The Magic Of Globalizing Regional Language Entertainment Through The Cloud

Addatimes is an entertainment portal offering streaming content in the Bengali language for its 300-million strong community located across the globe. Positioned as the world’s­ first Bengali video-on-demand channel, the original programming on the platform includes web series, short ­LMS, entertainment and educational videos, live sports and events, reality shows, and full-length movies across genres. Addatimes adds new shows and content each month, at times every fortnight. The ad-free content in high-defi­nition is supported by reasonable subscription plans and has garnered a signifi­cant and growing worldwide fan following. Subscribers can access the wide variety of programming on-demand across a multiplicity of platforms including the Addatimes website or app, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV stick, and through any smartphone irrespective of its size and features.

Business Challenge

With the plethora of entertainment options available online, there is an extremely competitive landscape when it comes to digital media streaming. Any portal that hopes to break through the clutter, garner market share, and retain its customers must offer a superlative experience. This means Addatimes needed to ensure minimal downtime, lag-free streaming, up-to-date content, and error-free application interactions. In addition, the portal had a diverse set of customers primarily spread across South-East Asia, and the Middle East. It needed to offer seamless customer experience no matter what device was being used, or where the viewer was accessing the content from. To deliver superlative customer experience as it grew globally, Addatimes was increasing its capital expenditure towards purchasing expensive on-premise network infrastructure. But these costly resources were not being utilized optimally because of variations in demand based on programming popularity, geographical location of users, or time of day. On the content side, the portal had to keep its programming relevant to remain competitive. For this, the website applications needed to be frequently refreshed to keep the media content up-to-date.

However, the software development processes at Addatimes were not optimized as the company had not yet implemented industry best practices such as separate branches for development, testing, and production. To deal with these challenges, Addatimes decided to explore using the cloud for its benefits of scalability, cost, and ease-of-deployment. Initially, the company approached Minfy to help manage the hosting of their programming content on the cloud. Later on, the company also asked for support with implementing a DevOps framework to manage programming releases and daily content updates