Streaming platforms in India are continuing to grow in popularity year-on-year. Over-the-top (OTT) media platforms like Zee5, Netflix, Hotstar, Amazon Prime Video and SonyLiv currently have around 457 million users across India, with viewership for high-traffic sporting events drawing in millions of concurrent viewers to the one platform. Hotstar, for example, reported 16.8 million viewers for the 2024 Indian Premier League series.
Given the volume that OTT platforms need to cater to and scale for, delivering exceptional digital experiences is paramount. However, the sheer number of concurrent users means that platforms are prone to issues that adversely affect user experience. These include poor network connectivity or concurrency challenges that result in slow load times and the failure to provide a graceful degradation experience, such as reducing streaming image quality when demand is high.
There are also a number of OTT platforms that aim to localise content to deliver personalised experiences, but end up overriding existing user-set preferences as a result. An example of this is when users are travelling between states, and their content changes to the regional language despite their preferences specifying otherwise. Rather than providing a personalised experience, the OTT platform ends up further frustrating customers.
Addressing these issues requires a systematic approach to identifying the root cause of performance problems. Observability can help OTT platforms deliver a better user experience by enabling engineers to speed up the troubleshooting process and resolution times. The right tool can help engineers analyse key metrics such as hit, miss, error rates, starts per second, round-trip time and origin request time in one place. It also helps OTT platforms reduce costs and improve performance through the optimisation of content delivery network (CDN) switching strategies, which enables engineers to filter CDN metrics by geography and divert traffic to fix load issues in real-time.
Additionally, observability solutions proactively look for issues such as high latency, loss of connectivity and buffering, ensuring teams have immediate visibility of these issues and preventing drop-offs from the OTT platform.
Delivering exceptional user experiences consistently doesn’t have to be daunting. With observability, OTT platforms can view the entire audience journey – from application programming interface (API) calls during app launches to playlist selection and first frame. This level of visibility is what will help OTT platforms maintain excellent viewer experiences, even during high-load events.
(The author is the Chief Architect, APJ at New Relic)
