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Tag: Ajit Mohan

  • “We are helping SMBs build a sustainable online model”: Facebook India’s Ajit Mohan

    “We are helping SMBs build a sustainable online model”: Facebook India’s Ajit Mohan

    KOLKATA: Facebook has always expressed its interest in small businesses globally. Moreover, a large chunk of the social media platform’s advertising revenue comes from that segment. Likewise in the Indian market, the company is putting a lot of energy to help small businesses come back faster from the pandemic crisis. In terms of ad spends, that market is coming back well as well as the overall number is moving up.

    Facebook India vice president and managing director Ajit Mohan spoke about its deep-rooted commitment to small business while participating in APOS 2020. “Around the world, businesses are starting to come back and a lot of our energy is leaning towards how we can help small businesses come back faster to where they can build a sustainable model,” said Mohan.

    “Facebook is fundamentally a marketing platform that is tuned to need of small businesses. Around the world what we have seen is that most frugal marketing spend come to Facebook because this is where small businesses can grow. Through the second half of March and April, we did see a very tight lockdown in India that had an impact on the ad market. But that started to change especially in the last few weeks of June and heading into July we see the numbers moving up,” Mohan added.

    Mohan also stated that experts tend to not incorporate and count India’s vibrant online ad market. One per cent of startups and five per cent of enterprises actually do spend money disproportionately on digital to find new sources of growth.

    Covid2019 has accelerated the shift from offline to online. It has brought new cohorts of users to the digital platform. According to him, the behaviour of coming online got hyperdrive. Facebook also saw extraordinary growth for all its platforms it sees that continuing.

    Mohan, who worked alongside Jio when he was in Hotstar, is again working as a partner of the former as Facebook has acquired a minority stake in Jio Platforms. According to him, there is an alignment of the mission of two companies. While Facebook’s energy comes from the belief in giving people the power to build community online, he sees the same passion in Jio as it is playing the role of enabler in the digital ecosystem. Moreover, the alliance of WhatsApp-Jio Mart was one of the focus areas of the Facebook-Jio deal. Mohan said if they could pioneer a certain model of shopping on WhatsApp giving a lean structure to it, Facebook could take the model globally.

    “We are just at the beginning of an exciting hockey stick. If we look at the last few years, the first phase of work was all-around access. The number of 4G users has gone from 50 million to 550 million in less than four years. It has all happened in a very short period of time and that’s the foundation. In the foundation phase, it has lit up multiple sectors. Now, the next five to 10 years will be to see the impact of all the hard work that has been done on the access front,” Mohan commented on the overall ecosystem.

    “If we can bring 60 million businesses online that creates an impact for leveraging the 550 million consumers who have already come online. Connecting the dot between businesses and consumers will open up the explosive economic opportunity not for just those businesses but for others who seek to serve them. With innovation, all kinds of opportunities open up in education, health, etc., and in ways that have barely scratched the surface. We have done the hard work and set up the foundation. Now is the moment to translate that to real innovation and economic opportunity,” he added.

  • Instagram introduces Reels to entertain India

    Instagram introduces Reels to entertain India

    NEW DELHI: Instagram today announced the extension of the testing of Reels, a new video format, to India. This format offers a new way to create and share short videos on Instagram, aimed at redefining the future of entertainment on the platform.

    With Reels, people can express themselves while entertaining others, whether that’s by trying out a fun new dance or spreading the message on something they care about. People can record and edit 15-second multi-clip videos with audio, effects and new creative tools on Reels; share them with their followers on Feed; and, if they have a public account, make their reels available to the wider Instagram community through a new space in Explore.

    Sharing to Reels in Explore gives people the opportunity to access a larger audience, especially since more than 50 per cent of accounts on Instagram globally visit Explore every month. Explore can showcase an entertaining selection of reels made by public accounts on Instagram, which may inspire people to create their next reel.

    Facebook India vice president and managing director Ajit Mohan said, “With the rise in video consumption overall and videos making up over a third of posts on Instagram in India, Instagram has a big role to play in unleashing expression in the country. People across the big and small cities of India come to Instagram to express themselves safely, and also to be entertained. With Reels, we’re unveiling the future of entertainment on the platform, in a way that ignites creativity. With the multiple creative formats, whichever way you want to express yourself, it can now be on Instagram.”

