Why India’s booming streaming services need observability to succeed

The dawn of 5G, increased internet adoption, and smartphone access in India have caused massive shifts in how the country consumes content. In 2024, India witnessed a 25% increase in customers moving away from traditional cable or satellite subscriptions, embracing the flexibility of digital streaming services.

With streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar, SonyLiv, Zee5, and many more gaining popularity, it’s no surprise that the OTT market in India caters to more than 457 million users. Traffic on some of these platforms, especially during the Indian Premier League, The English Premier League, and domestic sporting events like the India Super League, draw millions of users to streaming platforms. In 2023, Hotstar drew 35 million viewers onto its platform during the ICC Cricket World Cup.

Given the massive traffic volumes on these platforms, ensuring optimal digital experiences is crucial.

User-friendly app interfaces that provide easy navigation are one of the top priorities for OTT consumers. Even with an excellent content library, consumers will abandon a platform if they find it difficult to navigate. A recent study showed that 60% of users will walk away from an OTT app if their first experience is poor, and 80% will uninstall it due to ongoing issues.

In practical terms, this translates to designing and developing OTT applications that can deliver a consistent experience across devices, regardless of where the user starts, continues, and ends their journey.

An example of where this can go awry is localisation. Despite specifying language in the preference settings, some OTT platforms are coded to override these set preferences with geolocation, so content appears in a different language when travelling from state to state. This can create a frustrating user experience, especially for those who travel often.

Another key aspect is the platform’s ability to handle concurrency challenges. Failure to provide a graceful degradation experience–such as streaming an event 20 or 30 seconds behind when demand is high–leads to poor user experiences and drop-offs from the platform.  

Real-time, personal internet will replace traditional content retrieval: InMobi's Naveen Tewari

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Real-time, personal internet will replace traditional content retrieval: InMobi's Naveen Tewari

Delivering great customer experience is a challenge

As customer demand for OTT platforms continues to skyrocket in India, trying to capture and retain market share is a significant challenge. What sets competitors apart is the quality of the customer experience. While content is king, it takes the right technology and expertise to deliver that content with the quality, features, performance, and reliability that consumers want and expect.

This is a complex proposition because of the sheer volumes of data streaming platforms must tackle. Often, there’s no consistency around the data because different vendors offer different technologies within the video stack, all generating their own data. It’s an issue that complicates the entire process of holistically monitoring the workflow.

For example, streaming service providers must consider the device’s OS, screen size, memory capacity, and supported protocols, all of which can impact caching algorithms and changes in delivery protocols. Traffic volumes are bound to peak on streaming platforms, and delivery adaptability such as choosing a different CDN (content delivery network) within a particular region, becomes very important to ensuring a great viewer experience. The content itself can be transformed to accommodate different connection speeds.

Addressing this requires a lot of data, along with the variables that are standardised and normalised. Without that, engineering teams have no way to get a clear view of how efficiently or effectively the technologies within the streaming stack are operating, how well third-party partners such as CDNs are performing, and how it is impacting the user experience.

Merely having solutions to monitor the stack isn’t enough. OTT platforms need observability, so they can proactively identify and fix UX issues before customers pivot to competing platforms.

Observability is central to success

To keep up with demand and even prepare for known high-traffic events, OTT platforms must take a proactive approach to monitoring their services. By leveraging synthetic monitoring via an all-in-one observability platform, OTT providers can gather user experience data to simulate user journeys and use these learnings to protect viewers from imperfect end-user experiences. This enables the engineering team to identify performance issues before they impact viewers.

Observability also gives OTT platforms the ability to track the performance of their streaming services in real-time. By integrating alerts via AIOps, for example, teams can generate anomaly reports before, and during the high-traffic event, then discuss the alerts via an established internal communications platform such as Slack or Teams for swift resolution.

Beyond monitoring, observability provides valuable data that can be used to optimise various aspects of OTT platforms. This includes streamlining workflows, improving resource allocation, and enhancing CDN performance. They also provide detailed insights into cloud usage, helping companies optimize their cloud spend. This cost efficiency is achieved without compromising the quality or reliability of the streaming service.

By ensuring high-quality, uninterrupted streaming, OTT service providers can maintain and grow their viewer base, directly impacting their success in the competitive digital media market.

(Rohit Ramanand is the Group Vice President of Engineering at New Relic, overseeing the company's engineering operations in India.)