Bringing ESPN+ UFC Pay-Per-View to Hulu
Written by Brittnee Cann, Manager, Product Management at Hulu
At the beginning of May, Hulu launched support for UFC pay-per-view events on the platform. This launch marked a big, new change to the types of content that subscribers can purchase and watch on Hulu. Now, Disney Bundle subscribers who have a direct billing relationship with Hulu and Hulu subs with the ESPN+ standalone add-on are eligible to purchase and watch UFC PPV events in the Hulu app.
Hulu will continue to offer monthly UFC pay-per-view events to eligible subscribers via both web purchase flows and in-app upsell on connected living room devices. Purchasers can find their events in the new “Purchases” section of our legacy “My Stuff” part of the app and playback as soon as the event is live, plus for an extended replay entitlement window that comes with their purchase.
What We Built
Naturally, we had to start by creating a one-time purchase model for Hulu such that our billing systems could handle a pay-per-view transaction. This was uncharted territory as Hulu’s business has historically operated on a recurring billing subscription model.
From there, rather than reinventing the wheel for purchase paths, we leveraged our existing web and in-app upsell purchase flows, piping pay-per-view events through them. This includes our app homepage promotion and upsell through search. In all purchase flow scenarios, we made a deliberate decision to add friction to the purchase flow to (1) verify a user’s intent to purchase and (2) verify a user’s authorization to purchase. How we did this was discussed at length and in the end, we decided we didn’t want to ask a user to remember anything or input anything on their living room device. (This ruled out things like password re-entry or pin input.) Instead, we developed a “magic link” solution where simply clicking on a link emailed to our subscribers would progress them in the purchase flow on their device.
After a successful purchase, we had to decide where we’d send users next. To help train users on our new “Purchases” section within our “My Stuff” destination, we decided to send users there. This way, users could become acclimated to this new section of the app where they could always refer back to in order to find their pay-per-view event purchases. Once the event started, the playback experience was standard Hulu operation.
Challenges + Learnings
- Timing: The biggest challenge that all teams face. We set aggressive milestones and a super aggressive target launch. Our team built the entirety of UFC pay-per-view purchasing on Hulu in about six months. Their endurance and commitment is unmatched.
- Breaking the Hulu model: As previously mentioned, introducing the concept of a one-time purchase to Hulu’s billing system was new and uncharted. It went against a lot of core billing system logic which means we had to re-architect some things to make it work.
- Load Testing: In that Hulu has never done anything like pay-pay-view before, we had to make some calculated assumptions about the load of purchases and playback volumes we’d need to prepare our systems and services for. We were intentionally very liberal in our estimates such that we were confident we’d be over-prepared rather than under.
How It Went
Anyone who works in software development knows how rare it is for a project to launch without a hiccup. Pay-per-view on Hulu was one of those rare cases. Teams across Hulu, Disney, and ESPN+ convened on a Zoom war room during the Saturday of UFC 262 in preparation for being able to triage issues, make fast decisions, and even faster fixes as necessary. We periodically checked-in with each other and chatted about what we were seeing in logs and data dashboards, but without any incidents, we instead used the Zoom chat to talk about the UFC 262 event goings-on with one another instead. This isn’t to say there is nothing we can do to improve, certainly there is, but it’s safe to say that not having any incident escalations during our inaugural UFC pay-per-view offering will go in the “what went well” column of our retro.
Shout-Outs
This project was a HUGE cross-team collaboration that took nearly every individual across tech, UX, and product to pull off. We also could not have done it without the help of our marketing partners, legal, our friends at ESPN+, and more who were able to share what works and what doesn’t to help guide our decision making. Disney’s Direct-to-Consumer teams wouldn’t be able to deliver the magic they do if it weren’t for the team’s ability to work so efficiently cross-functionally with one another.
