ITV

Tag: CDN

  • Major websites crash after global internet outage

    KOLKATA: A global internet outage hit social media, government, and news websites on Tuesday morning. Many renowned news outlets including the Financial Times, the New York Times, CNN and Bloomberg News were down.

    According to some media reports, a technical glitch in a private CDN (Content Delivery Network) caused the outage. “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message flashed across affected websites. Amazon.com Inc’s retail website also suffered due to the outage, even as Twitch experienced issues. Several Reddit users also reported issues with the platform. Ireland, Germany, United Kingdom, United States, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore were the countries mainly impacted by the outage.

    Some reports have traced the problem to Fastly, a cloud computing services provider that runs an “edge cloud”, which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with sudden bursts in traffic. “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” Fastly said in an error message. Later, it announced on its status page that the issue was identified and a fix has been implemented.

  • DE-CIX India’s cloud exchange service to benefit M&E industry

    DE-CIX India’s cloud exchange service to benefit M&E industry

    MUMBAI: While cloud computing practices are taking on the online ecosystem, neutral internet exchange operator DE-CIX India launched its DirectCloud Exchange service in the country recently.  It is looking forward to go beyond peering and aims to bring its customers more value for the service.

    In an interaction with Indiantelevision.com, DE-CIX India vice-president and national head Sudhir Kunder spoke on the new cloud exchange service along with other industry-related issues.

    Edited excerpts:

    Which is your target market for the new service?

    Geographically, four locations across India: Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and Bombay being the hub. As for the target audience it would typically be the higher level of SMBs, SMEs and enterprises because this is where the cost optimisation is going to come. Once you have a larger picture emerging when companies would want to optimise their costs, you will see a lot of adoption in that category and if you see the kind of growth as India is concerned and the requirement of the enterprise to be on multi-cloud the solution we are probably going to catch up soon on the global trends where at least 22 per cent of the enterprises are already on a multi-cloud adoption.

    Are you looking at the M&E sector?

    What we intend to do going forward is to look at the enterprise from a verticalised standpoint. Create a use-case scenario for vertical saying how I am relevant to each vertically because, by being in the ICT space, one is aware of the kind of consumption models that you have across verticals. So there will be a proposition for BSFI, manufacturing and distribution, media and entertainment, etc. In media and entertainment, you will have the entire ISP and OTT segments.

    How are you doing your service promotion?

    When we are referring to the cloud business, what typically happens is the outreach to a minuscule extent will be through the existing ISP because some of them have a huge customer base already in the SMB and enterprise segment. They might not be the primary service providers, but from a redundancy factor, a lot of them are already entrenched in those accounts. So for them, it is already a plug and play kind of an affair, where with the right kind of digital marketing and outreach program, we will be in a position to reach out to the right decision-makers and he just has to know. Since he's already on my access port, all that he needs to do is an order for anything between as small as 10 Mb to as big as one gig or 10 gigs of cloud-connected. We have already generated a base, which is entrenched in the enterprise segment. So what that does for me is these organisations themselves have the reach. All we are trying to be doing with them is to help them monetise their relationship within the existing accountabilities that they have. And we will probably have one of the most lucrative distributions, margin setups and the entire programme; from an ecosystem point of view that the industry would have seen in terms of how much do they put in and what is it the work they get in response. Miniscule amount of inputs from their side is going to lead to a lot of direct and collateral benefits. So if you have to make it a very simplistic channel, which I call from our terminology point of view as a distribution model, that’s the way to go in terms of b2b distribution for cloud service.

    How did you cope with the sudden spike during the Covid2019 period?

    I don't know whether I should call it foresight or whatever but in January, we started looking at our traffic and our network in a microscopic manner. I would do complete slicing and dicing of anybody who's consuming more than 75 per cent of the subscribed port services. I knew what was happening as a real time basis, and this would get me into a review mode. So we already had a program going on whereby there was an outreach happening to my customer saying that, "Hey, guys, you know what you are at 80 per cent and this is what your current consumption is." During Covid2019, it was like a battlefield environment , initially, the fear was very high. Today, the capacity between data centre to data centre right at the onset of Covid2019, has been increased to a capacity level of about 400 odd gigs which can travel from any data centre to any data centre in the bar. This, along with the customer outreach program helped me to ensure that I was able to serve the traffic surge that I saw on my platform. So just to give you some numbers – for OTT traffic we have seen about 258 per cent growth since February, CDN traffic saw 54 per cent growth and gaming traffic increased by 150 per cent.

