 Welcome to today's virtual roundtable presented by Limelight Networks in association with E4M. Today's topic is broadcasters and publishers creating seamless digital experiences using the right CD technology. Now before we jump into the conversation and talk about the topic here are some of the key things that I would like to definitely tell all of you. We have brought together some of the best minds from the broadcasting and publishing industry in India to discuss and share how they ensure an enhanced and how they ensure an enhanced viewer experience quickly reliably and securely. Now me being a reader myself, I'm Khyatri Kawa your host for the day. I hope like me all of you also have seen the seamless transition from the physical newspapers to reading all the articles online. Now before I introduce our speakers I have a few announcements to make. We are live on Zoom, E4M Facebook page, LinkedIn and Twitter. Please start sending your questions in the Q&A section and we will take up these during the course of the discussion. Please tweet your thoughts about the webinar using the hashtag E numerical 4M webinar. It's E4M webinar. Now to introduce you to our panelists I hope all of you are ready. If you have any questions pertaining to the topic please go ahead and drop it in the Q&A box. Our moderator will take it into consideration during the conversation. Now to introduce you to our panelists Mr. Aditya Agarwal head digital technology ABP network. Mr. Aditya is leading the technology efforts of the ABP digital arm ABP live. Prior to ABP he has worked from for clients including Wycombe Inc, Comcast Cable and more. We also have with us Mr. Anil CS COO Flowers TV. Mr. Anil CS popularly known as Anil Ayur is the chief operating officer and chief marketing officer of Insight Media India private limited and its group companies. He has 20 plus years of experience in the media field and he's associated with the company from the inception. We also have with us Mr. Badri Prasad S technical head TV 9. Mr. Badri Prasad has been working with TV 9 for last 16 years. Since the very beginning he has been instrumental in the launch of seven channels and will be launching two more channels very soon. Prior to this he worked with ETV and was part of a core team to start channels in seven regional languages and also worked in RFC and started the visual graphics unit called Mantra. We also have with us Mr. Gunjan Jaiswal head of product and tech ITV network digital product Ninja an ex founder with over 10 years of experience in different domains including aviation media edutek and IT services. We also have with us on the panel Mr. Imtiaz PK chief digital officer media one. Mr. Imtiaz has managed multi-million IT project during his career in Oman and India. His recent project experiences have been transforming business processes with digital technologies. He also holds experience in media solutions e-commerce CRM and digital marketing. Let me also introduce our panelist Nishchil Maheshwari head IT India Today group. Nishchil Maheshwari is currently leading the IT operations for the India Today group. He is a proactive and responsive IT professional meditator and also a social worker. Very warm welcome. We also have with us on the panel Mr. R. D. Bhatnagar CTO Denik Bhaskar group. Mr. Bhatnagar is a seasoned professional with a career of 39 years in print and production and information technology of leading corporates in India. Mr. Bhatnagar is better known as an innovator and trendsetter in the technology sector for media and has many feathers in his cap including setting up more than 57 print and publishing centers for the media companies. We also have with us Sarbani Bhatia senior vice president IT Denik Jagaran. With a rich experience of nearly three decades in the industry Mr. Bhatia heads the IT function of the Jagaran group which is one of the largest media conglomerates in the country with interest spanning across print, radio, digital, out of home and activation. Denik Jagaran being one of its flagship brands is the largest red daily in the country. She has also been responsible for laying down the information infrastructure for all the various verticals of the organization as well as evolving robust seamlessly integrated systems and processes for all the financial areas. We also have with us Mr. Owais Baba regional head limelight networks. Mr. Owais has a solid track record of securing key clients and increasing products and services penetration to grow market share. He has immense experience in the cloud infrastructure platform where he spends almost a decade with Oracle business and then with Microsoft Azure offerings and CDN services. And to session the chair let me first quickly check if we have Mr. Dinesh Oak online. He had some technical issue. So let me quickly check. All right. So once he joins us ladies and gentlemen I will introduce you to our panelist Mr. Dinesh Oak as well. But now I would like to introduce you to our session chair. Mr. Faisal Kavusa founder and chief analyst tech arc. Mr. Faisal Kavusa is a senior technology market analyst and founder of tech arc which is into technology analytics research and consulting services. Prior to this he has worked with organizations like IDC and CMR serving leading technology brands with insights and market trends. Faisal is closely engaged with the CXO leadership and strategy teams advising on product portfolio go to market channel operations and other areas. Faisal plays an influential role in the technology domain and actively writes columns in leading tech and mainstream publications. Now before I ask Faisal to take over let me share the points of discussions for today. Sagar may I request you to please put on the screen the slide for talking points of today's discussion. There it is. I'm going to give you a few seconds to just go through and know what we're going to talk about whether the couple of touch points that a panelist and moderator will be touching upon. Also here I would like to remind all of you that if you have any questions then go ahead and drop it in the Q&A box. We will take them during the discussion. Also if you are online and want to create a social buzz on listening to these industry stalwarts then do not forget to use our hashtag E4M webinar. With that ladies and gentlemen I'd hand over the screen