Tag: Akamai

Synamedia partners with Akamai to speed up pirate takedowns

KOLKATA: Independent video software provider Synamedia has integrated its security and watermarking solutions with Akamai to protect customers’ streaming OTT content.

Synamedia’s solutions now detect and disrupt pirate streams in real time over the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform and redirect viewers to legitimate services. The integration of Synamedia’s Streaming Piracy Disruption (SPD) managed service with Akamai’s platform gives rights holders and content owners an added layer of anti-piracy enforcement and revenue protection.

The digital and OTT streaming industry has expressed concerns over the epidemic of piracy, which has only grown more widespread and resilient over the past year as demand for content shot up with people cooped up in their homes and production and cinema halls shut down. The collaboration between Synamedia and Akamai is aimed at dealing a decisive blow to pirates who engage in broadcast content theft.

Taking advantage of Synamedia’s intelligence-first security approach, Synamedia EverGuard counter-piracy operations center predicts which client devices will be used by pirates to leak content and determines the effectiveness of different actions, including quarantining agents and prosecution, to cause maximum pain. SPD uses resilient watermark injection and verification technologies as well as smart agents embedded in the headend and client devices to deliver the industry’s most comprehensive end-to-end solution.

“When illegal streams are disrupted, particularly during live sports, viewers tend to give up on pirated streams and switch to legal services. Akamai’s platform is used by many of our pay-TV and OTT customers and this integration will strengthen their ability to combat piracy at speed and scale,” Security Synamedia senior vice president Yael Fainaro said.

Akamai media product management Amit Kasturia explained the network’s scalable and secure edge watermarking integrations are intended to help customers identify pirates’ attempts to capture content and minimise illegal distribution. “The seamless integration of Synamedia’s intelligence-led security solutions with our platform can offer customers a quicker way of shutting down illegal streams, which is critical for the success of streaming rights for live sports,” he added.

Synamedia is now a member of Akamai’s Media Technology Partner program. The program is designed to foster interoperability, and referral agreements between Akamai and best-of-breed third-party solutions providers to give customers a range of options in selecting workflow components that work seamlessly with Akamai solutions deployed on its platform.

Synamedia has 30+ years’ experience in video security solutions, and developed the longest unhacked solution on the market. Since its inception, Synamedia’s operational security team has brought many criminals to the attention of law enforcement officials. Synamedia protects approximately $70 billion in operator revenues every year.

January 12, 2021
MX Player & Akamai partner to deliver seamless viewing experience

KOLKATA: MX Player has partnered with Akamai Technologies to provide its increasing user base in India with a seamless digital experience.

In 2020, MX Player was ranked by App Annie as the no.1 streaming app in India and the onset of the pandemic saw the platform witness not just a massive boost in viewership, but also new subscribers, and a newer audience. This accelerated growth heightened MX Player’s need for infrastructure that could support the scale and availability of the app across different networks and locations.

MX Player found Akamai’s world class media delivery solution to be the right choice in order to deliver a high-quality viewing experience to their customers across different cities. The enhancement in performance and user experience was particularly pronounced in the case of MX TakaTak, a popular short video platform, that has seen a rapid surge of users, with a large portion of them coming from tier-2 and tier-3 towns.

According to Redseer, online content consumption in India grew by 35 per cent in April 2020 compared to January 2020. It further stated that short-form video content consumption recorded the most significant jump during the lockdown.

MX Player COO Vivek Jain said, “In the last couple of months, our user base has increased exponentially. The demand to consume content on the go and the need for virtual entertainment amongst the middle, mass, mobile, millennial audience in India is growing faster than ever before. MX Player has seen more than 7X jump in time spent on the app. “

“Even MX TakaTak, which we recently launched, crossed one billion video views per day within a month from launch and has quickly become the market leading app in the short video category. We have always obsessed about best-in-class video load times. Akamai is a pioneer in Edge distribution and its presence particularly in tier-2 and tier-3 towns has helped us deliver an unmatched viewing experience for our customers across India’s mega cities as well as the hinterlands,” Jain added.

Akamai media and carrier section India sales head Mitesh Jain noted that unprecedented demand for content coupled with rapidly evolving user behaviour poses a challenge for apps trying to ensure high-quality viewing experience across a complex network topology.