  • COSMOTE TV’s new streaming service uses Synamedia’s private CDN

    COSMOTE TV’s new streaming service uses Synamedia’s private CDN

    MUMBAI: OTE Group’s pay-TV platform COSMOTE TV, the market leader in Greece, has gone live with Synamedia’s Media Streamer CDN platform for its new streaming service.

    Synamedia’s virtualized Media Streamer platform is deployed on a distributed private cloud architecture, providing high-performance edge caching and streaming through a network of servers deployed locally across cities throughout Greece. The CDN is managed by OTE.

    Media Streamer is a cost-effective private CDN platform with the flexibility to start small yet scale massively to distribute terabits per second (Tbps) of live, on-demand, and time-shifted video without compromising bandwidth or latency. This was important as COSMOTE TV streams exclusive live sports events in 4K and needs to maintain a high-quality viewing experience even during peak periods.

    Media Streamer’s intuitive dashboards displaying real-time analytics on consumer data and network operations help COSMOTE TV react promptly to any customer service issues.

    The COSMOTE TV streaming service includes live and on-demand content and selected sports programming in 4K for the first time in Greece. Subscribers have access to multi-screen content across 70 digital channels, including 16 premium COSMOTE sport, cinema and history channels. The service features personalized recommendations based on viewing behaviour and preferences to ensure viewers can always find something to watch, helping to boost engagement.

    Synamedia Media Streamer is a private CDN platform that gives service providers far greater control over their service quality, costs and operations than is possible with a public CDN. Scaling smoothly to support high-demand, appointment-to-view programmes, it offers service providers a cost-effective, open platform for streaming live, VOD, time-shifted TV and Cloud DVR Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) video. Media Streamer is available as a managed service or can be run and managed on-premise by the service provider. Building on more than 10 years of CDN expertise, Synamedia’s CDN solutions are trusted by over 30 service providers worldwide to deliver high-quality first-screen TV and Internet OTT video. 

    Julien Signes, (pictured), senior vice president and general manager, video network at Synamedia, said, “As the pay-TV market leader in Greece with ambitions to live stream a growing number of 4K sports content, OTE needed a CDN platform with terabit per second scalability. The virtualised Media Streamer deployment allows OTE to offer subscribers the ultimate appointment-to-view experience even during peak periods; and with detailed analytics on the state of the network, OTE can really boost operational efficiencies.”

    Synamedia’s video network portfolio powers premium quality broadcast and broadband video for more than 1,000 operators worldwide and 100 million daily viewers. Its video distribution, processing and delivery services and solutions create compelling live multi-screen experiences, enable software-defined video processing and unify operations. The award-winning portfolio also touts a cloud-ready, converged broadcast and broadband end-to-end ATSC 3.0 offering and low latency solutions for live video. Its virtualized Digital Content Manager (DCM) features live transcoding to multiple bit rates and formats, scalable video functions, and best-in-class video quality all aimed to deliver infinite entertainment. 

  • OTT players eye CDNs for optimised video delivery on mobile devices

    OTT players eye CDNs for optimised video delivery on mobile devices

    MUMBAI: There's no doubt that content is the most important component for over-the-top (OTT) platforms and publishers. But what has been put on the backburner is how platforms deliver content to our devices; i.e, the role of content delivery network (CDN) in the online ecosystem. During the Covid2019 lockdown, all OTT platforms and news websites have seen 2X-3X growth on average and CDNs have ensured uninterrupted consumer experience. As smartphone usage shoots up with more interactive content, CDNs need to innovate as well.

    Snapdeal CTO Prashant Parashar said during a virtual roundtable organised by Indiantelevision.com that CDNs have not focused highly on mobile devices while Indian consumers mostly consume content on smartphones. According to him, it is the right time for CDN players to innovate on the mobile side of videos and images and optimise for the newer economy in the post-Covid2019 world.

