Axinom and Partners Successfully Collaborate on Modernizing ZDF’s Streaming Platforms

Fuerth, August 2023 - Axinom, an expert in modern video streaming backends, announces the achievement of significant milestones in the ZDF’s video backend modernization project. The ZDF team and the partner consortium with Axinom, FFW, Condat, and HBT have established strong cooperation incorporating cutting-edge technologies and architectural enhancements to deliver robust, future-proof streaming platforms.

ZDFmediathek has long been a key player in the European streaming landscape, offering its diverse audience a wide array of content. To further elevate its technical capabilities and user experience, ZDFmediathek joined forces with Axinom and the partner consortium, each known for their expertise in digital transformation.

The project has seen monumental progress with successfully migrating the system to a robust cloud architecture, providing enhanced scalability, reliability, and flexibility in resource management. ZDF can operate a highly efficient streaming backend by leveraging the new cloud architecture.

The centralization and redesign of the middleware is an architectural evolution that will empower ZDF to leverage intelligent metadata capabilities for personalization and discovery, delivering tailor-made content recommendations to users. The centralized middleware speeds up development efforts, enabling streamlined updates and improvements for all backend services. The underlying Catalog service, powered by the Axinom Mosaic platform and based on GraphQL, plays a pivotal role in facilitating this functionality, enhancing ZDF’s ability to serve content to various frontends in an efficient manner.

A newly implemented API Federation approach simplifies system maintenance. It optimizes data retrieval by centralizing and standardizing the communication between front-end applications and various backend domains, such as the content feed, personalization, search services, and more. This innovation empowers each front-end to define its scope and talk with one counterpart, eliminating unnecessary noise in responses and ensuring optimal performance.

“We’re proud of the trust placed in us to streamline ZDF backend with an efficient middleware, boosting overall efficiency. The restructured architecture unifies system components, simplifying maintenance and development efforts,” says Stefanie Schuster, CCO, Axinom. “This consolidation sets the stage for future scalability and the seamless integration of diverse brands within a unified ecosystem.”