    Facebook vice president of product Vishal Shah said, "Instagram has always been a place where culture is created, because people come to share the things they care about and be entertained. We’re constantly listening to our community, and have heard that they want to make and watch short-form videos on Instagram and have the opportunity to be discovered by our broader community.  We’re excited to expand the test of Reels to India and give the next generation of creators born and bred in India a chance to share their native and cultural context — and be potential global stars."

    The feature will start rolling out to users in India from 7.30 pm IST and at the onset, will be populated with content from a diverse set of public figures and creators, such as Ammy Virk, Gippy Grewal, Komal Pandey, Arjun Kanungo, Jahnavi Dasetty aka Mahathalli, Indrani Biswas aka Wondermunna, Kusha Kapila, Radhika Bangia, RJ Abhinav and Ankush Bhaguna.

    India is the fourth country, after Brazil, Germany and France, where this new format is being tested. This entertainment experience builds on the work done in the past year to enable expression, such as the vast library of music available on the platform thanks to a partnership with prominent music labels; the Spark AR effects on Instagram that enable more creation and expression on the platform; and the ‘Born on Instagram’ program, which has led to discovery and growth of creators from all across India. 

    While this is a test, Instagram is committed to getting the experience right and will continue to learn and build as India creates and shares reels. To see reels from India on the day of launch, do follow #FeelitReelit.

    To create a reel:

    Select Reels at the bottom of the Instagram camera. You’ll see a variety of creative editing tools on the left side of your screen that you can use to create your reel, including:

    Audio: Search for a song from the Instagram music library for your reel. You can also use your own original audio by simply recording a reel with it.

    AR Effects: Select one of the many effects in our AR library, created by both Instagram, and creators all over the world, to record multiple clips with different effects.

    Timer and Countdown: Set the timer to record any of your clips hands-free.

    Align: Line up objects from your previous clip before recording your next, which helps for seamless transitions like outfit changes or adding new friends into your reel.

    Speed: Choose to speed up or slow down part of the video or audio you selected, which helps you stay on a beat or make slow motion videos.

    To share a reel:

    With Reels, you can share with your followers and have the potential to be discovered by the huge, diverse Instagram community on Explore. Reels that you post to Feed or Explore will also appear in the Reels tab of your profile. You can also share to Stories or in Direct, though your reel would then disappear after 24 hours, not be shared to Reels in Explore, and not appear on your profile.

    If you have a Public Account: You can share your reel to a dedicated space in Explore, where it has the chance to be seen and discovered by the wider Instagram community. You can also share to Feed so your followers can see your reel. When you share reels featuring certain songs, hashtags or effects, your reel may also appear on dedicated pages whenever someone clicks on that song, hashtag or effect.

    If you have a Private Account: You can share to Feed so your followers can see your reel. You can also share to Stories or in Direct, though your reel would then disappear after 24 hours.

    To watch Reels:

    Reels in Explore is a new space to enjoy reels created by the diverse community on Instagram. Discover your new favorite comedian, inspiring advocate, trending dance or beauty trend in a vertical feed customized for you. If you enjoy a reel, you can easily like, comment or share it with your friends.

  • Facebook Announces New Communications Head for India

    Facebook Announces New Communications Head for India

    March: Facebook today announced that it has recruited a new communications head to lead its growing corporate communications and public relations mandate in India. Bipasha Chakrabarti will take on the role of Communications Director at Facebook India, and will be a part of the India leadership team, reporting to Ajit Mohan.

    Bipasha comes with eighteen years of experience working with leading tech brands and PR agencies. In her last assignment as the Head of Corporate Communications at Cisco India and SAARC, she not only led the entire gamut of communications, including analyst, technology, and corporate communications, but also managed leadership and executive communications for the office of APJC President. Prior to Cisco, Bipasha was with Sun Microsystems. As part of her new role, she will lead the communications charter for both Facebook and Instagram in India.

    The announcement comes just a month after Facebook announced the hiring of Avinash Pant as the Marketing Director at Facebook India to drive the company’s consumer marketing efforts across the family of apps. Just a year ago, Facebook had also announced a new leadership structure in India bringing the company’s functions under Ajit Mohan, reporting directly to its headquarters in Menlo Park.

