Case Studies

Bloomberg Quintype Technologies

Scalable live commentary and stock price updates in real time

Case Study

About Quintype

Quintype is a data-driven publishing platform for digital media organizations and content creators serving a global range of customers. It’s primary focus is on helping organizations better their audience engagement and monetization across all digital channels, allowing for a collaborative team workspace.

Quintype Use Case

Quintype is serving over four thousand logged users and more than 5 million visitors with realtime commentary across several publishers. The auto scaling infrastructure handles viral content and powers push notifications to deliver the content to the intended audience, when and where they need it.

On the user side, the comments get reflected in real time even without refreshing a browser window. This allows users to see a continuous stream of comments and boost the engagement and virility of the web page they are on. The realtime features of Ably such as Presence, allow Quintype to show the total number of people typing and the number of people active on a webpage.

Ably enables Quintype’s Digital Publishing Platform to help content creators collaborate in real time. While creating and organising content, Quintype is able to show you which other users are working on the same content, and help reduce conflicts.

Additionally, the team at Quintype is using Ably to power a stock ticker that displays the changing stock price according to the live stock market, directly on one of the leading Indian financial news portals. The stock prices gets updated every 10 seconds by sending updates in real time to up to 5 million users. However, during important events, it’s updated every 3 seconds (or more frequently), just by changing a configuration on the server side.

Key Technologies used

  • Pub/Sub messaging

  • Presence and device awareness

  • Uptime guarantee SLA

  • Consistent client library SDKs on every platform

  • Mobile and Browser Push notifications

The Ably Solution

Relying on realtime infrastructure while focusing on scale and audience engagement

Quintype is set to revolutionize the publishing industry by building an end-to-end SaaS that is focused on enhancing the audience engagement for publishers. One of their core features is live commentary and updates that has proved to be technically challenging from the very beginning.

Instead of trying to build their own realtime infrastructure, the team evaluated several open source solutions before trying out Ably. The ability to autoscale realtime traffic through highly-availability globally distributed datacenters means Quintype can now deliver live updates to all of users without worrying about the architecture to do so. Ably made this possible thanks to our global network and Pub/Sub messaging features guaranteeing message ordering and delivery.

By publishing streams of realtime updates to channels, they could reach a limitless number of subscribers in mere milliseconds. As for their live commenting feature, they used event broadcasting with a realtime data sync implementation. From the users' perspective, this serves to be more engaging, while from a tech perspective, it definitely is a smooth realtime experience.

Milestones at-a-glance


30m+
Messages sent per month
60m+
Page views per month
4k+
logged users
5.29m
Visitors
15m
page views of financial stock tickets
Ably has helped Quintype drastically reduce the human and infrastructure costs of maintaining realtime infrastructure. We easily moved from a primus/node.js/websocket backend to using ably to push updates to your customers. Ably’s presence and channels APIs are extremely easy to work with, and ensure that messages go to the right users, in a cost effective way.

Tejas Dinkar

VP of Engineering / Quintype

Quintype relies on Ably for

  • Using channels devices can broadcast out realtime updates to any number of subscribers.

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  • Be notified when users and devices go online or offline.

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  • We guarantee a certain level of uptime for all our customers. Build a system you can rely on.

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  • Uniquely we guarantee all recipients receive messages 100% of the time. Build chat you can rely on.

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  • Simplify development with our API consistent libraries on every popular platform.

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  • Alert users with a native OS notification even when they are not using your app.

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