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  • GEMS: Experts on the future of live streaming in India

    GEMS: Experts on the future of live streaming in India

    MUMBAI: Live streaming technology has come a long way since its inception, and live stream viewers in India are on the rise. From conventional mainstream sports to e-sports, gaming, and online entertainment, live streaming has been used successfully in India in order to bridge the gap between new technology and traditional formats. There are about two dozen streaming services in India like Twitch, Mixer, YouTube Gaming and Hitbox, to name a few; digital subscriptions had risen by 50 per cent to Rs 3.9 billion in 2017, and are expected to hit Rs 20 billion by 2020.

    Watch the session here:

    During GEMS 2020, industry leaders and experts – Pocket Aces founder Anirudh Pandita, Rooter Sports Tech founder & CEO Piyush Kumar, game caster Raman Chopra and The E-sports Club co-founder Ishan Arya – discussed the future of live streaming in India.

    The rise of live casting

    Live streaming took off when Hotstar began streaming the IPL live in 2016. It has quickly gained ground since then, with the rise of popular game casters like Dynamo, CarryMinati, ScoutOP, and others. What started as a hobby for these YouTubers soon helped them rack up millions of followers, while also spreading the live streaming bug far and wide.

    Raman Chopra started doing live streams by watching gamers on YouTube and Twitch. From being on the platform just two days a week, he started playing games every day. Initially, the gamer had a minuscule audience but it grew quickly and today, he has over 2 lakh 74 thousand followers. Just like Chopra, there are many gamers in India who have made live streaming a fully-fledged career.

    With the growing popularity of live streaming, digital entertainment companies like Pocket Aces are helping streamers build their careers and make a profit. Founder Anirudh Pandita said the company has witnessed a whole new breed of content creators cropping up. For instance, there has been a marked rise in the number of game casters on YouTube in the last few years.

    To cater to this segment, they’re focusing on building interactivity between gamers, streamers, and audiences through their digital streaming platform Loco. The challenges are many, but so are the rewards, and the team’s developing features and tools around it, said Pandita.

    Read more stories from GEMS

    “We know talent very well; we have built some of the biggest live streams on our platform. We also know how to monetize the content, that is how we have built Pocket Aces. It was a very natural offering that we could provide to game streamers,” he further added.

    Boosting viewership and scaling

    In the live streaming industry, tournament organisers play a big part when it comes to promoting competitive multiplayers. E-sports platform The E-sports Club believes in building an ecosystem where gaming is conducted in a sustainable and scalable manner that is ideal for both sponsors and players.

    The Esports Club co-founder Ishaan Arya highlighted that the viewership and excitement level around game casting has increased. As an e-sports organizer, Arya found out that the only way to encourage gamers to participate is by giving them real-life experiences. The company has grown from one event at a time to organising events on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

    Arya said: “The daily-weekly engagement for our content is growing massively. For instance, a campaign we did six months ago fetched us over half-a million views, and on the other hand, for another campaign that we did three weeks ago, we have already touched a million views.”

    ‘Live streaming next best option to real-life experience’

    On similar grounds, Rooter Sports Tech is a social platform that connects sports fans and engages them during live sporting events. It launched its audio and video feature with the start of IPL and world cup matches in 2019. And for the company, the streaming business has been building up for the past 18 months.

    Read more stories on Gaming Industry

    Rooter Sports Tech founder & CEO Piyush Kumar said 2019 was a challenging year as the company was deciding to move into sports content. He focussed on building a technology that works in real-time and streaming appeared to be the best option. The reaction of fans that happens in real-time is altogether a different experience because the maximum reaction comes when the match is live. 

    “YouTubers and Instagrammers used to do commentary here and there to develop some audio-video content so they reached out to us. We built a set up where there are ten languages and different sets of commentators, which has now grown to 100 current commentators while the match is ongoing. It all happened with the help of UGC (User Generated Content),” he explained.

    The Covid2019 pandemic led Kumar to think that the logical extension of this product would be to get into the gaming content. He pointed out that 70 to 80 per cent of content in gaming comes through streaming. He built the entire technology in the month of June, and in the last three months, it has scaled massively. The company has added 1.5 million users on its app on a monthly basis. 

    Monetising content: Experts debate

    In Kumar’s opinion, streaming has a well-developed monetisation model. 90 per cent of the revenue made by all the key players is through monetization and the rest 10 per cent is through advertising.

