India’s streams face a flood of challenges

MUMBAI: When it rains, it pours, and in India’s streaming world, it’s pouring viewers, pressure and pirates. At the 9th edition of VIDNET 2025, Mohamed Bilal, lead principal engineer at Akamai Technologies, delivered a brisk reality check on what it truly takes to keep live streams afloat in a nation of over a billion people.

Bilal began by reminding the audience that India’s streaming appetite has exploded far beyond the comfort zone of traditional infrastructure. Scale, he said, is no longer a challenge but a constant fact of life. Citing cricket as the ultimate stress test, he revealed a staggering moment during the IPL when 50 lakh viewers joined a stream within 20 to 30 seconds simply because a star batsman began walking out to the crease. The emotional rush for fans is thrilling; for engineers, it is an earthquake.

Complicating matters further is the rise of users in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, which now drive 60 to 65 per cent of major live event traffic. That shift makes nationwide infrastructure essential. No platform, Bilal stressed, can survive by relying only on Mumbai, Delhi or Bengaluru. Akamai itself is now deployed across 55 cities, with deep penetration in smaller towns to ensure smoother, faster delivery.

But scale and quality are only half the battle. The bigger storm cloud is piracy, which Bilal said has returned with surprising force. Fragmented OTT pricing and easy access to illegal streams have created what he called a costly leakage. According to a 2024 article he referenced, India lost around $1 billion to piracy, with 9 crore people watching stolen streams. This year, the number could swell to 15 crore viewers and revenue losses may rise to $2.4 billion.

Most platforms, he warned, still treat security as a checkbox. Pirates, however, are evolving. Bilal explained that Akamai’s approach now relies on layered defences and intelligent detection designed to spot suspicious behaviour, such as a single subscription being used from dozens of devices and locations at once. With access to vast data across Akamai’s distributed network, the company can identify anomalies, assign tokens and track suspicious sessions in real time. The aim is not to eliminate piracy entirely, which he admitted is nearly impossible because “our senses are analogue,” but to make theft difficult, slow and unprofitable.

Ultimately, Bilal’s message was clear. Delivering large-scale live events in India demands far more than strong servers. It requires deep infrastructure, granular data, constant monitoring and a relentless chase to keep content both available and protected. In a country where streams surge like monsoon tides, technology must swim faster than the waves.

His session closed with a simple reminder, great content deserves great protection. And in India’s streaming ecosystem, standing still is not an option.