canada content analytics reporting)
• BI (Business Intelligence team responsible for our big data assets, including the data lake)
• MiR (Machine Intelligence Retention team which provides analytics for internal content creator use)
• ADaPT (Audience Data and Privacy Team responsible for the Data Management Platform, Customer Data Platform and MYCBC)
• CaML (Customization and Machine Learning Learning) and DAA (Data and Audience Activation) teams to ensure that downstream data in tests were what we expected. Load testing was also a key factor in ensuring our systems can handle spikes in traffic

Q: How did you and your team prepare for the Olympics with Solutions Architecture and what was the outcome?

• David Viscomi — mostly we were working with existing systems so no architecture needed to be considered
• Lavanya Singh — A lot of changes were made to our VMS systems

Q: How did you and your team prepare for the Olympics with video streaming and what was the outcome?

• David Viscomi — extensive testing

Q: What other people, teams or departments do you work with? How do they help you on the road to success?

• Carrie Yuen — Everyone involved: TMS [for digital media support], Soutien [Radio-Canada Support], Media Presentation, Ad Ops, Media Support (News), Sports Digital, NCS [National Client Services for Audience Relations], and all the teams within DS&P (Digital Strategy & Product) and OTT [for CBC Gem]
• David Viscomi — I’m really thankful that I get to work with a LOT of teams in the department and also outside of the department. My work has me: working with Content leads to ensure metadata tagging is correct, working with CMS/Distribution teams to ensure metadata is correctly accessible to the front end, working with audience facing teams to ensure tracking implementation is correctly done, and finally working with data teams to ensure they are able to get value out of user behavioural signals we collect from clients

Q: What tools and technologies do you or your team use for the Olympics? How do you bring people together?

• David Viscomi — Slack, Google Hangouts, and good humour

Q: Was there anything different in your planning for this Olympics compared to previous Olympics?

• Carrie Yuen — It was nice to have Product folks join in on being timbit hosts and more senior managers. I encourage more people to join in the next Olympics — it’s fun and you’ll learn a lot!
• David Viscomi — The changes to the OTT system and MPX replacement [for Cloud Video Platform] really meant we couldn’t rely on solutions/processes we had in place in the last Olympics. This made video playback analytics & metadata a lot of work to go through.

Q: What are some of the challenges you or your team faces?

• David Viscomi — finding ways to reduce manual validation of metadata in the system, while improving our data quality over time. We can’t leverage data if we can’t trust it.

Q: How do you celebrate after the Olympics?

• Carrie Yuen — I turned off the TV and notifications on my phone lol
• David Viscomi — beer
• Lavanya Singh — by going on a vacation!

Q: Was there anything else we did not ask that you would like to talk about?

• Carrie Yuen — One big lesson learned was that we need to test with all the other departments we work with to get a better understanding of what can break during the Olympics.
• David Viscomi — I have something eating my tomatoes in my garden, I had slugs before but I’m thinking it’s a caterpillar? If someone has dealt with this before please reach out I’m really getting tired of losing out on them!

To join our teams at CBC, check out our current openings here.