“We are glad to have partnered with MX Player to help them scale the user base and step up to conform with user expectations of evolving Indian consumers. Given MX player’s ambition, I am sure that this is just a start and we will be accomplishing many more milestones together,” Jain said.

January 5, 2021
Akamai names Parimal Pandya as MD-APJ to drive growth & innovation

NEW DELHI: Akamai Technologies has appointed Parimal Pandya as managing director for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), in addition to his current role as VP of media and carrier sales, APJ. Pandya assumed this additional role on 1 October 2020.

In his expanded role as MD for APJ, Pandya will lead the business across the region in support of the company’s growth and innovation goals. As a seasoned leader with a keen focus on innovation and digital transformation, he has overseen the growth of some of the largest gaming and social media platforms, and facilitated Akamai’s collaboration with the biggest technology companies in the world.

Pandya began his career at Akamai in 2003 as a product manager at the company’s Cambridge office in the U.S., where he was instrumental in the launch of Akamai’s web performance product line. He moved to Bengaluru in 2009, where he led the expansion of the company’s India operations and global mid-market go-to-market teams. Pandya extended his focus to Akamai’s business in APJ by setting up the company’s carrier strategy group, subsequently delivering key strategic partnerships with major telecom operators across Asia Pacific and Japan which paved the way for future growth and expansion.

Covid2019 has disrupted the smooth functioning and streamlined workflow of many companies, says Pandya. “Individuals and enterprises across a spectrum of industries have been compelled to quickly transform the ways they work and conduct day-to-day business—and the Akamai platform is playing a key role in this new work paradigm.”

Akamai Technologies co-founder and CEO Tom Leighton called Pandya a proven leader who is known for bringing teams together and delivering results. “Parimal’s successful track record of driving growth for our media and carrier business in the region make him an ideal choice for the post,” he added.

Prior to joining Akamai, Pandya founded and operated an e-commerce venture in New York City, and worked for a period in venture capital. He holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York. Currently, he is based in Hong Kong.

October 7, 2020
PallyCon partners with Akamai to offer forensic watermarking protection to OTT Content

MUMBAI: PallyCon, a global leader in digital rights management and forensic watermarking services, has teamed up with Akamai, the intelligent edge platform, to secure streaming video content against piracy and illegal distribution.

A large number of OTT distributors, studios, and sports rights holders use Akamai for delivering streaming services. To help protect their customers against attempts by pirates to steal their content and minimize their means of distribution, Akamai has developed a comprehensive security ecosystem of anti-piracy providers through its Technology Partner Program. By combining its own capabilities with those of key partners it’s able to address many of the common practices used by pirates such as credential theft, system hacking, rebroadcasting of stolen streams, and VPN abuse.

PallyCon’s forensic-watermarking service ensures that a content creator can trace the source of piracy of streaming content. Working in tandem with a DRM service – PallyCon offers it as SaaS – forensic watermarking helps creators identify leakages right to the last user who leaks or consumes the content illegally.

INKA Entworks global business head Govindraj Basatwar says, “We consider it a privilege to partner with Akamai. It has created an innovative integration of forensic-watermarking vendors in its ecosystem, which will boost the fight against piracy. PallyCon has started offering a scalable forensic-watermarking solution to customers using the Akamai edge.”

Using PallyCon’s forensic watermark service, Akamai users can identify illegal video streams at the relevant leakage points. Once a client has identified illegal distribution, it can proceed to take further action against the violators as per its legal policies.

Commenting on the integration of forensic-watermarking vendors in the Akamai ecosystem, Amit Kasturia, senior manager of media product management at Akamai, says, “Akamai clients spend millions of dollars creating and acquiring content. They bank on us to protect their revenue streams against piracy. By integrating PallyCon’s forensic watermarking solution into our network, we have bolstered our security ecosystem further. PallyCon’s solution is winning the trust of content creators by helping them identify illegal users of their offerings.”

To help clients across different sectors and sizes – from studios to regional distributors – PallyCon offers a range of subscription models. The forensic watermarking service comes clubbed with its DRM service, which a client can try for free for a month. PallyCon’s forensic watermarking suite can be applied to video streams of all resolutions.