    Said Ajit Mohan, VP and MD of Facebook India, “Communications is a critical function for us as we continue to build Facebook’s story in India. We are grateful for the trust that our users, advertisers, partners, and the government have placed in us, and are committed to communicating openly and transparently. Bipasha is among the most seasoned communication professionals in the country and I am very excited to have her join us and lead this charter.”

    Over the course of last year, Facebook has spearheaded several India-focused initiatives with a strong focus on fueling entrepreneurship, boosting digital skilling, and breaking the gender imbalance on the Internet.

    In the last few months, Facebook has recruited for key roles across multiple functions such as Marketing, Sales, Partnerships, and Policy. Consistent with the new organization structure, several of these roles have been spread across the Facebook family of apps.

  • Facebook launches first high-decibel marketing campaign in India

    Facebook launches first high-decibel marketing campaign in India

    DELHI: India alone accounts for 11 per cent of Facebook’s global user-base, making it the biggest for the social media platform. The country, with its growing internet penetration and smartphone market provides ample opportunities for the platform to grow and therefore, it is not leaving any stone unturned to tap the space.

    After updating the branding of the Facebook company in November 2019 and annoucing the appointment of Avinash Pant as the marketing director for India operations, Facebook has released its first high-decibel campaign ‘More Together’ in India, making the country the first Asia-Pacific region to witness its roll-out.

    “Consumer marketing is a new strategic area of focus for Facebook and is part of the company’s priority of transparently communicating the role its services play in the world. ‘More Together’ is the marketing campaign for the Facebook App, to share stories that celebrate and highlight the power of connections.  It is built on the core belief that people can do more together, than alone," shared Facebook in a press release.

    Facebook India VP and MD Ajit Mohan noted that India is at the heart of Facebook. He insisted that the brand wants to tell stories of its services that are deeply embedded in the fabric of India. “While at the company level we remain focussed on building trust, we want to showcase the many ways that Facebook is intertwined in the lives of Indians – from connecting with loved ones, to growing businesses and supporting local communities, to finding ways to come together to learn and share and celebrate.”

    The first film of the campaign, themed around the upcoming festival of Holi, has been catching the fancy of the media veterans.

    Praising the campaign, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc founder Harish Bijoor said, “Brands need to keep reminding their users that they are culturally in sync and in connect. Facebook is doing just that with this piece of communication. It is a format of pure goodwill communication at play. It seeks nothing but goodwill.”

    Samsika Marketing Consultants founder chairman and managing director Jagdeep Kapoor told Indiantelevision.com, “It is a vibrant campaign, taking the brand, Facebook, at a higher emotional level, far and wide and deepening friendship beyond boundaries, which keeping the Indianness intact, in this case through Holi.”

    Kapoor feels that the campaign will take the brand reach wider and deeper. He stated that the timing is perfect to launch such campaign which is topical and relatable.

    The multi-channel campaign has been conceptualised by Taproot Dentsu and will have multiple campaigns going on-air over the next few weeks, in eight languages.

    Dentsu Aegis Network creative chairperson and Taproot Dentsu co-founder Agnello Dias taking delight in developing the campaign said, “The world of Facebook represents a canvas of connections that’s huge, vibrant and full of serendipitous outcomes and surprises. To celebrate all users and to inspire more of them to benefit from the power of connections, our creative team led by Pallavi Chakravarti, wrote stories with all these unexpected, wonderful outcomes, which are inspired by real people and their real journeys.”

  • Facebook plans to invest in tech startups of India

    Facebook plans to invest in tech startups of India

    MUMBAI: Social media giant Facebook is planning to invest in technology startups of India. Few months back, the first minority investment that Facebook made was in Meesho. Speaking at the opening session of the second edition of ‘Huddle Kerala 2019,’ Facebook India vice president and managing director revealed the plan.

    “We now have shown willingness to make direct investments in technology startups in India. We are willing to spend our time, and energy to tap the massive depth of engineering talent in the country,” Mohan said.

    The first investment Meesho could bring 2,00,000 first-time female entrepreneurs online which relies on the existing behaviour of communities in India and leverages on women entrepreneurs essentially pitching products to their friends and families.

    “It is an innovation that was coming out of India which can be exported to rest of the world, and that model has scaled a dramatic impact in job creation. Any analysis of economy, most of the job creation happens from small business,” Mohan added.

