Mumbai: Quickplay Media has delivered next-generation OTT solutions for 25+ Tier 1 services, across 50+ markets, for MVPDs, Telcos, and Direct-to-Consumer services. Its cloud-native platform and open architecture deliver performance, extensibility, and scale to meet the needs of customers and their audience.
Indiantelevision.com caught up with COO Goutham Vinjamuri. “We sit at the intersection of technology, data, and experiences – continually enabling our clients to deliver against their greatest ambitions” he explains.
He is responsible for customer success, platform engineering, service operations, and professional services at Quickplay Media. He most recently was AVP Software Engineering with AT&T Entertainment, where he led OTT & video solution engineering teams in the U.S., Canada, and India.
Vinjamuri headed professional services for Quickplay, until it was acquired by AT&T. He was Polaris Financial Technologies senior VP of engineering and a Practice Head in North America with Tata Consultancy Services, where he worked across industry verticals. He has an MSc in Computer Science from the National Institute of Technology and BS in Electronics from ANU, India.
On how the idea of Quickplay came about, and the response to the recent innovations with aha in India
In the field of premium video streaming services, Quickplay has been at the top of the mind recall in terms of name and brand for two decades. In the Thor movie "Asgard is where Asgardian are.” In OTT, Quickplay is where Quickplayers are. Even after multiple M&A initiatives, by ATT & Firstlight Media, the same core team continues to hold the mantle
Innovation is our central pivot, culture, and mindset. As we’ve deployed cutting-edge new capabilities – especially with aha – the market has embraced the power of 4K, Dolby, our unique dynamic storefront, independent personalized containers for users, and more. These and resource-light concepts like Skip Intro, Skip Song, and Free Preview to non-subscribers on premium content have been widely accepted & cloned versions are now mimicked by other OTT providers.
Take our dynamic storefront, for example it hosts Tamil and Telugu content in a single app, yet makes it appear as two different apps. That’s generated tremendous interest in what aha is doing, especially their ability to use our cloud-native platform to support their “glocal” ambitions. What has been called “aha 2.0” launched in Telugu in November of 2021 in record time – seven months from agreement to launch – and turned up a Tamil service just three months later.
We recently introduced a bunch of free games and we will continue to surprise our users with innovations around engagement & features to come in this quarter.
When aha and Disney+ Hotstar simultaneously aired the Indian blockbuster “Bheemla Nayak” last year, aha 2.0 earned rave reviews for its performance. Viewers tweeted lavish praise for aha’s Dolby 5.1 audio and 4K HD video quality and in an informal online poll more than 62 per cent of viewers selected aha’s telecast as the superior experience. That speaks volumes about out encoding quality.
Currently, more than 50 million unique users have visited and upwards of 18 million mobile app downloads have been installed. International subscribership has risen by 60 per cent since the launch of aha 2.0, and paid subscribership has increased to nearly two million. We recently worked with aha to introduce a bunch of free games and we will continue to surprise aha viewers with innovations around engagement and features to come.
aha 2.0 was a finalist in the CSI Innovation Awards presented annually during IBC, one of the industry’s largest\and most important conferences, and its success has enabled Quickplay to generate additional customer launches and interest in the APAC/India market
On the growth and challenges faced in a cluttered market
Streaming services have been on a rollercoaster over the past few years. They rode the rocket of consumer adoption during the pandemic, and now are more focused on keeping those subscribers. As subscribers signed up en masse during quarantines, OTT providers’ systems were stressed by years of growth compressed into just a few months. Job One for streaming providers is keeping their services relevant in a market with hundreds of streaming options. Providers need to leverage rich data and analytics to understand how best to meet subscribers’ expectations, and to rapidly deploy new features and capabilities that can enable them to capitalize on emerging opportunities.
What providers have learned is that their original platforms are not flexible or scalable enough to adapt quickly to the market; they see the value of cloud-native platforms to attract viewers and enable personalization that drives loyalty and monetisation.
Quickplay's USP of helping new and existing services launch and scale globally quickly.
Quickplay uniquely has harnessed the power of cloud-native technologies – including containers, microservices, a service mesh, APIs, and immutable infrastructure – to cut the time to market and effort required to launch new services by up to 50%. The technology stack provides significantly better performance, a modular approach for feature expansion, continuous delivery for rapid iteration, and built-in scalability, observability and security.
Using Quickplay’s cloud-native platform, OTT providers can cut the time needed to launch services to just a few months and can enable new services and features to come to market in days and weeks rather than months and years. That faster time to market means a more agile response to new opportunities that will retain or monetize subscribers. It also enables rapid and cost-effective testing of new features, spurring innovation by reducing the cost of failure and shortening the time to success.
On what OTT services need to keep in mind to achieve long-term consumer loyalty and value.