May 26, 2020
Preventing content piracy in the cloud era

Sacred Games Season 2, an original Indian series by Netflix, ended up being one of the many victims of rampant content piracy in India. The series was available on illicit websites and other digital mediums on the internet even before the original content was made available.

The online TV and movie revenue lost to piracy in India is expected to reach USD 3.08 billion by 2022. This is a development we’ve seen not just India; revenue losses and lost monetisation opportunities by virtue of content theft and piracy continue to plague the global media & entertainment industry today. The cost of global online streaming piracy will hit $52 billion by the year 2022, according to a report by Digital TV Research. Nearly 190-billion visits were made to illegal piracy websites in 2018, of which 17.4 Billion were from the US, followed by the Russian Federation (14.5 Billion), Brazil (10.3 Billion); with India (9.6 Billion) and the United Kingdom (5.75 Billion) as the other top nations affected by online piracy. In terms of the type of content pirated, almost 50 percent of the visits to pirated websites were for television shows, and 20 percent of visitors were looking for the latest movies.

The widespread availability of online video content, instigated by factors like ubiquitous high-speed data connectivity, hyper-connected devices and living room experiences – are all playing their part in the explosion of video content consumption online, making it lucrative for pirates to steal a portion of the pie. As more and more viewers are moving to mediums and platforms that are digitally native, circumvention of subscriptions and geo-based restrictions to access premium content with no loss in experience or quality, motivates end-users to embrace pirated means of consuming content.

There are multiple ways in which digital content piracy exists today. There might be genuine users who are paying for the content but start sharing their credentials with other users. Pirate sites might sign up with content providers in a single-user model but then start re-distributing content. There are sophisticated piracy tools like re-encoders or stream ripping tools being used to grab content and redistribute it. Another popular content piracy technique is circumventing geo-restriction by using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and proxy servers to mask unauthorized IP addresses to make it look like an authorized IP which might lead to media companies breaching contractual obligations with their rights' holders due to content viewership from unauthorised regions.

According to a survey of almost 200 media technology influencers and decision-makers conducted by Akamai in 2018, attacks on media organisations are widespread and of different types. Service downtime, caused by DNS based attacks or DDoS attacks were listed as an important area of concern, the second most important was protecting premium video content.

For media & entertainment organisations, monetising premium video content and protecting it against unauthorised usage and distribution is key to a successful video strategy. Based on the survey, organisations face a few challenges in implementing technologies to prevent content piracy.

The Akamai content protection portfolio is designed in a way to help media organisations defend themselves against critical threat vectors so that organisations can focus on their core, which is creating and managing content; while offloading content distribution and the threats related to safeguarding it. The portfolio aims at helping organisations prevent content piracy, unauthorised access and maximise monetisation opportunities. The portfolio provides a few key capabilities including user authentication, access revocation, geo-restrictions, encryption, watermarking and securing last mile delivery using Standard TLS.

Security in the media & entertainment industry means securing the entire content delivery path from the content provider to the viewer – adopting a holistic approach to security. Any media company that wants to serve or distribute its content to these end-users or viewers needs to protect itself from attacks that can originate at multiple points across the content delivery path. Content consumption has changed over the last few years, and in that, it has shaped the next wave of technology, and how we interact with it. If viewers believe that Content is King, companies should invest well to protect it.

(The author is product marketing manager, media and entertainment, APJ, Akamai. The views expressed are his own and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.)

December 2, 2019
15-20% of total WC viewership for SonyLiv was female

MUMBAI: FIFA World Cup (WC) 2018 has surpassed the expectation of Sony Pictures Networks India’s digital arm, SonyLiv, by miles in terms of viewership numbers and brand associations. It had just 15 brands on board in the first week but completed the event with a total of 36.

The matches falling into India’s primetime slot may have worked well in its favour giving it 70 million online viewers. Surprisingly, 15-20 per cent of viewership was contributed by female fans and the remaining by male supporters.

SPN head-digital business Uday Sodhi noticed some interesting things in this WC. “Firstly, India has become a big football nation globally on digital. Secondly, in the first couple of days of the tournament, we crossed the numbers of entire Euro 16. We have seen a huge growth in terms of advertiser and the approach of brands to digital advertising.” In Euro 16, Sony had just five to seven brands.

