Capturing A Billion Emo(j)i-ons

In stadiums, sports fans love to express themselves by cheering for their favorite teams, holding up placards and team logos. Emoji’s allow fans at home to rapidly express themselves, and when millions of fans do it simultaneously, that’s a technical problem that we solved!

At Hotstar, we strive to build features that make the viewing experience more engaging to users with an interactive Social Feed. We discussed the “Hotstar Sports Bar” from a design and product point of view. Here we talk about how we built this feature from a technical perspective.

Emojis show the real-time changes in the opinions of the audience. When Dhoni bats, people want a boundary shot on every ball but when he is keeping, people want to see the wickets fall. Collecting these user-generated signals in real-time, condensing these opinions to an emoji swarm that shows the mood of the audience and displaying the changing moods in real-time is challenging when you plan to receive billions of such emoji submissions during a tournament.

For a while, we used a third-party service to power this feature. However, we could not achieve the performance and stability we hoped for, while also not being a cost-effective. The time had come to bring this core service, in-house.

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