First, we should note that success isn’t a result merely of having great content; emphasis also needs to be placed on the subscriber experience and the overall performance of the streaming service. The ability to stream services to recommend and ease the discovery of content is essential to making the service part of the subscriber’s daily habit. The reality is that many consumers subscribe to a service because of a single show or series; recommendations and data analytics are key to helping them stay engaged once they have exhausted that initial viewing interest. Additionally, having a platform that is able to support the rapid creation and testing of new features can keep the service fresh and maintain engagement.
On how Quickplay helps OTT platforms boost their content on the cloud and how cloud-based platforms help in lowering the cost for OTT players
Quickplay’s cloud-native platform is cloud agnostic, so OTT providers can work with their cloud of choice – public cloud, in-country cloud or telco cloud – rather than being forced to make a platform decision based on a specific cloud provider. Quickplay is expert at helping customers who were locked into premise-based or hybrid solutions to escape those confines and build fast, flexible services that reduce upfront costs and enable scaling in alignment with subscriber growth. An added benefit is that providers can use their existing cloud spending commitments on the Quickplay platform, enabling greater business efficiency. Quickplay has a superb and recognised track record of working with cloud providers: Google Cloud Industry Solutions Partner of the Year and Microsoft Cloud Partner of the Year finalist.
On how the acquisition by AT&T in 2016 helped Quickplay Media grow
AT&T resources enabled Quickplay to further build out its capabilities and helped it establish a reputation for being the go-to platform provider for solving difficult use cases, especially in markets lacking optimal broadband infrastructure. AT&T’s marquee brands also increased Quickplay’s expertise in supporting high-concurrency events. Finally, AT&T resources helped the company conceptualise and implement what would become the streaming industry’s first cloud-centric platform.
AT&T’s system contributed to taking the platform to new heights with many of the specialty features such as personalized, rich broadcast quality video experiences – a natural fit for many of the TIer 1 service providers Quickplay’s prowess was fully scaled onto a multitude of platforms and leveraged the full potential of Quickplay’s IP thus developed across the services. Our platform capabilities, coupled with clients’ content, now are advancing the user experience and creating new monetisation opportunities for Quickplay clients.
On how ML, AI enhance the content performance of an OTT platform
Studies say that 57 per cent of the Indian market has access to at least one streaming service and it is important to understand the viewer's interest and recommend the right content at the right time with personalized suggestions. Quickplay's AI/ML based solution helps the customer to increase the content reach & subscribers engagement through:
- AI-powered content metadata - In the SVOD (Subscription Video On-Demand) business, ~20 per cent of the content catalog contributes to 80% of total watch time. Quickplay’s AI-powered content metadata discovers the micro genres and plot keywords by analyzing the video scenes and the closed-captions available within the content. This helps us to engage the subscriber with granular content discovery experience.
- Hyper-Personalized Recommendation Engine – 80 per cent of the playback comes from the top 4 carousels of the home screen. We consider the subscriber’s behavioral data, watch pattern along with AI powered content metadata to generate hyper-personalized content recommendations like "You May Like This," "Because You Watched," and "Recommended For You" suggestions to help improve the viewer experience and content discoverability
- Beyond content recommendations, the Quickplay platform adopts and develops multiple algorithms and models for measuring subscriber engagement, propensity to subscribe/winback, churn predictions, and personalised ads to model customer behaviour and create cohorts for targeted marketing and acquisitions.
Quickplay's Advanced Analytics Dashboard provides a 360-degree view on business insights covering engagement, campaign performance, regions to target, subscription trend, survival curve and much more.
On how OTT allows for a more immersive experience when it comes to sports content
Sports television has been locked in a one-to-many television paradigm for decades. But the reality is the sports audience itself is changing, and sports content needs to change with it. Instead of an audience that overwhelmingly watches games from end to end, we’ve seen the emergence of new groups, including those fans who simply want to watch highlights of games and others who are more interested in the personalities involved. OTT’s ability to offer a one-to-one experience – particularly when cloud-native platforms are used – enables telecasts to be tailored to each viewer.
Full games, highlights, features, different camera angles, different commentary, interactive overlays, and more are all possible, enabling fans to be engaged on their terms. Data analytics can sharpen the fan experience by alerting viewers to statistics, overlays, highlights and other features as they become available. Social viewing allows cohorts of fans in diverse locations to share their viewing experiences with one another. Gamification takes interactivity to new levels and sets the stage for sports betting on the TV by allowing fans to predict what will happen on the next throw, the next swing, or the next shot on goal, and to compare their prognostication with others viewing the same event.