  • Facebook appoints Hotstar’s Ajit Mohan as India MD & VP in major coup

    Facebook appoints Hotstar’s Ajit Mohan as India MD & VP in major coup

    MUMBAI: The social media giant Facebook finally ends its hunt to find a head for India operations. Facebook has appointed Ajit Mohan as Managing Director and Vice-President of Facebook India. He will join Facebook early next year.
    In this newly created role of Managing Director for India, a VP-level role, one of the most important responsibilities for this person will be aligning teams and driving Facebook’s overall strategy in India. This is a new structure for Facebook India of having a senior leader reporting into Menlo Park and not Asia Pacific.
    “India is one of the largest and most strategically important countries for Facebook. As we think about what it will take to achieve our mission of bringing people together and building community, we know that investment in India is critical. Ajit’s depth of experience will help us to continue to have a positive impact in India across communities, organizations, businesses and with policy makers”, Facebook Inc vice-president of business and marketing partnerships said David Fischer.
    “I am delighted to take on the mantle of shaping Facebook’s charter in India. It is a unique opportunity to shape the agenda of a company that has brought the world closer together in one of the most exciting markets in the world. I look forward to championing India in Facebook and working with stakeholders across the spectrum to help build deep and meaningful communities across the country” Ajit Mohan commented.
    He joins Facebook from Hotstar, the streaming platform launched by Star India, where he was Chief Executive Officer. He launched and built Hotstar into India’s leading premium video streaming platform. Ajit is an alumnus of McKinsey and Company’s New York office where he worked with media companies around the globe as well as served as a Fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, where he focused on India’s rapid urbanization. He is a graduate of the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Challenge the establishment to crack digital code: Hotstar’s Ajit Mohan

    Challenge the establishment to crack digital code: Hotstar’s Ajit Mohan

    MUMBAI: Just when India was warming up to the concept of internet on the mobile, Star India came out with its over the top platform Hotstar. Today, it is the top OTT platform in the country and one may think the road to success was entirely smooth. But Hotstar CEO Ajit Mohan spoke about the streamer’s journey  while speaking at The Advertising Club’s D-Code.

    Hotstar was initially a free-ad supported venture when it was launched in 2015 causing rapid growth in users. The challenge was when it had to convince the price-conscious Indian consumer to pay. Indians were so used to free goodies that paying for content was unheard of.

    It had just bagged the streaming rights for the popular show Game of Thrones season 6 and came out with a campaign leveraging the lingo of the American fantasy drama. Though it was a great campaign for Game of Thrones fans, the subscription number did not move.

    The game changer campaign which makes the Hotstar CEO very proud, was launched during season 7 of the stalwart show. The multimedia campaign titled ‘Torrents Morghulis’ is a twist on the phrase ‘Valar Morghulis’ from the show. The meaning of the original phrase “All men must die” was tweaked into “All torrents must die.”

    “It clearly communicated the fearlessness of the premium proposition,” Ajit Mohan said. It was not easy to challenge torrents which enjoyed a lot of loyalty and commitment among its users. “…Therefore it was a statement to tell them (torrent users) that not just did we have a better proposition than torrent but torrent was dying,” he added. The campaign led to a “dramatic rise” in Hotstar Premium Subscription numbers.

    Mohan also spoke about a campaign from Domino’s which can give valuable lessons to brands. The “classic video campaign” was rolled out during this IPL leveraging Hotstar’s WatchN’Play. While WatchN’Play provided cricket fans to play along with their favourite teams virtually, Domino’s was the first brand to utilise the opportunity. The rule for users was that the points collected from the game help to access Domino’s coupons. 19 million coupons were distributed across the country on the back of this campaign. Domino’s blurred the line between brand and performance according to Mohan.

    This IPL itself was a benchmark for Hotstar as 202 million viewers logged on to its video streaming platform to watch the T20 tournament. Moreover, it successfully handled more than 10 million concurrent viewers during the IPL final match.

    The man who saw the challenges from the initial days of OTT business in India and built a world-class platform along with his team thinks challenging the establishment is very important, however small a brand could be. A campaign line alone does not suffice to crack digital code without an articulated philosophy. He concludes with, “Look for the truth in humour and the humour in truth.”

  • An evening dedicated to D-CODEing the digital landscape

    An evening dedicated to D-CODEing the digital landscape

    Mumbai, 1st August, 2018: The ballroom at a posh city hotel transformed into an interaction and learning hub as the leaders of Indian media, marketing and advertising industry gathered together at The Advertising Club’s maiden edition of D-CODE: The Annual Digital Review 2018. The panel asked its members to share an example of their own work, one work they admire and 3 learnings they would want to share with the audience. 