    “The system works by paying good publishers to create content for your platform. Firstly, we monetise through advertising which we started last year. So, we have a certain pipeline, brands and partnerships. Post this you provide them the distribution model; it could be on both apps and websites. Like Paytm and Samsung are some of your partners so we decide how to distribute them there. Eventually, take them to a level where they can monetise their content,” he said.

    He went on to say that though YouTube has lots of features, it is not customized for Indian audiences.

    Reports state that in the next three years, streaming will become 10 to 15 percent of revenue share of the overall gaming market. But more than monetisation, it is important to create engagement that attracts advertisers, put in Pandita.

    In a similar vein, Arya said that he believes it is about giving value to sponsors who are investing money. In fact, he has increased the prize money of players by 33 per cent to motivate them.

    The panellists came to a common conclusion: that e-sports and gaming is completely different from entertainment, where content could be published weekly. But when it comes to live streaming, the content needs to be created on a daily basis.

  • How Tata Communications is growing India’s e-sports market

    How Tata Communications is growing India’s e-sports market

    NEW DELHI: Heightened internet penetration and increasing base of smartphone users has helped generate a positive hype fore-sports and gaming in India. Amounting to 15 per cent of the global total, Indian gamers are leading the change in how gaming and tournaments are perceived in the country. The process has been further accelerated by the Covid2019 pandemic, which has drawn a significant chunk of Indian players and viewers online.

    Technology is playing a key role in this process and Tata Communications has been at the forefront of enabling these technical interventions. Elaborating on how the company is leading the next generation of e-sports and gaming community into the future with its robust systems, global head media and entertainment Dhaval Ponda addressed the audience on the day one of the first Games, E-sports & More Summit (GEMS), organised by Indiantelevision.com and AnimationXpress.com.

    He said, “We have the experience of working within the industry in the US, South Korea, and Europe. And we have worked with not only publishers but also technology platforms to individual gamers. We are looking at the gaming sector to evaluate the monetisation opportunities to give us a significantly better industry and significantly better experience as a community.”

    Tata Communications is now striving to provide technical support to the Indian e-sports and gaming community across three key areas: digital infrastructure, streaming platforms, and production and broadcasting.

    “Digital Infrastructure is something that is very close to us. The global submarine cable infrastructure is owned and operated by the Tata group. Currently, one-third of the internet infrastructure, from a consumption standpoint, is supported and managed by Tata Group and this can be the vehicle for every single aspect of viewing interaction; whether it’s streaming, or playing on mobile/iPad/PC and posting the content – the nearest CDN server will be able to do it. Also, these streams are in real-time,” he elaborated on the first aspect.

    He added that their servers are running on low latency that gives a niche experience to the viewers without any lag in video quality.

    Earlier this year, Tata Communication had also announced the launch of a 100G media backbone in collaboration with Swedish communication equipment maker, Net Insight, to enable broadcasters, sports organizations, OTT companies, and E-sports businesses to offer streams with up to 4K UHD resolution. Ponda promised to take it up to 8K UHD quality.

    The conglomerate is already involved in remote production of some of the biggest e-sports and gaming tournaments, from completely virtualising the production to getting it on cloud servers.

    “These are the points for people to consider where they can deliver a unique experience. An ultra-low-latency delivery is something that is absolutely vital for e-sports and gaming and this is something that will become a core component of the viewing experience. So by ultra-low latency, we are talking about a second or two-second delay between the event actually taking place and consuming it on a platform or video stream that we put live anywhere in the world,” he said.

    Additionally, Tata Communications has set its sights on creating an exceptional pre-game and in-game experience for players. “Our comprehensively managed security service also includes DDoS attack detection and mitigation along with web application firewall and unified threat management. It is very important for the publishers too because one DDoS attack in a big event will mean people going somewhere else,” he said.

     Ponda signed off by saying that things are looking pretty exciting when it comes to e-sports in India. “We’re attempting to take it mainstream, which means at par with tier-1 sports, whether it be football or rugby, or cricket.” 

  • GEMS: Designing the next level of gaming and e-sports in India

    GEMS: Designing the next level of gaming and e-sports in India

    NEW DELHI: The gaming and e-sports industry in India is quickly levelling up, Covid2019 possibly being the biggest booster augmenting its growing popularity amongst the masses and advertisers alike. With more and more people spending increased time on these virtual platforms promising thrill, excitement, fun, and also lucrative career opportunities, the industry is staring at a massive boom. 

