Login failing? Hotstar let you watch anyway.

transcript

Hotstar's login could fail mid-match. And you'd keep watching. That wasn't luck. They planned it, before the match.

First, they listed what must always work. They called it P0. Video. Advertising. Ads keep playing, even in a panic. Subscriptions and payments. Everything else? Optional, at the key moments.

Normally, you log in, get a personal home page, and pay in real time. Panic mode. Login failing? Watch without logging in until it's fixed. The home page becomes a simple default. No personalisation. Payments failing? Skip payment and watch with an ad.

A service nears its rated capacity? Switch off extras, in a planned order. At 80 to 90 percent of its rating, the team flips it to panic. By hand. Fixed, or traffic falls? Step back up, one level at a time.

But here's the clever bit. A switched-off service doesn't return an error. It returns a normal 200 OK. So nothing that calls it fails too. And the app shows no scary pop-up. It stays calm.

Decide what to give up before you're under pressure. In the words of Hotstar's CTO at the time: the video must play on.

Full breakdown in the lecture.