Sodhi believes that football has finally arrived in India. The second big event after Olympics garnered eyeballs from Kerala, Bengal, Pune, Ahemdabad and Lucknow apart from the metro cities. “In terms of traffic and concurrency, we are among the top two platforms in Asia Pacific and Japan, according to Akamai,” he added.

“The overall complexity that we were handling was very high because of six language feeds, two streams, paid and free feed (with five minutes delay). On an average, a viewer spent close to 15-16 minutes per match and the finals registered 1.5-2 million concurrent users on the digital platform.”

There were a few hiccoughs. The first match of the WC didn’t go as planned. Instead of a five-minute delay on the ad-supported feed, there was a slightly longer delay of 10-15 minutes. But it picked and surged forward.

July 19, 2018
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.

May 25, 2018
CDN players work for efficient content delivery experience

MUMBAI: Internet users in India are growing exponentially, riding on the back of cheap smartphones and low-cost data plans. By 2020, there will be 730 million internet users in India. This makes content delivery networks (CDN) crucial and the need to be efficient.

In India, it’s a good time for CDN players to be in the market. The traffic growth is turning CDN into a necessity. While a major chunk of it is coming from tier III cities, rural areas where traditionally internet connection has not been good, Akamai media country sales manager Sandeep Reddy believes better in-depth optimisation can provide an enhanced experience to users at the fringes.

“In India, we have been seeing massive growth. It’s poised to grow 30 to 35 per cent year on year. That’s one of the fastest growth you can see in the world,” Limelight Networks country head Gaurav Malik says.

Several big CDN players provide added services. While some focus on fastest delivery of content, others highly emphasise on security to protect customer data. Along with digital growth, the CDN market also needs to ensure seamless viewer experience. If your content takes more than a few seconds to load, 50 per cent of the traffic is likely to bounce off. The need of the hour is faster delivery.

Brightcove, a leading technology company in the field, started in 2004, has stuck to a B2B model since inception. Though it is not directly aligned to customers, the company’s obsession lies with end-user experience. Brightcove media head Greg Armshaw emphasises on the importance of fast delivery. Without claiming to be the fastest players, he says that engineers are working to focus on faster video loading and playing.

Brightcove has its own proprietary software named Context Aware Encoding. “It’s a machine learning process where we examine the content of each frame of the video. We analyse based on past approvals and if we need to save more information about that frame,” says Armshaw.

While cost of delivery is one of the biggest expenditures, Armshaw assures the company can save between 30-50 per cent of it with quality products. One of the features is to look at every frame, encode them and this allows for savings too.

Among other CDN players and large competitors, he thinks this is one feature which adds value to Brightcove’s existence in the space. Recently, Young Hollywood reduced its operational cost using this technology. Its over the top (OTT) channel, Young Hollywood TV, realised a 23 per cent saving in storage and a 35 per cent saving in bandwidth.

Despite the improvement in infrastructure, technological hurdles mar the outcome. One of the challenges, as Malik highlights, is that planned events can be executed better while unforeseen instances like the Ram Rahim row in Punjab can cause hassles. In case of these unplanned events, CDN can face a problem.

With more OTT apps than ever, content discovery for users can be a challenge. Analytics can be the only way out to provide users with great recommendations by getting constant feedback of users’ experience.

Reddy thinks analytics can pave the way for good recommendation by analysing user habit. “Analytics is a growth area for understanding customers and harvesting information about people’s consumption,” Armshaw says.

“Analytics of data is the core of any business, whether its OTT or not. That gives the visibility on what’s working and what’s not. It tells you how people are reacting and adapting to it so that you can improve, learn and improvise on that. It’s a constant feedback,” Malik adds.

Reddy also mentions ‘deeper focus on analytics’ as one of the company’s new initiatives. “We have a tool called cloud test which helps to determine and understand user interaction with the site. End user performance monitoring is a big area of focus,” he says.

CDNs are known to also be targets of piracy such as stealing of live stream and encoding it. However, some players believe streaming is not the primary root of piracy and creating a pay-worthy environment on platforms can curb the problem.

