The COVID19 pandemic had led to an increase in the consumption and subscriptions of OTT content in India.
From K Dramas such as All of us are dead to the upcoming Deepika Padukone romantic movie ‘Gehraiyaan’, OTT players in India have anchored their presence in India.
According to a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report ‘Blockbuster Script for a New Decade’ reveals that India had 70-80 million paid subscribers of OTT platforms at the end of 2021, which is from 14 million in 2018 and just 0.5 million in 2014-15.
The digital led-consumption of OTT services and gaming have also increased, helping the industry grow 12-16 per cent year-on-year in 2021, to a market size of $27 billion. Today, OTT has a 7-9 per cent market share in India’s $27 bn M&E industry. However, by 2030, its market share is expected to increase to 22-25 per cent. Meanwhile, television’s market share will decline from around 35 per cent to 24 per cent, a Business Standard report added.
W.Media spoke to Ujjyaini Mitra, Founder & CEO, TheDeltacube.ai in order to understand how the OTT players are managing the increased demands of content, whether the companies are increasing their cloud capacities, and the ways in which they are managing security and downtime. Mitra was the former Chief Data Officer of Zee Entertainment.
Importance of CDN
There is a new emerging concept of the edge data centers; these are not large hubs but also wherever the consumers are I can have a small data center closer to my consumers where the most popularly viewed content will be stored so that it can be delivered faster,” said Mitra.
“There are multiple angles when it comes to delivering the content. The Content Delivery Network (CDN) delivers the content from the main storage system to the consumers,” said Mitra.
CDN or Content Delivery/ Distribution Network is required for scaling, they are a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of contents of various forms. CDN does not host the contents, however, it can cache content at the network edge, which improves the performance of the site by delivering the content fast and lowering the Video Start Time or Video start failures.
The storage capacity of the content needs to be increased due to an increase in the demand for content and there are smart ways of storing and a redumenting way. It all boils down to a smart way of storing content.
“People watch content on a smart TV, they watch that on HD and a higher resolution requires the higher capacity of storage. There are also people who watch on lower bandwidth and wifi and in such cases, the mobile cannot carry that high-resolution footage,” Mitra explained.
Content can be watched at various resolution quality – 4K, Full HD, HD, 1080p, 720p, etc. In the case of rudimentary processes, a platform converts the content into all possible qualities and stores 1 file for each quality for the same video content. That increases the storage capacity required. While in smart processes, the content in various qualities is not necessary to be pre-created and stored, but could dynamically sense the bandwidth fluctuation and convert the content in packet size in the required format.
“Either you spend on storing or processing. With more content coming out and more consumers joining the OTT wagon from tier II and tier III towns, one will require more cloud storage capacity and CDN capacity,” added Mitra.
The distribution and delivery of content is also an important aspect for example if a CDN hub is in Mumbai but a particular kind of content is consumed more in Jharkhand then the delivery time takes longer. Instead, if there is a CDN hub located near Jharkhand then the delivery of content becomes easier.
“Analysis of the kind of content that is consumed in different areas is done and then accordingly that kind of content is provided in the particular area,” said Mitra.
According to Frost & Sullivan’s analysis, edge computing will be employed by 90 per cent of enterprises by 2022, with the multi-access edge computing (MEC) sector estimated to reach $7.23 billion by 2024.
Handling Security and Downtime
When it comes to managing security and downtime there are various security protocols that organisations should follow.
“I have seen that piracy is an issue everywhere. Organisations try to improve the security protocol so that it can be reduced. Startups are working towards reducing the latency to identify the piracy and automatically taking down those pirated sites. There are startups who have patented technologies in this space too. In many organisations there is a team to see where these pirated contents are available and notices were sent to them. They take it down from one place but put it on other websites again,” said Mitra.
Startups are trying to identify and shut down the piracy sites either by tracking them or using the latest technologies.
Mitra further explained that in terms of managing downtime companies do not depend on one CDN for distribution of content but on multi-cloud or multi CDN so that even if one of them faces downtime the other one picks up from there. Most companies use about two to three cloud providers and CDNs in order to avoid difficulty in the distribution of content.
Not only OTT but organisations belonging to different industries are looking towards adopting a multi-cloud environment. Over 84 per cent of enterprises in India prefer hybrid multi-cloud as their ideal operating model, and 58 per cent are expecting to implement such environments within three years, according to Nutanix’s fourth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report.
Enterprises are moving to multi-cloud environments for security, performance, cost, and business continuity, especially with the rise of remote work.