to Mr. Faisal to take charge from here. A very warm welcome all of you. Thank you Cathy. Welcome all my co-panelists, audiences welcome to this show. I think you know we are again going to talk today something very very important because in you know personally I believe in digital ultimately it's all about experience. You may you may develop some great technologies in the background but what customer or user values and appreciates is the experience that comes through that technology solution and that obviously results in stickiness satisfaction and other such things which of course ultimately means revenue profits and such things. Today we have one of the I would say dynamic industries no need to know them all because they let you know everything okay that's how I would put it. I'm very glad to be part of this panel and I think we are going to have some exciting time over next say 60-75 minutes or so. For the audience just a request if you have any questions please feel free to ask in through the Q&A tab and we will be taking them through in the course of discussion. Let me start the discussion with Aditya. Hi Aditya. So Aditya you know this COVID-19 has been I think you know yes there are challenges but there are some of the you know definite trends we are seeing all across the industries. So how would you sum up its impact on your industry per se? Just a quick round if you could give us some views on it. Well in terms of you know digital viewership and digital engagement after just when the COVID started we had logged down all over the country. So you know there's a tremendous increase in user viewership so there's I will say kind of increase something which brings to around 25 to 50% in the viewership across the levels over there and especially our main trend what we have seen is you know viewership over the mobile mobile devices rather than the traditional TV TV viewer and desktop viewers so people are working from home so in the viewership there has been a significant impact since the COVID started and I can see the trend is still ongoing you know well it is stabilized as of now but again the increase is very much over there people you know used to move over to the digital medium rather than moving back to traditional television and all so that is a positive impact I had seen because of the COVID on the transformation I will say. Sure, let me take this question to Sarbani. Sarbani what's your view on this like maybe on opportunities on challenges side what did COVID result in? Yeah so COVID has had a significant impact on the publishing and broadcast industry with the impact the pandemic induced lockdown has led to a substantial increase in the media consumption mainly digital, OTT, TV and gaming also and this search in demand has added many new consumers and expanded to new demographics and new geographies I would say I know it could be the network improvement and the pandemic both are to be you know factors for this we have seen a huge surge of demand from tier 2 and tier 3 cities as well and with a lot of people being homeward bound and willing to consume a lot of media there have been great opportunities for subscription revenue as well so a lot of our publications have also started the subscription on the subscription model during this so this was a huge opportunity. The huge demand for OTT content etc has motivated players to innovate and to use technology to use technology in fantastic ways to create content in these limited circumstances and to distribute them efficiently because of the huge demand they wanted to ride the wave and so I see in all in all there have been huge opportunities you know there could have been challenges with our print versions where the publication was hit definitely but then there too the credibility improved many folds because of the abundance of fake news at times on social media etc so that was a plus point but however the circulation did separate there but all in all for digital media I think the growth trajectory accelerated many fold it was predicted I think that India would have a billion digital users by 2030 I think that really got accelerated considerably thanks to this pandemic absolutely we have digital jump started you know so to say yeah so so interesting things yeah so so interesting things coming out you know we are seeing you know say adoption mobile we are seeing new geographies getting added next year I want to you know probably roping you here and again you know understand what what's your view what's the impact first of all I would like to say you know what covid to give to the industries like we have more at like about two to three years in terms of the digital viewership and the separability in the market so it's it's it's us you know covid impact is on the digital industries like we are ahead of the time that results at all the things we can going to get in like after two years and all this being achieved earlier so this is the biggest impact I've seen and as the everyone is seeing there's a multi-fold hits and spikes and we are like all in a plus in terms of digital business okay great good to hear that everything is going up so far you know what I get from you people to you Badri like what's what's your your view on the topic just quick introductory remarks the covid is really a challenge for the television industry especially because we never we never ever thought that the day will come that we have to work remotely and but the challenge is taken in the right manner and then if not entirely we slowly started the working remotely and then finding out ways how to how to do it with the with the available resources that is another challenge so we have slowly started working from the the the scripting and then the the graphics and the the editing also we could achieve to the certain extent but not to the maximum I mean not to the extent that it is required but yes certainly about 50% of the work staff we we could do it from the our people can do it from the home remotely and even now also they are doing it but yeah it is a challenge at the same time it is a learning learning new things that is exciting as a technical person and I I wish that I wish that we could we could get into more and more technologies using the the internet and then do better things than what we have done so far the confidence has come that