     “A lot of time we experience that video delivery is not as optimised as you would expect for mobile platforms. As new content is not being created, content consumption has spread out quite a bit. As a result, it is putting pressure on CDNs in terms of efficiency. Hence, it has become tough managing traffic,” Viacom18 Digital Ventures technology and engineering head Mohit Srivastava added.

    Limelight Networks product management senior director Michael Milligan also acknowledged that serving video to mobile devices have certain challenges. If a user is on fixed broadband, the bandwidth can be anticipated. But in terms of mobile connection, bandwidth as well as the latency may change unpredictably.

    “So from a Limelight point of view, we have done a lot to optimise how we can sustain network condition changes in real-time. We have done a lot of work in CDN and HTTP streaming capabilities to be aware of bandwidth changes quickly and to work with our customers to make it easier as things like buffer rate have a huge impact in countries where people are watching mostly on mobile. We have optimised a lot of our CDN to do that,” he added.

    “It has to do with TCP optimisation and understanding a client’s bandwidth. There are various algorithms which you can use to understand real-time bandwidth. It's a very interesting technical challenge because as you are trying to measure the bandwidth, you are actually impacting how you do that. There are some algorithms that have been developed lately by companies like Google and Netflix to help do that in a way that’s more efficient. We look at the connection real-time and understand the bandwidth and latency simultaneously,” he elaborated.

    Asked as an OTT player what he expects from a CDN, Srivastava said that cost is very important because the amount of video OTT players deliver can really change the economics of the business. But beyond cost, everyone who delivers video is looking at the quality of service that they can expect of a CDN along with the kind of configurabilty and customisability that it provides because the video has multiple use cases. He mentioned that broadcast is an easier case to serve but as soon as it comes to peer-to-peer communication, it starts becoming a challenge. According to him, CDNs have not played that important role so far in the case of such communication.

     “For customers, we are looking to have specific types of applications they want to build for something specific. We have edge computing capabilities around the world. They can use it to deploy their application. When we specifically talk about low-latency types of communication, we do have a real-time screening application that we have rolled out. We provide the ability to share video with viewers anywhere around the world in less than a second,” Milligan responded.

    EPIC ON COO Sourjya Mohanty highlighted that the challenge of compression continues to exist. Milligan added that consumer appetite for quality goes up but at the same time they need to have a compression standard. He also stated that several compression tools have come into the market. Srivastava added that it’s not only about newer compression technologies being available but also be adaptable on client devices as well. Hence, CDNs still need to evolve and invest despite being an essential requirement for the online content ecosystem. 

  • Covid2019 a disruptor for digital content delivery

    Covid2019 a disruptor for digital content delivery

    MUMBAI: It's not easy to cope with the rising anxiety and uncertainty while sheltering-in-place. Fortunately, there is a huge amount of content available online that keeps everyone entertained and informed. With the exponential rise in content consumption, the tech teams of over-the-top (OTT) platforms and publishers have taken up important roles to serve consumer needs along with the help of content distribution networks (CDNs). However, the challenges of delivering content have risen during the Covid2019 crisis due to the overwhelming surge in consumption, a panel comprising industry experts during a virtual discussion agreed.

    The panelists included Viacom18 Digital Ventures technology and engineering head Mohit Srivastava, EPIC ON COO Sourjya Mohanty, The Indian Express CTO Amardeep Vishwakarma, Asianet News Media and Entertainment assistant director of technology Anoop Mohan, Quintype head of engineering Rashmi Mittal, Snapdeal CTO Prashant Parashar, Simsim CTO Gaurav Kalra, Limelight Networks product management senior director Michael Milligan, VideoTap founder and CEO N Dilip Venkatraman, Limelight Networks India sales director Ashwin Rao and Kavasam Konnect chief information and technology officer Koushik Ramani.

    The panel discussion, on the importance of CDN for data and video explosion in the post-Covid2019 world, was organised by Indiantelevision.com and moderated by its founder, CEO and editor-in-chief Anil Wanvari. 

    Srivastava said that consumption has gone up exponentially both for AVOD and SVOD models on VOOT; the latter has seen really skyrocketing growth.