To lessen the security threat also, CDN companies have various tools. While Limelight Networks uses a private network to manage everything across data centres, Akamai has a platform-based service to protect customers from attacks. The company also tries to provide smarter authentication protocols so that only legitimate users can avail the content.

Content creators are churning out more to gobble and CDN players are there to provide users with better experience. But today, CDN companies are indulging in more services. The more good content and technology will go hand in hand, more users will be attracted to the digital content.

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April 16, 2018
Nasscom projects 730mn Net users in India

NEW DELHI: There were 391.50 million Internet subscribers as on 31 December 2016. The government has said it is expected that number of internet users will increase in the country owing to fast adoption of digital technology,.

Minister of communications Manoj Sinha told the Parliament that the National Telecom Policy-2012 envisages 600 million broadband connections by 2020 at minimum 2 Mbps download speed.

According to National Association of Software & Services Companies (NASSCOM) –Akamai report launched on 17 August 2016 regarding “The Future of Internet in India”, 730 million Internet users are anticipated in the country by 2020.

The government has allocated 965 MHz spectrum through auction in October 2016 to various telecom service providers for access services. This will enable the telecom service providers to roll out 3G and 4G services which will facilitate proliferation of high speed internet facility.

The BharatNet project is also being implemented to provide 100 Mbps broadband connectivity to all Gram Panchayats (approximately 2,50,000) in the country by using an optimal mix of underground fibre, fibre over power lines, radio and satellite media.

March 27, 2017
How Digital India will foster VoD growth: Spuul Global CEO

MUMBAI: India is a market with enormous potential for digital services, and it is expected to continue to grow with a very rapid speed and much higher than many other markets in the world, as far as data traffic is concerned. In fact, some estimates suggest while the rest of the world will grow 10-12 times maximum when it comes to data traffic, India will grow 17 times.

In the West, people went from a single TV to multiple TVs and then to the mobile, but India seems to be jumping directly from TVs to watching content on their smartphones, leaning on improving mobile internet to consume digital content. TV is becoming a static screen in your living room, while consumers are looking forcustomized viewing experiences.

With a number of video on demand platforms coming together the Indian consumer is all set to enjoy a wide variety of video content as each VOD platform has something unique to offer to its viewers.

Having said that,the online video space provides a fantastic platform for experimenting with various content formats. It isn’t constrained by the economics of satellite television. A show prepared for the web, doesn’t necessarily need to be in ~30 minute slots. It could be a few minutes or a few hours. This has allowed content creators to experiment with multiple formats.

At the same time there is a clutch of factors that could play spoilsport in the near future. Despite falling costs of technology and production, producing content is prohibitive and added to that distribution costs too are significant. The state of the broadband speed remainsspotty.

A July report by Akamai, a US-based content delivery and cloud services provider, suggests that India had an average 3.5 Mbps Internet speed. Yet, it was the lowest average Internet speed in the Asia Pacific region.

On consumption of data, the report said the country is on the cusp of significant growth in data traffic driven by rising data users as well as growing data usage per user.For 2016, the number of smartphone users in India is estimated to reach 204.1 million, with the number of smartphone users worldwide forecast to exceed 2 billion users by that time.

Watching a movie of 2-3 hours could take up about 200-250 MB of data, which costs around INR 40-50. For VOD platforms to succeed in India costs of 4G have to come down drastically.The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said that there are 1.06 billion wireless telecom subscribers in the country. The Cellular Operators Association of India, said, the number of 3G users in India is expected to more than double (to 330 million) and 4G to grow by over 10 times (to 42 million) from 2015 base till 2017. 4G will be a game changer in the way video is being consumed in the country.

The way consumers consume information and entertainment will change from TV to video on demand over multiple devices, but one thing that won’t is that content will continue to be king. Because how the content is consumed depends on ease, convenience of the video on demand platforms and ultimately technology will decide who gets the most viewership. India though has room for many video on demand services to survive and thrive because preferences and tastes of viewers vary from region to region.

The writer of this article is Subin Subaiah. The views expressed here are personal, and Indiantelevision.com need not necessarily subscribe to them

February 6, 2017