we can achieve certain things okay remote great great great coming to you ripu if I'm pronouncing your name correctly ripu what's what's your take on the situation well you can you can call me rd where people know me as rd vatnagar great yeah so you know the pace of development on the digital side pre-covid was pretty much you know very slow as businesses were focusing more on their hardcore content delivery or maybe in the newspapers so we had taken up this transformation journey about just a two years back and then we started you know moving our legacy applications onto the cloud and new technologies pandemic was just like you know adding a turbo booster to that whole effort and whatever we had planned that you do in the next three four years we just did it in flat maybe just a month so and I must tell you it was what an exciting experience it was that within three days of the lockdown we were able to move about 95% of our people working from home and it was fully facilitated by you know it and the digital you know the department one of the drawbacks or one of the things that you know was actually making us more concerned was how do we you know take the newspapers to the people well and in our markets as I've been you know speaking to a lot of my peers in the in the industry we did not lose even a day of our print except for Maharashtra where the government had taken a decision of you know closing down the all the centers but in the rest of all the markets we did not close on your version for a single day and the circulation have come up to a decent level again but I must tell you whatever you know boost that we got digitally we could know could not you know we cannot say that we can sustain it because in our markets people still believe in the look and feel or the touch of the physical newspaper while they have been consuming a lot of news from the digital channels but I must say it's not a very you can say you know a potential or a very a jump that you could monetize or you can say that you're building some future business over on digital because monetization on a digital numbers is still a far first thing for the media companies right right but yes we have actually been connected to our readers to both the medium you know using newspapers as well as digital so one of the most thing you know best thing that we got during this lockdown was that we got more connected to our customers rather than we would have been earlier so it was a very slow pace when we went out to customers and meet but today I can tell you that we have a tab almost of all the customers that we have read newspapers we have that connect with them so we can connect them digitally anytime we want so that's one of the biggest things that the pandemic gave us that's that's great so at least one challenge coming up how do we monetize growth is there uh Imtiaz coming to you what's what's your view on you know the impact of COVID on the industry thanks a lot to all those who have you know contributed so far in the discussion level and I would like to avoid the repetition of whoever has already been mentioned you know in the in the contribution level I would say that the pandemic has expedited the you know the digital transformation process at least five to ten years you know ahead in advance in the last six months the kind of you know support which we have been getting from management was great that as you know both Badri and Adi Panagra was saying the the the change you know we the digital revenue from the total you know revenue monetization level was not big enough to be considered but that has changed now now the attention is there from the management side that the revenue which is coming from the monetization from the digital channels is something which is considerable and should pay attention so I would say the biggest change that has happened is basically from the management or the investors side that this is a no longer a little boy or a little sister you know roaming around but is something which need to pay attention this is the biggest change I would say that has changed the second thing from the community level you know the address to where we are basically you know addressing so there's a huge change we would definitely say that we have a lot of you know subscribers or viewers from the you know a Middle East side from of course from the NRIs of the Middle East side and and we also had you know both from the media one and I representing both media one and a Madhimam newspaper so both the media one TV the channel as well as the Madhimam newspaper level we got a huge shift from the print and the traditional broadcast level to our digital channel including you know our app level including to our digital portal level including to our YouTube level and Facebook level so those you know YouTube, Facebook and our an app and portal we had a you know we had almost 100% more than 100% growth in the last six months time so this is the second thing which I would like to say that from the community side the third thing which is more important is that you know from our clients you know those who are advising providing us advertising level there's a huge change in the culture that they used to you know interact with us we definitely all our all of us are getting a network ad from the ad exchange level that is that is having an organic growth but that organic growth has definitely jumped you know that is one thing second thing is that apart from the the network ad we are now getting a lot of you know always on local ads and those local ads level has changed a lot you know and then it is coming to a level with our in expertise within the in-house level which we have built the digital transformation and SEO level some of our editors are coming forward in such a way that they are asking can you also take up our you know SEO and you know digital transformation level so it has now you know given us an opportunity of a new business area where we can you know mutually benefit each other so you know so what I want to say is that from the management side from our subscriber side and from our editor side in all the three levels the jump has to be I would have you know imagined that the age that the stage which we are here towards end of 2020 we would not have you know in a normal non-pandemic level we would have reached