    Mohanty also mentioned that its two OTT platforms have been doing really well. It has witnessed consumption going up 3-4x many days. He also added that along with more consumers, they have received more consumer insights too during this period.  

    Vishwakarma also added that traffic has increased 2x across its platforms. Although it's not inclined too much to video, people are consuming available static content on websites. 

    Mohan also spoke about a 2-2.5x growth across Asianet platforms. While it serves in seven languages, growth is occurring in each. It has also started producing Covid2019-related content to avoid fake news. 

    Mittal also added that the number of page views has doubled for its client publishers. On the other hand, Ramani said that it's leveraging social media platforms more as its OTT platform is not fully launched yet. 

    Snapdeal recently entered the video content space. Parashar said that during the lockdown, when non-essentials were not being shipped, it wanted to engage customers and started using video for that. Kalra, too, acknowledged that there has been an impact on the business as commerce is not happening. Hence, its focus has deviated more towards content.

    Parashar said that they have to put more efforts to deliver similar quality content at a lesser speed of data used by consumers. He brought up an important aspect that CDNs have not focused highly on mobile devices while Indian consumers mostly consume content on smartphones. According to him, it is the right time for CDN players to innovate on the mobile side of videos and images and optimise for the newer economy in the post Covid2019 world. 

    “A lot of time we experience that video delivery is not as optimised as you would expect for mobile platforms. As new content is not being created, content consumption has spread out quite a bit. As a result, it is putting pressure on CDNs in terms of efficiency. Hence, it has become tough managing traffic,” Srivastava added. Mohanty also agreed that this has been a key challenge: reduction of latency and better response time.

    Limelight Networks' Milligan noted that although smartphones are heavily dominating the Indian market, the Indian audience is also watching content on connected devices. “It's not only about the mobile experience, but content providers also have to think of connected devices. So, as a content distributor you have to find out how you can give the best experience on both,” he added.

    Mohan also revealed that as Asianet users are in tier-III cities and rural areas, where consumers use a lower version of Android, it created a multi-CDN strategy. It reached out to different CDNs to see how it can optimise them and deliver content faster.

    However, publishers in the panel said that CDNs have been very helpful to deliver static content during this crisis taking up a lot of load. Their challenge was another: the decline in ad revenue despite growing consumption.

  • SugarBox Network’s seamless offline video delivery tech, ZEE5 integration & monetisation plans

    SugarBox Network’s seamless offline video delivery tech, ZEE5 integration & monetisation plans

    MUMBAI:  While data revolution has catalysed the emergence of over-the-top (OTT) platforms and e-commerce services in the last two-three years, there are still challenges existing in the ecosystem regarding data speed and patchy internet connectivity. SugarBox Networks is offering an alternative plan as it is a platform that enables a user to use mobile apps and digital services seamlessly without requiring internet connectivity. Although the OTT industry is of utmost importance for the company's business strategy, SugarBox is also looking at the e-commerce sector, educational apps and the gaming industry as well.

    SugarBox Networks CEO Rohit Paranjpe spoke to Indiantelevision.com on its product USP, business strategy, revenue models and target markets. Edited excerpts: 

    When did you start the journey? If you could tell us about your initial experience…

    We started the company in August 2016. We started out as very similar to what offline content distribution companies do but it was slightly different. What they do is they put some content on the box, they create an application that talks in the box so that you can watch the content on the application which is very similar to the system inside Jet Airways and Vistara Airlines.  What we always wanted to achieve was to not make a separate platform for this. The endeavour was to see if an OTT app really works from this box rather than having to create a separate platform altogether.

    In September and October of 2016, ZEE had an app called OZEE. We made OZEE work off the box. At that time what happened is any player who would install this box would be able to watch OZEE. But OZEE was a very simple OTT app. It did not really have all the layers. Then, we tried integrating with ZEE5. Then we realised there are far more complex equations. That’s what the product completely evolved to what it is today.

    How does your platform differentiate itself from others?

