Gaurav Mallik's take on future of digital in India

Limelight Networks, a global leader in digital content delivery, empowers customers to better engage online audiences by enabling them to securely manage and globally deliver digital content, on any device. The company’s award winning Limelight Orchestrate™ platform includes an integrated suite of content delivery technology and services that helps organizations secure digital content, deliver exceptional multi-screen experiences, improve brand awareness, drive revenue, and enhance customer relationships — all while reducing costs.

Gaurav Mallik is the Sales Director of India, at Limelight Networks. In his current role, Gaurav is responsible for revenue and growth strategies in the fast growing mid-market and startup segments for Limelight Networks in India. Gaurav has over 13 years of technology sales, marketing and business development experience.

Prior to Limelight Networks, Gaurav held various sales, business development and marketing positions for Akamai Technologies, Synygy and CareerBuilder.com in India.

In a conversation with Adgully, Gaurav Mallik, Sales Director of India, at Limelight Networks shed light on the future of OTT in India, Content evolution, challenges faced and much more. Excerpts:

How are CDN and OTT shaping the Indian market?

With the onslaught of global as well as local OTT platforms trying to gain market leadership in India, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have assumed greater importance to ensure high quality delivery of OTT content to end-users. CDNs serve a large portion of internet content delivery today in India, and they are becoming increasingly essential with recent introductions of diverse content segments such as live streaming, on-demand streaming, live engagement, and interactive app-based content.

With more options available to the consumers, content that requires longer loading times will result in adverse consequences for these platforms, including decreasing ROI, and loss of consumer base. As such, the simultaneous growth of OTT platforms and CDNs have enabled the Indian online content market to expand massively during a short period of time, surmounting these challenges and enabling an optimal consumer experience.

Revenue generated in OTT sector and the future of OTT. 

The Indian OTT market is currently valued at USD 200 million, registering an unprecedented growth of 35 % Y-o-Y. Currently, there are more than 30 OTT providers and approximately 90 million active viewers, while the number of smartphone users is expected to grow to 520 million by the end of 2020.

From this alone, we see that the future of the OTT sector is promising. Currently we see strong demand, and this demand will continue to grow. Internet use will soon become a staple across India’s respective regions - rural areas will soon account for 55% of internet users by 2025, up from its current 33%.

Improving OTT customer retention by delivering the best user experiences. 

In Limelight Networks’ recent State of Online User Report, we uncovered interesting findings about the Indian consumers’ use and online experience. In particular, we found that watching online videos is the most common activity among Indian users when they go online. As such, customers gauge their user experience based on the quality of the video they stream and also the number of times it rebuffers. Given that website visitors in India have the least patience for slow-loading websites, with only a third willing to wait 5 seconds or longer for a page to load before leaving, this could translate into serious impacts on businesses if they end up permanently losing the consumer.

As such, the role of the OTT platform is clear in determining the user experience, thereby making the role of high-quality CDNs all the more significant. CDNs can address the issue of content latency, or the delay in loading of content, through web acceleration via proxy servers closer to geo-locations of individual viewers. OTT service providers can also augment the user experience by customizing their audio and video content through transmuxing. This approach helps in extending the desired content in the most optimal format to end-users considering their devices, platforms, and the prevailing network conditions.

How has the content creation evolved over the years on the OTT front?

OTT platforms have transformed from being just an aggregator of pre-existing content to developers of original content, which has undoubtedly become the single most important determinant of their success. The rapidly growing online content consumer market, with a robust internet infrastructure, reduced data consumption costs and increasing smartphone penetration, has consistently motivated OTT platforms to partner with local content creators to create regional content. Even global OTT platforms are focusing on developing more localized content to connect with local audiences by bringing their stories on their screens. Having content available in many languages beyond the most popular ones will be a differentiator.

Along with content creation, its delivery aspect is also undergoing a rapid transformation. Technological developments have made CDNs much more seamless, quick and efficient, thereby enriching the user experience. Furthermore, the involvement of Machine Learning and AI promises to help micro-target individual content searches and make content consumption a much more immersive experience than it is currently.  

OTT and cloud security as key focus areas for India. 

While cloud-based content delivery is extremely efficient and cost-effective, there are security concerns. In India, specifically, as the number of OTT platforms grows, CDNs need to ensure security of platforms from a huge number of sources. OTT platforms cannot afford to let their digital content be stolen or be accessed by unauthorized personnel. As such, CDNs today need to provide comprehensive security services that can scale with a growing business and keep a platform working at all costs while keeping the content protected.

India as a hybrid market – coexistence of cable, DTH and digital.

While the number of digital consumers is steadily on the rise, it can be safely assumed that cable and Direct-to-Home (DTH) will remain a strong part of the content fabric in India. A major reason behind this is that the digital adoption in rural geographies is yet to pick up, and there’s a likelihood that these consumers might first avail cable services – as an outcome of their familiarity with the same – and be later on-boarded by OTT platforms.

Even if you draw a parallel to intensively digitized countries such as the U.S., 81 percent of US households are still subscribed to cable and satellite TVs. This figure, despite shrinking to 60 percent by 2030, will still leave US satellite and cable TV operators as a dominant market entity even a decade later. Similarly, the advent of digital services in India will not eliminate cable and DTH services from the scenario, at least for the foreseeable future. We believe that the entire ecosystem will have to adapt itself, learn to coexist, and innovate with individual areas of expertise in light of the changing market dynamics.

What are the challenges faced by OTT providers in today's world?

Geographical distance between servers and users, increasing competition and limited revenue options are some of the major challenges faced by most OTT platforms.

For instance, India has consumers distributed over a large geographical area, which makes it necessary to establish servers near the end-user. This results in an increase in operational costs, which combined with increasing competition, can bring down the total revenue from these platforms.

Furthermore, user-based ad blockers and the lukewarm attitude towards subscription-based viewing compound the problem areas that need to be navigated by OTT platforms to succeed in the Indian market.