this this stage only by 2025 so at least a five years ahead of jump especially in the in the regional you know language which we which I am representing is you know boosted level so there's a tremendous attention you know tremendous investment been you know you know given approvals and progress so I think with you know keeping all the the health you know impact which we had of course you know and then paying you know tribute to those who are past level at the same time whoever has had the the financial impact level I would say from a digital transformation level this has given us ample opportunity to focus sure sure thank you so there's this there's so to say management swing towards digital to you Gunjan the same question how do you perceive impact of covid on the industry yeah hi Fazil hi everyone so I agree with the MTA's and Mr. Adik also this has actually impacted the you know the upper management to think about how digital works actually so how it used to work is like only we used to look into SEO for only websites and apps only but now people are looking into YouTube and Twitter and everything how can I increase my followers how I can increase my followers in YouTube or in Twitter or on my Facebook and how I can do much more of live streamings and everything coming from a you know background channel background basically so we have actually transformed we have made our prints into PDFs so you can get our you know PDFs of our print versions we have also tried to you know go into app friendly kind of ways also like Amazon fire stick is there Apple TV is there so we what we have seen is that people are actually moving out from DTH also and they're actually going 100% you know digital and there are multiple places where we can actually find our customers which we didn't explore first that we think that they were might not be from there but yeah this is something that we have actually seen okay great I think I think interesting start you know now let's have a different view of the market I want to you know rope in a ways here so with you heard what industry has gone through or is you know how they have so to say embraced COVID-19 opportunities as well as challenges so how is limelight you are helping maybe you know industry partners here or globally in in in kind of meeting all that what has you know come up due to COVID-19 yeah thanks Basil it's a great point I think everybody put across some good points it's it has a both sides what this pandemic has given us a lot of challenges as well as well as it has some good sides as well but I would say you know with this pandemic resulting in the worldwide lockdown people across different parts of the world have been confined to their homes and because of this COVID you know it's impacting lives across the globe which is I would say you know forcing us to change how we work how we learn how we access information or how we connect with one another and the environment options as well so a streaming is becoming the forefront of this new normal especially with Indian consumers because now engaging with online video for an average close to five hours every day which is the highest among the surveyed countries and this lockdown has raised a demand for online content and CDNs are ensuring to provide content faster and smoother as well to the users and this is because you know different people access the content on different devices and under varied network conditions because you know we can see in tier two and tier three stays wouldn't have that great bandwidth that great network conditions there but there is a way to help ensure a smooth user experience by using a content delivery network provider like we as a limelight so we as in you know we operate as one of the world's largest and most interconnected private networks to why we provide real-time streaming live streaming we have security services as well we do have edge services and on-demand video delivery with a with a massive global private network along with our own software and where we have the connectivity with most of the ISPs serve in the world so this helps our customers in getting their videos delivered to any device and anywhere in the world at high quality and with the lowest buffer rates in the industry because the reason is we don't rely on the public internet and where all the congestion happens and with limelight the delivery happens through our private backbone and that is that is the reason that we have the highest cash rate ratio among all the CDN providers in the world so in general if I say all the CDNs play an important role in improving the performance for the media and broadcasters which we are talking about right now while delivering the content with rich media formats and interactions and engaging content to the users so online you know you know having said this online video continues rapidly to grow in popularity at the expense of traditional broadcast living experiences and on average if we see we most globally spend nearly eight hours per week watching various types of content and this year the increase of close to 16% of the average living time so we have seen increases in consumption of content across the world like kind of TV shows movies it could be news it could be binge watching or UGC content and whatnot and all this is possible seamlessly with the best user experiences through a great CDN like what we are doing in the market right now. Okay great great let's let's now you know talk a bit into technology so Aditya coming to you again I want you to understand obviously you know you know we we heard about probably you know new new users getting edited you know different types of devices out there we we heard about you know probably opportunities of you know monetization on sites of maybe having subscribers so once obviously you know somebody pays the expectation you know increases okay in terms of you know service delivery so how critical if we may get into this CDN aspect how critical is it in the entire technology value chain in delivering the that right experience well I will say CDN is you know just like the backbone if we talk about the greater distribution so you need to have a you know definitely a good internet but yeah again if you're missing on the CDN in our digital industry you know generally they say every two seconds matters the