    So today if we want to describe it in a nutshell, we are something that can be attributed as a hyperlocal or intermittently-connected content distribution. What I really want to mean is, if you take an equivalent of an Akamai, which is CDN, what it does is deliver the content file for an OTT where everything else is coming from the OTT. Because we are hyperlocal we are doing two things, the first thing we have done is figured out an Akamai CDN server and miniaturising it so the CDN can work from anywhere in the world instead of requiring a data centre. It can fit in a bus, train, plane, hotel, mall, corporate park, residential complex etc. Anything that is a physical constraint, I can configure a box to support that place and install a CDN server. The second thing is because it is in a premise, I can expose the CDN server over what we call as LAN. So, the moment you expose it over a LAN, you are not dependent on the internet anymore because a device can talk to a CDN server without the help of the internet. Most importantly, today a CDN has to be permanently connected, so that is why it is put in a data centre. What we manage to do is we make a CDN run without being permanent.

    How does it benefit end consumers?

    As a product what this does is for consumers, it facilitates three things. A consumer who is using an OTT app that is using SugarBox, can now get unlimited, uninterrupted, unrestricted service. Today, the problem OTT industry is facing that the data speed is going down, so the buffers are getting worse and the availability of the data is going down. As I go beyond tier 1 cities, I don’t get 4G most of the times. SugarBox acts as a perfect alternative. It’s not about OTT only.

    How do you plan to monetise your product?

    Because we are a CDN, we monetise like one. A CDN typically works on how much data I am delivering to you. Data hosting and data delivery are the two main revenue models for us because we host the data for OTTS, we deliver data for OTTS. But in addition to this, we are right down to premise and consumers. We also act as a marketing channel and we also act as a payment gateway. I also act as a channel where people can communicate and acquire customers. And also I act as a channel wherein people can use my network to do billing, voucher distribution, offline payment, etc.

    Who are your major clients?

    Today, the only client we are live in the market is ZEE5 as an OTT app. We are in the process of integrating with a few more apps. These are not just OTT. We were keenly looking at certain industries such as e-commerce, education, gaming, etc. Gaming is a very large industry for us. The biggest problem with gaming is, if you look at the popularity of PUBG, everyone wants to play PUBG but the game needs uninterrupted connectivity and low-latency streaming. SugarBox can solve all of these problems. The fourth industry that is very important for us is hyperlocal communication.

    Which are the segments you are primarily targeting?

    The reality of the situation is every place is relevant. But if I started saying every place is relevant, I would not know where to go. So, typically our strategy has been threefold. We began with places that would give us the biggest bank in the market. By biggest bank I mean, where I can get the highest number of people with the least amount of effort. And in this fashion, something like transport has the biggest opportunity. We work with multiple metro bodies, railways and a lot of bus bodies. We also intend to work with a lot of multi-city bus operators where a person’s need for entertainment is also very high. The second thing is we have not gone into households yet but we did a lot of pilots in what we call a Basti (settlement). We also did a lot of deployments in places like hostels. The second foray which is now coming along is going right down to the grassroots being a part of the digital India movement, going right down to the panchayats, villages and seeing if we can power them there. The third is we come to establishments like five-star hostels, housing societies, complexes, corporate parks. We consume a lot of content when we are in the office, hence going to the office is more important.

    How do you strike deals usually?

    Sometimes, we only install SugarBox which is typically an 11-month long deal. There are lots of places where we install the entire wi-fi system. We work on a lease model of 3-5 years contract.

    How big your team is currently?

    Currently, we are about 90 people. We are now growing at 5-7 people per month. Out of the 90, 65 are tech guys. But we started scaling up our business functions. I think over the next 2-3 quarters there will be a substantial increase in the business function. So, the marketing team will be also bulked up.

    Going back to your initial days, how did you find investors?

    Investment part was actually completely unforeseen. What really happened is we had this idea and founders got together. As a pilot, we went to Goregaon station and we literally put our box and four access points. There were 200 movies on the box that we had. We went to vegetable vendors and promoted it. On average, people ended up watching the entire 200 movie collection. Realising the demand for content, we understood we need more content and that's why we need one of the major broadcasters. Zee said I am not giving you content unless I buy you out. They invested Rs 75 crore for 80 per cent stake and essentially acquired us in 2016 and we have been a subsidiary of the company since 2016.

    Who are your major competitors?