    On the stage were Ajit Mohan- CEO, Hotstar, Anupriya Acharya- CEO Publicis Media, Anuradha Aggarwal- CMO, Marico, Arun Iyer- Chairman & CCO, Lowe Lintas, Juhi Kalia- Head of India & Anthology APAC for Creative Shop, Facebook, Rahul Johri- CEO, BCCI, Mohit Kapoor- VP Advertising, Reliance JIO, Sam Singh- CEO- South Asia, GroupM, Sapna Chadha- Head of Marketing, India and SEA, Google, Siddharth Banerjee- EVP, Marketing, Vodafone and Tanmay Bhat- Co-Founder, AIB. 

    Vikram Sakhuja, President, The Advertising Club, said, “The Advertising Club has been at the forefront of driving the A&M industry’s excellence agenda. We are constantly creating forums that enhance the learning curve of the fraternity. With D-CODE we have created another engaging property that bring together the industry to debate and deliberate on the stimulating issues of the digital ecosystem.”

    Aditya Swamy – Managing Committee Member, The Advertising Club said: “I have always believed in the power of colabs. Inspire and be inspired was the theme of D-CODE and bringing together key stakeholders across the industry to crack the digital code was an exciting idea. From my days at MTV where we looked to marry pop culture and brands to now at Google where we unlock the power of digital and tech to deliver value to advertisers, this is a journey that only throws up more and more interesting opportunities. I look forward to being in the center of this equation as we build centers of excellence.”

    Punitha Arumugam – Managing Committee Member, The Advertising Club said: “Our endeavor while curating D-CODE was to create a platform that would showcase pioneering work on Digital and facilitate ideas exchange within the fraternity.  We have tried to bring representation of all facets of digital with the versatile panel of stalwarts from across the M&E industry.”

    The five key learnings that the advertising, digital and marketing mavens agreed upon were:

    1) Digital is a medium that everyone is experimenting with and no one exactly knows how to ‘crack-it’. The need of the hour is to approach it with an open mind, keep experimenting and learning from one’s own and each other’s strategies.

    2) Digital as a medium does not exist in a silo. All that media needs are great ideas, beautiful craft and creative people who can utilize the right tools to gain success. 

    3) One needs to invest in the right marketing technology, tools, talent and partnerships.

    4) To execute successful digital campaigns, one needs to fully leverage digital signals, customize messaging, employ data and have performance oriented goals. 

    5) Partnerships are critical in making digital campaigns effective. Scale for both a campaign and digital as a medium of marketing can be amplified when the power of partnerships is harnessed.
    With a galaxy of the who’s who of the media, advertising and digital industries in attendance, the debut edition of D-CODE was off to a fantastic beginning.  

  • Hotstar and the art of managing traffic spikes

    Hotstar and the art of managing traffic spikes

    MUMBAI: Ajit Mohan sits back in his chair on the 26 floor of Urmi Estate in Mumbai his chest swelling with pride as he reads what he has just posted on LinkedIn. “Reading about YouTube TV crashing for the England vs Croatia game and being reminded again that scaling for live is no accident. Feel proud about Hotstar Tech and our VIVO IPL 2018 scale,” the post states.

    What the CEO of Hotstar is referring to is the huge spike of 10.33 million concurrent viewers that India’s leading video streamer could handle during the IPL 2018 finals. 

    “Over the past three and a half years, we have built live tech that is truly world class and that can handle massive surges in traffic. It is not about just scaling the video infrastructure , it is about making sure all parts of our tech can scale, including the gaming and social TV experience. I do think we have built something unique and special in live tech and we are proud that the bar has been set by an Indian service,” he says.

    In fact, Ajit has over the past year or so invested heavily in tech resources – in terms of teams and in-house hardware, monitoring tools,  and what have you. So much so that most of the Hotstar tech today is run by its own engineers with very little reliance on third parties.

    Today Hotstar’s command centre in Mumbai hosts more than 100 techies, most of them youngsters between the ages of 23 and 35 only. “It’s the youngsters who are driving leapfrogs in innovation,” says Star India managing director Sanjay Gupta.

