Indian OTT Market — The Common Challenges…

From BigFlix starting in 2008, to the era of 2010s when the biggies of the industry such as HotStar, Netflix, and Amazon Prime started, grew and established themselves in the Indian market; to now, when we have a whole plethora of OTT apps available in the market, serving all kind of mass, general entertainment, regional, religious, sports, news and niche content. OTT in India, thus far, has had an exciting journey in phases.

A major factor driving the growth of the Indian OTT market has been the increasing internet penetration in the country amidst the intense competition in the telecom sector. With their growing user bases, OTT platforms around the country are facing challenges like never before.

Let us have a quick look at the most common challenges facing the OTT players, specifically in terms of the technology and what is required to win the game as OTT 3.0 (Growth to Maturity) takes over:

Operational Complexities

Building an OTT is a complicated task, let alone maintaining the same for the long haul. Because:

• Different sets of expertise are required to develop & maintain different functions and components of an OTT platform, making it all the more difficult a task.
• Platform owners have to manage multiple contracts with multiple vendors as it is literally impossible for a business to have all the resources on board, in-house.

As the new entrants hit the market, the competition would be intense and there would be a greater need to simplify the platform’s day-to-day operations.

This is where it makes sense to identify and work closely with:

• A strategic partner that not only does a part of the project but provides a holistic solution to all the OTT technology requirements.
• A trusted “One Stop Shop Solution” with industry-standard & industry-leading features, that helps a business focus on creating & procuring the correct content and marketing it to ensure the visibility & buzz around the same.

Needless to say, it simplifies the operations for the platform owners as maintaining the tech stack, the solution and the infrastructure is up to the Solution Provider.

With Airtel IQ Video bringing the benefit of its End to End Solution, platform owners can rest assured of a robust tech stack powering up their platforms with not just a wide range of industry-leading features but also an infinitely scalable & highly secured infrastructure that can withstand heavy traffic load in the hour of need.

Operational Cost

As the complexity involved in creating & maintaining a streaming platform goes up, so does the cost. The more popular a platform becomes and the more users it acquires, the operational cost will only go up as:

• The smartphone revolution in India is at its peak with more users getting connected every passing day. Better connectivity in the far corners of the country would only lead to more users consuming more content.
• More users streaming more content will eventually lead to greater demand for new content and therefore, higher costs would be incurred on CDN and Storage.

A good idea here would be to make sure that the media assets are highly optimized and platforms are able to offer great viewing resolution at an optimally compressed size of the video. This would mean:

• Getting the optimal resolution on every profile of the bitrate ladder, reducing not only the storage space occupied by the media asset but also reduced bandwidth consumption on the CDN.
• Having the best commercial offer for both, the CDN & the Storage and a strategic partnership with a reliable partner who has a proven track record in the industry.

With Airtel IQ Video bringing platforms the advantage of not just optimal resolution & great compression but also of the best price for the last mile reach of their content, platforms owners can rest assured about a strategic partner bringing them the best value for the investment made.

Lack of Effective Distribution

With technology evolving at a fast pace and extending its reach faster than ever, we have seen multiple Content Distribution Networks emerge. To the extent that some of these CDNs only have a great reach in a particular geography. But the OTT game is lost if the end users travelling to the far shores of the country do not get a consistent quality of the stream.

As OTT 3.0 in India takes center stage, it would be essential for platforms to keep an eye on the Quality of Experience which is highly dependent on the Quality of Streaming. As more users come onboard, platforms will eventually have to upgrade to better backend infrastructure, the most important component of which is the CDN.

While finalizing the CDN, a platform should not only make sure that it gets the best price but also:

• The CDN should actually be robust, stable & reliable enough to ensure, the delivery is not impacted due to any arbitrary reason such as quality of connectivity, device types, the maximum screen resolution, etc.
• Have a multi-CDN strategy, with a swift switching between the CDNs to ensure that the content is delivered through the best network in any given region.
• Align itself with the leaders of the industry who have expertise in high packet delivery and have robust, well-connected CDN POPs and edge locations at as many geographical segments as possible; thereby ensuring the effective distribution of the content to the last mile.
• Associate with a partner with a greater scale of operation which can help a platform with a sizeable audience by offering a great price to help them achieve a greater scale of economy & reduce their costs, significantly.

From the Mainstream Cinema to Live Sports, to Educational Content all the way to the Super — Niche Content relevant to an interest group. Video Streaming and OTT have come a long way in India which already, given its sheer size & variety of audiences, forms one of the largest user bases in the world, for content consumption. At Airtel IQ Video, we are here to help you not only bring your OTT and Video Streaming platform to life but also to optimize your costs in an effective, efficient manner.