    The data delivery ecosystem in the world is $220 billion per year. From a competition standpoint, there is nobody in the world who does what we do. And which is the reason why we also have a few patent applications at a global level. One of the patents has been granted, another is expected soon. If you ask me who my competitor is, it is everyone who delivers data.

  • Urban-rural internet experience gap needs bridging: Gaurav Malik

    Urban-rural internet experience gap needs bridging: Gaurav Malik

    MUMBAI: The digital savvy generation not only yearns for good content but also a seamless viewing experience. A few seconds of latency or buffering can push the user to switch to other platforms.  Thus media companies, especially OTT platforms, are integrating with content delivery networks (CDN), content management systems and cloud platforms increasingly to improve efficiency. Though CDN is not strictly limited to video transmission, Limelight Networks country director Gaurav Malik thinks the demand for CDN in India is primarily driven by video proliferation.

    Consumers have endless option for online video content. Starting with international players like Amazon, Netflix to local players like ZEE5, SonyLiv, Hotstar, Voot and YouTube also can’t be forgotten. Hence longer loading time can lead to higher churn rate, smaller base along with decreasing ROI and loss of consumer confidence.

    For Limelight Networks, the global player in digital content delivery with 19 offices across the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific, the Indian market definitely holds a special position. Malik thinks not only Limelight but also the entire CDN market is being benefitted by rising OTT Consumption. Moreover, CDN’s role becomes more prominent when it comes to OTT consumption in rural areas.

    Though the demand for online video content has rapidly grown in rural areas, infrastructure in the areas still now lacks proper development. While the rural audience predominantly uses feature phones, that also under dissimilar network conditions, sometimes OTT platforms cannot offer the video formats supported by those devices. Moreover, the geographical distance of a device from the data centre can also cause video lag.

    “CDN players store every media file across their data centre as well as globally-distributed proxy servers. They then transmit this media file in the most ideal format after detecting the user’s device configuration. This is also done through a proxy server that is closest to the user, thereby preventing delays in transmission,” Malik comments explaining the importance of CDN players for seamless content delivery across the country.

    While talking about rural internet consumption, he highlights another important point that the internet experience for urban and rural users differ vastly, resulting in an urban-rural digital divide. “This gap needs to be bridged,” he said.

    “As such, the simultaneous growth of OTT platforms and CDNs have enabled the Indian online content market to expand massively during a short period of time, surmounting these challenges and enabling an optimal consumer experience,” he said.

    Consumer dissatisfaction can lead to more crucial problems like piracy along with increasing churn rate. Addressing common issues like poor video quality and lag, the problem can be countered to some extent. This aspect makes the role of CDNs more significant in the issue of curbing piracy by offering simplified video sharing and streaming video delivery.

    As the CDN market is growing, more players are also seizing opportunities. Akamai is one of the main competitors of Limelight in the video content delivery vertical and website acceleration vertical while the former entered the market early. On the front of cloud origin storage, Amazon’s S3 is the prime competitor of the company.

    Over last few years, India’s technological scenario has got better and better but cybersecurity still now remains one of the major areas of concern. While the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of cyber attackers are becoming more advanced as they are beginning to leverage sophisticated technologies, an average user in India is often not even familiar with the most basic cyber attacks.

    “We believe that information regarding cyber attacks, including the simplest of attacks, must be proactively shared to help each other in countering this prevailing cyber threat. There is also a ubiquitous need for a more concerted effort, including infrastructure building by the larger ecosystem to ensure greater digital security of users. From a technological perspective, the geographical distances between servers and users are also an area of opportunity,” he commented on the issue.

  • CDN players work for efficient content delivery experience

    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.

    Also Read :

    PTC Network embraces Amagi’s cloud technology for broadcast

    Isobar bags digital mandate for LIXIL water technology

    UC Browser Launches India’s first Women-only Mobile News Channel

  • ALTBalaji to stream content to millions through Amazon Cloudfront

    MUMBAI: Balaji Telefilms’ video streaming service ALTBalaji has partnered with Amazon Internet Services to use Amazon Cloudfront, a global content delivery network (CDN) service. ALTBalaji will have access to multi-petabytes of bandwidth in preparation of the launch of the ALTBalaji service in mid-April 2017.

