Limelight-e4m webinar: Importance of Content Delivery Network for digital platforms

Limelight Networks, along with exchange4media group, on Thursday organized a webinar on the role of Content Delivery Network (CDN) technology in creating a seamless digital experience. The panelists also discussed how to deliver it in a secured fashion.

The symposium was moderated by Faisal Kawoosa, Founder, techARC, and the panelists in attendance were Aditya Agarwal, Head - Digital Technology, ABP Network; Badari Prasad S, Technical Head, TV9; Gunjan Jaswal, Head of Product and Tech, iTV Network; Imthiyas PK, Chief Digital Officer, MediaOne; Nischal Maheshwari, Head – IT, India Today Group; RD Bhatnagar, CTO, Dainik Bhaskar Group; Sarbani Bhatia, Sr. Vice President, IT, Dainik Jagran; and Owais Baba, Regional Head, Limelight Networks.

It was a freewheeling session which touched upon several issues of note concerning publishers and broadcasters and the value of CDN in their operations.

Kawoosa, in his opening remarks, averred that customer experience has attained prime importance. “You may have developed some great technologies in the background but what the user appreciates or values is the experience, which results in satisfaction, which, of course, ultimately means revenue, and profits,” he said.

Covid-19 caused a huge disruption in the very fabric of publishing and broadcasting operations.

Elaborating on its impact, RD Bhatnagar said that development of digital prior to Covid was very slow as businesses were focused on their hardcore content delivery or newspapers.

“Pandemic added a turbo booster insofar as what we had planned to do in the next 3-4 years, we did in a month flat. I must add that it was exciting. One of the things that concerned us was how do we take the newspapers to the people? In our markets, people still believe in the look and feel of the newspaper. While people are consuming news digitally, I must say it does not hold potential. It is not a jump you can monetize. It is still a far-fetched thing,” Bhatnagar added.

Imthiyas PK said the pandemic has expedited the digital transformation process by 5-10 years.

“In the last six months, support from the management has been great. Digital revenue was not big enough to be considered; it has changed now, and we have management’s attention. That is the biggest change that has happened from the investors’ point of view,” he said.

The conversation then moved on to discussing the tenets of a robust CDN and what makes it tick for broadcasters and publishers.

Aditya Agrawal declared CDN as the backbone of distribution. “You need to have good internet, but if you are missing on CDN in the digital industry, they say two seconds matter the most. If you cannot deliver in two seconds, 50 per cent of them will be lost,” said Agrawal.

Sarbani Bhatia stated that every media organization is looking for the right platform to overcome challenges of content delivery. 

“The aim is to reduce latency, and have a quick page load. It is only with effective implementation that we can avoid them. With omnichannel being the way forward, as everyone is present on multiple devices, it is CDN which will help us deliver our content across platforms and devices. It will also help us cater to a surge in traffic, withstand hardware failure due to its distributed nature,” said Bhatia.

Nischal Maheswari elaborated upon the security provided by CDN.  He also added that it has played a game-changing role in providing the best experience.

“It is most secured. As an individual publisher, you do not have to worry or invest a lot in the security of data. CDN is highly distributed platform which means you do not have to be concerned about any delay. It is a quality web experience to all end users no matter where they are, what browser they are using, what device they are using, what network they are on,” he added.

Owais Baba stressed the importance of security which is oft-neglected, according to him. He talked about the need to address three questions—how do we deliver to places with low bandwidth? How do we provide the right experience to users? What role can CDN play in this scenario?

“CDNs are geographically distributed platform of servers delivering content to end users where we minimize the loading time of web pages. The current increase in traffic load puts extra strain on the capacity. It is crucial to continually increase capacity and deliver services with high performance even in a case of increasing demand. When a user requests information on the application interface, the request has to reach only the nearest data centre and revert to the user.  The signal need not travel to the original source, this helps cut down congestion on network servers,” Owais said.

He added that this also improves the website page load time and people end up spending more time on the website as the bounce rate is reduced.  It decreases the bandwidth cost as a good CDN helps reduce the hosting cost of a website.

“If we talk about getting it to the right user, it is a critical part to the workflow. It can be complicated and difficult to manage but it requires multiple formats of the same content to be available,” he proclaimed.

According to Owais, Limelight is well placed to handle these issues as it offers services which help produce content in the right format in a dynamic way. It helps producers focus on the production, thereby delivering high quality. 

Kawoosa then examined the trends that the panelists were envisaging for the future in the wake of a new normal consolidating itself post lockdown.

Badari Prasad S shed light on how CDN is a tool to reach more number of people than they are reaching now.

“Apart from CDN, CMS makes a lot of difference. We started only as a text website, only two months back we introduced video content on the website because the pandemic gave us more viewers than before. They are glued to websites more than television. We are introducing the live feed and more VOD (Video on demand) content,” said Prasad.

He said that the viewership numbers have created a demand for specialized content which they will be working upon in the next one year.

“What we cannot show on television, we would like to show on the website as it gets different types of viewers and the size is huge. We want to provide the right content to them. In the next 3-5 years, viewership and consumption of videos and advertisement revenue will increase substantially for digital platforms,” he said.

As per Gunjan Jaswal, the next frontier is understanding what the customer is like and what he would like to read or watch.

“The next few years will be all about OTTs and VODs. People are likely to go through what they want to watch and then watch the news, rather than live DTH feed,” he added.

Owais Baba, in his closing remarks, said that media industry is in the middle of a revolution and the fundamental shift in power is affecting every media organization. He called it a dramatic change in technology and business model. He called for a need to be competitive, and flexibility in video delivery infrastructure. 

“Instead of broadcaster pushing out content at a pre-fixed time, viewers are now in-charge of pulling whatever content they want to consume from whichever media organization, at whatever time that suits them, on whatever device they want to watch it. It is all about experience,” he concluded.