most if you are not able to if your viewer is not able to you know watch you have you have been trying to deliver in two seconds probably 50% of them you will lose them away so the CDN a right choice of CDN you know enables us to have this have that seamless delivery but still in terms of challenges I will still say over the low mobile networks we still have challenges even with best of the CDNs we still have challenges over the you know low internet penetration areas for the users to even what the live streaming even in case of you know very low bandwidth streams ranging to 200 300 kvbs so that is still a challenge but yeah for most of it like if you see the distribution over connected devices it is already increased by not just connected devices but over all the devices the distribution already increased by something around in order 40 to 50% so and when connected devices are again you know delivering the content in full SD quality so when a high amount of data is going in right choice of CDN is you know it is it is a must have you just cannot do without it okay okay if I may come to you Sarvani with the same question you know I think the last last thing that any consumer loves is to be dictated okay so we can't tell them that you can watch the basics or you can get the content in you know the best experience on this device and not on that device so there is this you know there are so many devices out there and consumers want to kind of consume content and data and other things on whatever they want so so what is in your opinion role of CDN in really really making that great experience out there sorry you are muted every media and entertainment organization is forever looking for the right media platform to overcome these challenges of content delivery because you know the aim for every broadcast or publisher is to reduce the latency to you know have a quick page load and minimal buffering and quick video startup optimal video quality so it is only with an effective CDN implementation in place that we can we can kind of overcome these challenges because a user will click away if the page load time is huge so to reduce these bounce rates we require a CDN definitely and especially now with the only channel being the way forward every user being available on multiple channels multiple devices even as we speak now I think each one of us have so many devices internet connecting devices within arms reach so it is a CDN which will help us deliver seamlessly our content across platforms and devices and it will also help us cater to this huge surge in traffic suddenly no sudden surges in traffic we had not expected you know it's with a CDN in place that we were able to deal with that withstand hardware failures because of the distributed nature and we were also at the back of our mind very sure that our content would be always available because it would mitigate the leader's attacks if any phishing attacks if any have a waft in place so that way our website and web application is also kind of secure and along with the CDN do performing these functions the AIML stack of it and the data insights helps us of course to some extent on targeted advertising and help us monetize content and help us to kind of build our content around user preferences understand the user behavior a bit more than we would know without the CDN and help us deliver tailor-made curated content so all in all the CDN is absolutely I don't think any successful media organization today can think of surviving without a CDN so it's kind of absolutely necessary for a smooth function. Okay okay I think it's it's great to hear that you know the kind of significant CDN has in the entire you know value chain. Nishal if I may come to you you know CDN has perhaps multiple roles to play okay so if we talk from maybe the security point of view you know Sarvani did touch a bit of it but you know in your opinion how how critical you feel CDN is as an element on the technology so to say secure the content and deliver it securely and I think once we have that security only then we can you know think of monetizing it effectively you know stopping the revenue leakages and other such things and also you know users would feel comfortable in consuming that data. Right as well as all the fellows because as already said you know it's a backbone and CDN has played actually a game-changing role you know to provide the past experience to the user and yes rightly it's more security and as an individual publisher here you don't need to be worried or invest a lot you know into the securities and have the extra precautions for the security of your data and all and the as the CDN is you know highly distributed platform and across the world you really don't need to worry to you know where is your consumer is actually so you get best of the experience and you get the minimize the delay you know in loading all the web pages content and physical distance is hardly matter so CDN in terms of security is provide best of the content in a secure manner and it's a quality web experience to all the end users no matter what location they are what browser they are using on our device or what network they are connecting from so in these terms as rightly everyone has been already concluded with nobody can think about now the digital great form without the CDN right right absolutely coming to you Badri you know although Imtiaz touched upon this you know in his introductory remarks you know with this digital there is nothing like regional now you know everything is so to say global okay now you are your viewers your readers could be anywhere in the world okay and and so so again you know a robust CDN perhaps helps and you know accelerates that growth that going global growth and strategy of a regional player so what's your what's your view on this sorry you are muted yeah as you said rightly the the and everybody mentioned we can't think of a world today without a CDN CDN has matured over the years and it has and the it has matured faster than what we expected rather the only challenge is that one is a security that they have to concentrate more on security and the and the threats okay the the malware threats are the the other threats and the security of the content and I'm from a video industry okay satellite television see the the the challenge in the