    “We have built our platform to serve Indians globally and wanted a service provider who could support us efficiently across all geographies. We use Xstream Mediamaker as our backend OVP and video delivery is entirely hosted by and built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which already serves numerous global OTT platforms with over hundreds of millions of streams. Thanks to AWS, our platform setup is capable of handling high volumes of traffic and media content per week, and at the same time stream content to millions of our customers every day through Amazon Cloudfront,” said ALT Digital Media Entertainment COO Sunil Nair.

    “Currently, all ALTBalaji distribution partnerships that use the content syndication system, payment partners and wallets available on ALTBalaji, including other middleware infrastructure, run on AWS. We use Amazon Redshift for our data warehouse, which allows for analysis of all the customer interactions to arrive at actionable inferences. We have found Amazon Web Services to be a very reliable and responsive service provider at a time when we prepare to take ALTBalaji global,” added ALT Digital Media Entertainment head of product Ashish Bhansali.

    ALTBalaji leverages a vast range of tools offered by AWS to empower its video streaming platform. The anticipated interest in the video streaming platform and the original, premium and exclusive shows has prompted Balaji Telefilms to invest significantly in the latest cutting edge technology and infrastructure to ensure it provides a world class service to its global customer base.

    “Increasingly, various businesses around the world are deploying their critical workloads on AWS and going all-in so they can refocus on serving their customers best,” added Amazon Internet Services Private Limited MD Bikram Bedi. “We’re truly excited for ALTBalaji’s adoption of AWS, which will allow them to quickly and easily scale, reduce costs, improve security, and increase agility for even their most critical workloads.”

    ALTBalaji app will be launched with six new shows and will be followed with new shows every month for its viewers to binge watch. The content is created by some of the best talent of the Indian entertainment industry, including critically acclaimed directors and actors. The long illustrious list of artists comprises of Nagesh Kukunoor, Juhi Chawla, Nimrat Kaur, Rajkumar Rao, Hansal Mehta, Sakshi Tanwar, Ram Kapoor, Atul Kulkarni, Sameer Soni, Yudhishtar Urs, Dipannita Sharma Atwal, and more.

  • Limelight content delivery to simplify MultiTV’s ad insertion

    MUMBAI: Limelight Networks, a leader in digital content delivery, has announced that MultiTV is using Limelight’s Orchestrate Platform to bring high-quality online video to more than 40 million viewers across India.

    MultiTV, a leading provider of video streaming solutions for live TV and video on demand (VOD) in India, selected Limelight’s Orchestrate Platform to deliver exceptional video experiences to any device, anywhere. Leveraging Limelight’s global Content Delivery Network (CDN), the Orchestrate Platform now ensures that MultiTV customers get the reliability, consistency, quality, security and performance they demand.

    “Viewership in India is growing rapidly and there is complexity because of multiple devices, platforms and standards. At the same time, customers want world class reliability on a complex infrastructure at domestic price points,” said MultiTV founder Vikash Samota. “With Limelight, we have a global partner with excellent quality, capability and reach to help meet consumer expectations. This allows us to focus on our business – content acquisition and customer service.”

    MultiTV is also using Limelight Cloud Storage Services, making it easy for them to upload, replicate and manage large video libraries and quickly get content to viewers.

    “MultiTV is a pioneer in bringing next-generation OTT solutions to the fast-growing Indian market. To help develop this market, we’re determined to deploy our people, capabilities and capital at an accelerated pace,” said Limelight Networks CFO Sajid Malhotra. “After having doubled capacity in India last year, we expect to expand our capacity there this year by 5 to 10 times our 2016 capacity levels, and are prepared to assist and accelerate the adoption of CDN services in ways only we can.”

    MultiTV launched a Live Streaming solution using Limelight’s CDN with its proprietary technology that can detect commercials on live streams or VoD on any device. In addition, MultiTV provides technology solutions to solve the problems of video ad blockers. MultiTV helps broadcasters and content owners reduce infrastructure costs and provides solutions to assist with content monetization.

    Limelight empowers customers to better engage online audiences by enabling them to securely manage and globally deliver digital content, on any device.