After six months of commercial service, ALT Balaji is streaming high-quality entertainment to more than 2 million subscribers in four countries.
Mumbai: A company is judged by the company it keeps. And Xstream’s growing blue-chip customer base underpins its technological leadership. Today, the firm’s OTT customers include Altibox, Canal Digital, Mayo Clinic, Spark New Zealand/Lightbox, Star Media Group, Telenor and many more.
Another blue chip customer is Balaji Telefilms, India’s largest film and TV production studios. As a leading producer of high quality tamil entertainment content, it wanted to grow revenue into direct multiscreen SVOD content distribution with a new ALT Balaji service targeting young, connected, new-age global audiences. The service would extend the studio’s fabled creative expertise to digital audiences worldwide with on-demand, original and exclusive content.
With the aim at addressing more than 40 million ultra-affordable subscriptions in 2018, Balaji wanted to “outsource” all technical complexities to a partner capable of delivering a highly-scalable and cost-efficient OTT platform that would address all technical, promotional and subscription habits in all markets.
The studio knew that it needed the most reliable and OTT-savvy business partner on the market to deliver the smoothest and most cost-effective user experience in video playback.
After an industry-wide review of potential business partners, Balaji Telefilms selected Xstream and its MediaMaker™ end-to-end cloud platform as the enabler for its video supply management, distribution, monetization and user-experience. Xstream was also tasked with operational responsibility of the ALT Balaji multiscreen SVOD service.
Minimizing Balaji Telefilm’s total cost of ownership, Xstream’s delivers its cloud all functionalities the OTT needs; content ingestion, monetization capabilities and end user experiences.
End-to-end cloud delivery minimizes the need for additional solution components and external integrations and partners. This drastically reduces the amount of system integration and interoperability testing work required in the initial deployment and in each software upgrade conducted during the multi-year service life-cycle. Additionally, minimized solution components and partners reduce OTT support and maintenance costs.
The ALT Balaji cloud is running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, which enable Xstream to deliver unparalleled performance, elasticity and durability to ensure fast scaling and quality delivery to ALT Balaji subscribers never previously experienced.
Fast deployment is a key component of a profitable OTT service as it enables early revenue ramp-up … one of the main benefits of Xstream’s cloud-based end-to-end OTT platform.
Above all, Balaji ranked the customizable monetization, marketing and localization capabilities of MediaMaker enable ALT Balaji to simultaneously launch services in many countries such as the US, Canada, UK and India.
“Extensive use of off-the-shelf cloud technologies has basically become a pre-condition for a successful and timely OTT service market launch,” says Jacob Barlebo, Xstream’s Sales and Marketing Director. “It allows video content providers such as Balaji Telefilms to concentrate on their main business value, which is creating captivating stories and high-quality entertainment, instead of managing a global video delivery system.”
Result
In April 2017, Balaji went live with Xstream MediaMaker enabling ALT Balaji to seamlessly create, manage, deliver and monetize Internet TV solutions across the entire Indian market. It proved an easy and transparent workflow management platform so that Balaji was able to focus on what it does best … developing creative content, not technology and financial collection solutions associated with the complex OTT industry.
Xstream’s flexible and scalable platform combined with strong local professional service capabilities proved compelling to subscribers around the world and drove thousands of downloads at launch. ALT Balaji became the third most downloaded app in India in just three months. Today, after six months of commercial service, ALT Balaji is streaming high-quality entertainment to more than 2 million subscribers in four countries.
Customer Feedback
“Xstream’s impressive track record of managing high-end, customized Internet video services, proven cloud technology and local delivery partners truly sets it apart others and fully justified our choice of business partner,” says Ashish Bhansali, Head of Product, ALT Digital Media Entertainment.
“With Xstream and its local Indian technology partners, we’ve gained a valued network that truly understands the complicated OTT ecosystem. This enables us to continue to build next generation OTT services on multiple-devices as we extend our service in the fast developing OTT market.”
Sunil Nair, Chief Operating Officer, ALT Digital Media Entertainment, adds: “ALT Balaji wanted its audiences to enjoy compelling video stories and does not want technology to be a stumbling block in their experience. We believe technology is an OTT enabler … if it’s invisible to the consumer, we have done a great job.”
He adds: “Xstream gives us world class solutions that are extremely flexible allowing us to offer and monetize a smooth user experience in video playback. Its experience combined with the local professional team has helped us to very quickly build a fabulous platform.”