On insights into some of the recent work by Quickplay
One of the most remarkable things about the Quickplay platform has been its ability to be the foundation for an incredibly diverse set of applications. Here are a few: The “glocal” approach adopted with aha 2.0 Telugu and Tamil services in India is just one way the platform’s versatility is being leveraged. In the Philippines, PLDT’s wireless subsidiary Smart Communications Inc. has used the platform to create differentiated video experiences and new cutting-edge capabilities without the cost and complexity of maintaining separate, distinct systems. Cignal TV, a subsidiary of PLDT Group’s MediaQuest Holdings media partner, has leveraged the flexibility, agility, and scalability advantages of the Quickplay platform to significantly improve streaming quality, navigation and discovery, and control for viewers of the service’s rich library of on-demand and linear programming. Rogers Sports & Media’s Sportsnet in Canada has used the platform to transform its SN NOW direct to consumer service, combining the flexibility and scalability of the cloud with the quality and high performance of broadcast. And Allen Media Group in the United States has teamed with Quickplay to launch a wave of FAST – ad-supported virtual linear – channels that can be personalized to the interests of each subscriber.
On why cloud-native architecture will be the key to the future success of OTT players
As we said earlier, the rapid boom in subscriber growth taught the OTT industry the limitations of premise-based or cloud-adapted platforms. The flexibility to add new features – and to do so quickly and at scale – is essential to OTT’s ability to stay ahead of subscriber growth and behavior. Rather than waiting months to implement a new feature or to implement a monetization strategy or needing to make a costly investment in new resources to address customer growth, streaming providers need to be able to react nimbly and cost-effectively to the market. That can only happen in a cloud-native environment.
On how 5G will give OTT a boost in India
Over-the-top (OTT) video streaming, online gaming, augmented reality, and digital commerce are expected to drive data usage, and this would also push the growth and expansion of OTT services.
High bandwidth such as that provided by 5G leads to enhanced and engaging user experiences offering personalization at scale through recommendation engines with data and analytics insights to drive content and business intelligence. Engagement features would be a new normal in the OTT apps and include specialty features such as: multi-video views in which multiple live streams can be displayed in a tile view; timeline markers; picture-in-picture; interactive graphical overlays for polls, trivias, and social chats; social viewing; and real-time video-synchronization including gaming and augmented reality. The possibilities are immense for OTT platforms to reinvent themselves for delivering hyper-personalized content, morphing the user experience to accommodate taste and consumption patterns of different cohorts.
On trends being seen when it comes to FAST penetration and consumption and monetisation potential
FAST – or Free, Ad-Supported Television – is the “front porch” of OTT. In the U.S. market alone, nScreen Media estimates that FAST will grow to 216 million monthly active users and $4.1 billion in revenue in 2023. For subscribers who are intimidated by the myriad of OTT programming choices, FAST provides a stress free way to view content that otherwise might not be viewed. For providers of SVOD – Subscription Video On Demand – services, FAST can be used to expand the value of content libraries by promoting discovery of longtail content that may be less obvious to viewers.
On the work being done with Google to boost CTV monetization
As Google Cloud’s Media and Entertainment Industry Partner of the Year, Quickplay has worked closely with Google on streaming innovation. Following up on an announcement at the huge NAB industry conference last year, Quickplay announced collaboration in three areas:
- Personalised FAST channels running on Google Cloud and ready for scalable CTV monetization via pre-integration with Google Ad Manager across client, and server side environments.
- Analytics dashboards built on a proprietary, unified data model, bringing together user engagement, content performance, and quality of experience metrics to help drive the business. Leveraging the Quickplay analytics platform, built on top of Google BigQuery and Looker, media companies can identify and target users at risk of churn to improve retention and identify new revenue opportunities.
- Linear streaming through HLS and DASH on Google Cloud Media CDN, with an early version of low latency streaming using the LL-DASH protocol.
Quickplay also has pre-integrated Google Ad Manager’s digital ad management capabilities into our next-generation OTT streaming platform to expedite monetization by bringing together the diverse ecosystems of streaming providers, CTV platform owners and advertisers. The integration covers both client-side and server-side ad insertion use cases for HLS and DASH delivery protocols. This means that Quickplay can power providers’ AVOD, linear and FAST services, using the same backend platform, across all CTV platforms, thereby improving efficiency; that Quickplay’s personalization capabilities can enable better, more intelligent experiences that engage audiences with relevant content and advertising, including personalise FAST channels; and that current and prospective CTV partners can utilize Google Ad Manager to power monetization by tapping into diverse content sources supported on Quickplay’s platform with our pre-integrated solution
On how a holistic approach helps in speedy delivery and management
To better understand the diverse consumers aha was targeting, Quickplay embarked on creating a customer focus group. By gathering direct feedback from various diverse users and cohort groups, Quickplay gathered valuable insights, quantitative and qualitative data about the desired content options, user experience, motivations for using the service, monetization, and pricing tiers, and the features and capabilities valued most.
This exercise served as the initial foundation to develop and design a unique and highly personalised 100 per cent local streaming service. As with other customer engagements, Quickplay’s OTT platform was selected as the end-to-end solution of Quickplay’s video orchestration, content management, dynamic broadcast ad replacement, data and analytics, and publishing platform, together with billing and subscriber management services provided by Evergent, and front end app development by using reference framework of Quickplay .
