Akiro for Rapid Event Notifications in OTT platforms
Spurred by COVID-19, OTT consumption has skyrocketed, brands like Amazon Prime and Netflix reported a 67% & 65% uptick in subscriptions, respectively.
Along with this the increasing number of cord cutters moving towards OTT, has spiked the OTT subscriptions. I am one of them.
With the rise of OTT adoption and Mobile viewers, OTT players have new set of challenges in terms of scale. Especially on the Rapid notification systems, which addresses some of the below key use cases
- Dynamic changes in the metadata in the Users
- Currently viewing activity across devices
- Dynamic content recommendations
- Change of user metadata, like settings, plan info, parental controls - Diagnostics data from the players and the quality of service metrics like buffer ratios, error ratios
- User engagement notifications like new releases and offers
- User behaviour data being collected from the players
- Dynamic changes in the metadata in the Users
Every OTT platform would need these critical features and these features must scale seamlessly , else it affects the user experience. Some of these use cases need to be acted at realtime, eg: if the buffering times of the OTT players are very high in a particular region, the OTT Site Reliability Team (SRE) must immediately trouble shoot the cause and take measures like switching to a alternate & faster CDN. Hence these are latency sensitive. Hence scalability and reliability of such features are very essential for the revenue streams as well.
Adding to these, some other challenges faced by Rapid notification platforms:
- Scale and Variety of devices
- Flaky networks, 3G/4G
- Background network activity restrictions with device OS like Android/iOS
- Priority messaging
- Google FCM/APNs Quota limitations
- Topic based and direct messaging
- Event multiplexing
There needs to be a system which can take care of these challenges, scale seamlessly and is latency sensitive.
Akiro is tailor made for OTTs with the above use cases and challenges in mind. Akiro is a pub sub platform which specialises in device communications, providing bidirectional messaging with the device clients. Akiro supports a wide variety of device communication protocols, like MQTT, MQTT over websockets, Websockets, TCP, OCPP, DLMS, HTTP(s), FCM/APNs. This gives the flexibility to the business teams to offload the complexity of taking care of different protocol implementations, device data ingestion and scale.
Akiro with its Petabyte scale time series and diagnostics analytics, helps the OTT platforms to react to realtime events and anomalies immediately, before the OTT user realises. The later the reaction, more effect on the user experience and hence revenues.
MQTT is one of the prominent protocols which was made for IoT sensors, but due to its reliability in flaky networks and light weight protocols is seeing increasing adoption in OTT, Mobility use cases like Live tracking, Live chat, Pub Sub communications with microservices.
There are some notable characteristics with Akiro, which would make it apt for OTT use cases and covering the challenges on scale and reliability:
- Highly scalable pub sub & real time messaging (> 10 million connections in each single cluster)
- Reliable delivery modes (Fire and forget, Guaranteed delivery, Exactly once delivery)
- Variety of messaging (Broadcast, Direct, Topic & namespace messaging)
- Multiprotocol support + APNS/FCM
- Sub-second latencies (< 10 ms)
- Message recall
- Rule based actions
- Realtime callbacks on events
- Cloud agnostic
With the new boom in OTT scale, we at Akiro are excited to be part of the OTT evolution and help the ecosystem evolve.
Try out Akiro SaaS for free: https://www.akiroio.com/get-started
We are hiring, speak to us @ hello[at]akiroio.com