    Albeit, there are some underlying issues related to data safety, screen timing, the nature of the games, and some peculiar nationalist sentiments to be addressed, and a growth plan to be charted that can offer the most to all stakeholders involved; from technicians to designers, to players, to aggregators, to advertisers, and to the viewers. 

    Indiantelevision.com and AnimationXpress.com will, therefore, be facilitating the process of direct communication amongst all the people involved in the process with its proprietary gaming, e-sports, and more summit, GEMS. The summit is co-powered by Tata Communications.

    The two-day virtual conference will bring together the biggest gaming studios, game developers, broadcasters, OTT platforms, streaming giants, pro players, brands, and agencies to discuss the next level of this raging saga. 

    Read the whole agenda here 

    Our speakers will include the likes of Trinity Gaming founder and CEO Abhishek Aggarwal, Nodwin Gaming director Akshat Rathee, Reliance Entertainment Digital CEO Amit Khanduja, Pocket Aces founder Anirudh Pandita, ESPL CEO Michael Broda, and Parle Products Pvt Ltd sr category head marketing Krishnarao S. Buddha, among many others. 

    You can register here for the sessions.

  • Mindshare sets up GEMS, promotes Deepika Nikhilender as CEO

    Mindshare sets up GEMS, promotes Deepika Nikhilender as CEO

    MUMBAI: Mindshare has launched a new full service media unit in Singapore called Growth and Emerging Market Solutions or GEMS, with Deepika Nikhilender as its CEO.

    GEMS will serve the needs of a number of companies who use Singapore and other Asian cities as their central marketing hubs for managing their emerging and developing growth markets across Asia, Middle East, Africa and others. GEMS will provide marketers who have responsibility for these regions with a broad spectrum of services including emerging class consumer activation, mobile marketing, category communications planning, ROMI, digital analytics, consulting, content development and management of quick data for insights. As specific sub-regional needs from clients grow, Mindshare will look to support the GEMS Singapore hub with talent based in China, India, Middle East, Africa and other developing markets.

    GEMS provides a simplified single-window access to clients looking for specialist planning skills and implementation partners in all the areas of marketing communications described above. It will house a team of client leaders along with specialists in these service areas who will help develop solutions for clients. GEMS is designed to be an open-source partner to its clients. It will bring in bespoke planning platforms and a real-time campaign data-tracking centre, which will facilitate open-source collaboration with various marketing communications partners to develop integrated marketing solutions. These partner companies will focus on word-of-mouth, activation, insights, data analytics and technology, and digital media – like Kantar, Geometry Global, Advocacy, VML and several others. In addition, GEMS will harness global partnerships with digital and mobile companies that Mindshare already has in place.

    Deepika Nikhilender previously led Mindshare Business Planning across Asia Pacific where she led and developed Mindshare’s offering in analytics, insights, strategy and data and technology solutions. She brings extensive experience on multiple product categories across Asia. In 2010 she was chosen Regional Client Leader for Mindshare APAC as recognition of her contribution to clients. In this role, Deepika will report to R Gowthman, recently appointed COO for Mindshare APAC. Deepika has been with Mindshare for 15 years.

    Deepika said, “At Mindshare, we have always kept our clients’ business at the centre of all that we do. Their expectations from Mindshare have also changed significantly in response to the changing marketing and media opportunities. We continue to evolve ourselves to stay ahead of market, while ensuring we stay relevant and competitive. Thanks to our clients who keep pushing us to raise the bar, inspiring us to open up new streams and encouraging us in all our new initiatives.”

    Ashutosh Srivastava, Chairman & CEO for APAC & Growth Markets at Mindshare, said “GEMS is part of an exciting new approach, using technology to create centres of excellence at a few hubs, look at data centrally and share precious talent across more markets when developing solutions. Hopefully this model will enable clients to use all their partners more collaboratively – to create more impactful solutions and drive growth, in markets where lack of experienced talent is currently a huge handicap. We are going to run GEMS like a start up – data and tech driven, fast and flexible, provocative and founded on collaboration, with ability to dial up and down for clients without tying up massive resource for clients.”

    Mindshare Asia Pacific’s GEMS unit and Deepika’s role are effective immediately.