CoupleTV and Dolby Real-Time Streaming: The Perfect Match

This case study explores how CoupleTV overcame streaming quality and scalability challenges by integrating Dolby’s real-time streaming solution, enabling seamless viewer experiences and supporting global expansion.

Couple is an online dating platform which enables singles to attend live speed dating events. Their online dating platform (www.couple.com) makes dating fun through integrating elements such as trivia, live entertainment, mingle rooms, and games, leaving participants with a better understanding of personality and chemistry of their date. More recently, Couple also launched CoupleTV (www.couple.tv), a reality TV show where singles spend eight weeks getting to know each other over virtual speed dates, all of which are streamed online, in an elimination-style dating show controlled by the viewers. These viewers can interact through choosing the cast, influencing dates and sending one winning couple on a dream vacation. As the CoupleTV platform brings a lot of interactivity, streaming at sub-second latency is key. 

This case study explores how CoupleTV overcame streaming quality and scalability challenges by integrating Dolby’s real-time streaming solution, enabling seamless viewer experiences and supporting global expansion.

The Challenge 

CoupleTV  was finding success in their live streaming shows, and needed a platform that could handle the influx of viewers they were seeing. However, with their initial real-time solution, when their stream would hit around 800 viewers, they noticed quality issues related to scalability of their real-time video streams, such as frame drops, audio and video desynchronization, automatic drop down to lowest possible resolution, and video freezing. With ambitions to reach more than 100k viewers through their reality TV shows, this was not acceptable. 

Moreover, an integral part of the CoupleTV show is that, with different dates going on at the same time, viewers should be able to navigate from one date to the other. However, their real-time streaming solution gave channel change times of around 3 seconds when under load, which resulted in a low viewer quality of experience. 

The Solution 

In April of 2022, Couple came across Dolby at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, and it was a perfect match! 

As Dolby real-time streaming scales over a CDN instead of spinning up additional server instances in the backend. This means it can easily scale to any audience size globally without compromising on video quality, immediately supporting Couple’s plans for further growth, and expansion to other regions such as Europe. 

The fast channel change capabilities of Dolby real-time streaming were also a big plus for CoupleTV, as Dolby real-time streaming caters for seamless transitions between ongoing dates. 

The Results

Integrating Dolby real-time streaming in the CoupleTV platforms resulted in the following key benefits:

Extensive Scaling

Whereas Couple was struggling with reaching higher viewer numbers before, they can now easily scale their real-time streams to any audience size, whether streaming to 500 or 100K viewers. Thanks to the Dolby real-time streaming global CDN POPs, Couple is also fully ready for further international expansion of their reality shows.

High Quality of Experience

The quality issues that Couple was seeing before have fully been resolved. Couple has even been able to increase their maximum resolution of their real-time streams from 720p to 1080p since they’ve started using Dolby real-time streaming.

Fast Channel Change

Thanks to Dolby real-time streaming, CoupleTV viewers are now able to switch seamlessly between dates, further improving the viewer quality of experience.

Seamless Integration and Support

Dolby real-time streaming integration into the CoupleTV platform went very smoothly thanks to the API first approach, clear documentation, and fast support response times.

Dolby real-time streaming makes it easy for us to create high-quality interactive experiences for CoupleTV. We’re focused on launching season 4 of Couple TV Love Made Live, and further adding production capabilities and interactivity features to our platform; and we know we can rely on Dolby real-time streaming for high-quality real-time streaming to support us in our further growth.
CEO of Couple.TV

Summary

Couple, an online dating platform, faced challenges with streaming quality and scalability as they expanded their reality TV show, CoupleTV, to larger audiences. Their initial real-time streaming solution struggled with frame drops, video freezing, and slow channel switching, affecting the viewer experience. After discovering Dolby’s real-time streaming solution at the NAB Show in 2022, Couple integrated the solution, which offered sub-second latency, seamless channel changes, and global scalability. As a result, CoupleTV improved streaming quality, can easily scale to 100K viewers, and resolved technical issues, enabling the platform’s international growth and enhancing the interactive experience for viewers.

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