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OTT Platforms Rule the Roost on Cloud Networks

Feb 19, 2020
OTT Platforms Rule the Roost on Cloud Networks
Publication: CXOtoday.com

One of the fastest growing industries in India is the OTT platform business accompanied by content providers. The 4G/5G networks with lightning quick speeds and top quality bandwidth has brought forth a tectonic shift in the way content is viewed online, thus helping the OTT players enhance viewership and increase the demand for quality content.

Players such as Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, HotStar, Zee5 and the upcoming AppleTV, Disney Plus has really created a whole new segment of screen viewers who are agnostic to the devices as well as the location where they watch them. All they care about is a seamless viewing experience.

At higher levels, OTT players depend on Fast Compute, Fast & Humungous Storage for Data and Fast Networks. Data centres today, provide cost effective options like delivering solutions on OPEX. This becomes critical for customers, so that they don’t need to block huge sum of capex for their IT infrastructure deployments.

The opportunity for the company lies in the growing adoption of content over digital platforms and a burgeoning segment of OTT viewing. With an increase in viewership and viewing content, especially with the 5G spectrum also gaining interest, there is an enormous demand for data storage.

These data centres are often strategically placed with internet exchanges situation within the premises and conjointly connected to the National Exchange, making them the source for all traffic that traverses within the country. This means media and entertainment traffic on the internet such as live streaming of events and content can move via the shortest path to far geographical locations in the country.

Customers such as Netflix and several CDN providers host in data centers to serve content on the internet. Media companies have huge storage and serving needs. Also, in an interlinked world data is often pulled up or referred by other websites. All this needs data storage as well as high availability via disaster recovery plans so that a 24x7x365 continuous content serving is available for users.

Cloud use could help media and OTT platforms address a number of pressing business challenges. Companies in the field are under pressure to continuously create more content cost-effectively. At the same time, they have to deal with changing patterns in media consumption and ways in which it is delivered to the audience. This sector definitely needs to use more cloud solutions such as CDNs to content faster and, analytics that can capture and analyse user behaviour patterns.

And then there’s the global dimension. A game developer, may need to localize content in 15+ different languages and coordinate with disparate content-creation teams around the world. Today, the drop in cable television subscriptions and the increase of viewers on digital plays and mobile devices set the stage for greater cloud adoption.

Another factor influencing cloud adoption includes businesses seeking more predictable cost models around content production and moving toward Opex-based approaches. Cloud plays really well into this. OTT Platforms and Content Creators require low entry barriers for faster adoption of their services, this could be well supported by Opex based services delivered through a Data centre that can deliver lowest network latency and agile IT infrastructure which has the ability to scale IT resources as per demand.

We foresee that with an increased demand in online content streaming, cloud computing could be one of the fastest enablers of these services.

(Disclaimer: The author is Assistant Vice-President and Head, Cloud Services at Web Werks, providers of data center services offering hosting services on dedicated servers, cloud, virtualization and disaster recovery services. The views are his own and the publisher may or may not hold the same)