    Cubicles are buzzing with data scientists, programmers and hardware and software geeks peering over and at screens monitoring hotspots where traffic is unusually high and ensuring that Hotstar stays up at all times. “We want to be and probably are the gold standard in streaming experience – not just in India but the world as well,” says Ajit.

    It is this almost maniacal obsession with giving Hotstar users a consistent streaming experience while they are watching live cricket or shows from its linear channels that has made it the envy of the likes of leading media tech company Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings who has referred to it on several occasions during investor calls and briefings.

    As compared to that, larger companies such as Optus down under simply collapsed unable to bear the weight of a few thousand subscribers during the group phase of the FIFA World Cup 2018.  Customers were subject to repeated drop outs or blurred and low quality streaming with the spinning progress wheel continuing for minutes at an end.  They came out in hordes slamming the service labeling it #FloptusSport. . So much so that it was forced to turn off the pay button and give free access to subs until 31 August and even issue refunds. Optus will also be offering customers the first three rounds of the Premier League for free.

    Another major which simply disintegrated during the current football frenzy was media tech titan Google’s YouTube TV which costs viewers a hefy $40 a month.  Customers were once again left frustrated when the service got logjammed unable to handle the thousands of concurrent live streams. YouTube aplogised profusely but to no avail. Soccer fans took it to the cleaners. Tweeted one of them: “..it’s completely down. If Google can’t keep it online in a surge like this, nobody can.”

    Google engineers could probably try knocking at Hotstar’s doors and learn a trick or two from Ajit and his tech team.  That would probably give their customers a better video experience.

    Akash Saksena, one of the Hotstar engineers, posted on a blog what went into making Hostar the smooth streamer it turned out to be during the World Cup. Read on to find out more.

    “Your cloud provider also has physical limits of how much you can auto-scale. Work with them closely and ensure you make the right projections ahead of time. Even then, nothing can make it better for you if you are inefficient per server. This calls for rabid tuning of all your system parameters. Moving from development to production environments requires knowledge of what hardware your code will run on and then tweaking it to suit that system. Be lean on your single server and yield results with more room to scale horizontally. Review all your configurations with a fine tooth, it’ll save you the blushes in production. Each system must be tuned specifically to the traffic pattern and hardware you choose to run it on.

    No Dumb Clients
    At Indian cricket scale, we cannot afford to have clients that rely completely on the server systems to make decisions. Tsunami’s can overwhelm the back-end. Retries will make the problems worse. Clients must be smart about inferring when things don’t look right, and add “jitter” to the requests they make to the servers. Caching, exponential back-offs and panic protocols all come together to ensure a seamless customer experience.

    Three pillars

    Our platform has three core pillars, the subscription engine, meta-data engine and our streaming infrastructure. Each of these have unique scale needs and were tweaked separately. We built pessimistic traffic models for each of these basis which we came up with ladders that controlled server farms depending on the estimated concurrency. Knowing what your key pillars are and what kind of patterns they are going to experience is pivotal when it comes to tuning. One size does not fit all.

    Once Only

    Scaling effectively at such a scale means that you drive away as much traffic as possible from the origin servers. Depending on your business patterns, using caching strategies on the serving layer as well as smart TTL controls on the client end, one can give breathing room to their server systems.

    Reject Early

    Security is a key tenet, and we leverage this layer to also drive away traffic that doesn’t need to come to us at the top of the funnel. Using a combination of white listing and industry best practices, we drive away a lot of spurious traffic up front itself.

    The Telescope

    Like any other subscription platform, we’re ultimately beholden to the processing rates that our payment partners provide us. Sometimes during a peak, this might mean adding a jitter to our funnel to allow customers to follow through at an acceptable rate to enable a higher success rate overall. Again, these funnels / telescopes are designed keeping in mind the traffic patterns that your platform will experience. Often these decisions will need to involve customer experience changes to account for being gentler on the infrastructure.

    The Latency Problem

    As the leading OTT player in India, we’ve been steadily making improvements to our streaming infrastructure. It remains a simple motto of leaner on the wire, faster than broadcast. As simple as this sounds, its one of the most complex things to get right. Through the year we have brought down our latency numbers from being roughly 55s behind broadcast, to approximately 15–20s behind broadcast and only a couple of seconds behind on our re-done web platform.

    This was a result of highly meticulous measurement of how much time each segment of our encoding workflow took and then tweaking operations and encoder settings to do better. We did this by applying profiling of the workflow to instrument each segment. This is another classical tenet, tuning cannot happen without instrumentation.

    We continue to tweak bit-rate settings to provide a un-compromised experience to our customers while at the same time be efficient in bandwidth consumption for Indian conditions.

    Lower latencies and smarter use of player controls to provide a smooth viewing experience to customers also helps with smoother traffic patterns as fewer customers are repeating the funnel, which can cause a lot of ripple through the whole system with it’s retries and consequent additional events that pass through the system.

    Server Morghulis (aka Client Resiliency)

    The Hotstar client applications have been downloaded multiple hundred million times so far. Suffice to say that when game time comes, millions of folks are using Hotstar as their primary screen. Dealing with such high concurrency means that we cannot think of a classical coupling of client with the back-end infrastructure.

    We build our client applications to be resilient and gracefully degrade. While we maintain a very high degree of availability, we also prepare for the worst by reviewing all the client : server interactions and indicating either gracefully that the servers were experiencing high load or by a variety of panic switches in the infrastructure. These switches indicate to our client applications that they should ease off momentarily, either exponential back-off or sometimes a custom back-off depending on the interaction so as to build a jitter into the system that provides the back-end infrastructure time to heal.

    While the application has many capabilities, our primary function is that to render video to our customers reliably. If things don’t look completely in control, specific functionality can degrade gracefully and keep the primary function un-affected.

    Ensure that the primary function always works and ensure resiliency around server touch-points. Not every failure is fatal, and using intelligent caching with the right TTL’s can buy a lot of precious headroom. This is an important tenet.
  • Hotstar and Akamai create internet history

    Hotstar and Akamai create internet history

    MUMBAI: Hotstar, India’s leading premium streaming platform, leveraged Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the world’s most trusted and largest cloud delivery platform, to create streaming history on 22 May 2018 during the first qualifier match of VIVO IPL 2018. The match between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Chennai Super Kings attracted an unprecedented 8.26 million peak concurrent viewers tuning in simultaneously to witness the nail-biting finish, thereby breaking all previous records in online video streaming across the world. Over four hours, more than 26 million viewers tuned into Hotstar to watch the match.

    The previous record is believed to have been established by YouTube when Felix Baumgartner’s space jump in 2012 saw a peak of just over 8 million concurrent viewers tuning in to watch the event.

    Hotstar’s steady march into the record books started in 2017, when it recorded a peak concurrency of 4.8 million simultaneous viewers during the India-Pakistan ICC Champions’ Trophy final match, the highest in APAC at the time. The opening week of Vivo IPL 2018 upended this record with 5.5 million concurrency recorded on 10 April, followed by the next peak of 7.1 million on 25 April. The peak seen during the ICC Champion’s Trophy Final was nearly doubled during the VIVO IPL 2018 match between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Chennai Super Kings. With all sports streaming records broken, the next frontier was to go beyond just sports and raise the bar on streaming as a whole.

    Commenting on the historic development, Hotstar, CEO, Ajit Mohan added, “Four years ago, when we started streaming IPL, 8 million viewers would have been a big deal for the whole tournament. Crossing 8 million simultaneous users is a testimony to the power of VIVO IPL and evidence of the abiding passion of cricket fans. It is not just about the scale, however. It is about reinventing the sports experience online and constantly raising the bar. Our objective is to create the future of social TV. And we are proud that the tech that we are building is expanding the frontiers of online video.​”

    Akamai Technologies, Vice President, Media, APJ, Parimal Pandya commented, “Over the past year and a half, Hotstar has broken several online viewing records at the regional level. A contributing factor was technology from Akamai playing a role in bringing down the latency drastically so users can enjoy the live action almost as well as people watching it on their television. This is a clear indicator of the fact that, driven by technology from Akamai, live sporting action can be enjoyed on a smartphone which is the new frontier for audience engagement and growth.”

    VIVO IPL 2018, now in its final week, to be concluded on Sunday 27 May 2018, is the fifth year that Hotstar is streaming the tournament. The current edition of the tournament marks a sharp upgrade in viewing experience, with additions like WatchN’Play, a skill based game that tests the cricket fans’ knowledge as they watch, VR to really immerse the viewer in the on-field action, and feeds available in 8 languages.