satellite television this thing using a serial is a bandwidth at the last mile the last mile connectivity still needs to be improved a lot the the series will talk about the about the about their performance and the the deliverables only at the pop level not at the customer level those those challenges have to be overcome and I know it is it is a it is not as easy as I'm telling rather I'm talking but unless I mean that is an important thing I think that they have to concentrate on and then you know bandwidth at the last mile are much more need for the digital growth the the without a CDN of course the digital the growth is not there and we can't think of any industry not can you be the television on a digital and but the user experience will be much more better and you don't you don't lose a viewer not even a single viewer if there is a good experience and a good continuous availability of the bandwidth while stationary or on the moon this is my view one is a security and availability of the bandwidth for the end user sure sure thank you I think I think we know more probably validations required how critical how important CDN is and I wanted to come to the challenges or gaps which probably you guys are still you know feeling are there in the solutions available you touched upon them a bit but but you know now moving on to your empty house so any any areas you feel within the CDNs that are available right now which you feel can can need some little bit of enhancement to probably solve your worries of course CDN on a normal delivery level will expedite the you know the the accessibility but at the same time we do definitely have a lot of challenge especially you know when that when it comes to the caching level and you know there are some you know insecure or you know and censorship we you know required data being published and then then we wanted to catch it back you know the CDN do make a challenge we have experience with that especially you know as we are having the viewers from across the world and especially in some of the censored censored in countries we have experienced some of the data which is maybe not you know very well censored within our you know own country but then it has got in a different censorship in a in a different country and then when it comes to the CDN level and that has been you know identified with their level the level of you know refreshment is is you know is an area we had challenges in the last couple of weeks especially so the caching mechanism in which how frequently you know once we are you know flushing a new content or a replaced the content level you know how how quickly it is getting replicated across the in a CDN is definitely a challenge I think a lot more intelligent has to come because it's not only you know sometimes it may be an enhanced version or an updated version sometimes it could be a deletion or sometimes sometimes it could be you know a complete replacement so based on the content level based on the in a in a the the the the the censorship level of things if there are different type of action which is required from the from the in a CDN level so it's not CDN is not just a you know static data replicator it has to have a lot more intelligent you know what is the level which can be cashed what is the level which can be delivered immediately well you know we could make sure that the user is been in a served immediately but at the same time a continuous update is happening so the the from the traditional level from a static data being delivered it has become that there is there's no data anymore you know with the static it's all become very very dynamic I mean I would still say that there are static and then a text-to-data image data and then video data but then the dynamism of those data is becoming so important level that you know how how just now you could understand that if you look at the you know yours election results you know you could definitely different you know results on different you know even leading newspapers level including CNN if you go how the CNN is replicating how the how the in a Google is replicating how the amp is replicating so it's it's mainly when it comes to those type of data the it is not only the content or a static updation it becomes much much more dynamic level so that is where I would say the the intelligence of the CDM is becoming from from a traditional level to a much more complicated level because it is not only text it's not only image in a text image and video together when it comes to any industry level in the media you know it's very very dynamic and so there is a lot more intelligence required in the caching mechanism of the cdm level okay great point great point coming to you gunjan any any gaps you find and and you know this being one of the elements in the technology value chain which is perhaps closest to the consumer yeah so what are your expectations from us you know a great cdm yeah so like you know how google says that it's like within two seconds the website the page load should be within two seconds that that too for any commerce site and for a normal site they said I should load within half a second or one second something like that the first page look should come in so what we look for is like if I'm optimizing the images at my level before uploading it to my website or the app or anything so the cdm should also be able to optimize and send it the request according to the network of the fellow who is actually receiving the content and not only for the image I think one of the biggest challenges is obviously videos nowadays because people are more engaged into video view first so if the cdm can help us get into like an optimized video content so if somebody is on a 2g this is a real case but on a low end phone somewhere and he's directly browsing it so it should be able to like there should not be not be a buffering or a break that should happen and I could deliver my video content actually much faster as compared to a normal or a older kind of a service at all. Okay before I come to Ues, Aditi if I'm not wrong you probably have a hard stop or can we still continue for some time? We'll for 10 more minutes. Okay then okay we can have your views so Ues you heard what all the technology experts had to say about cdm okay security, delivery of content, buffering I think analytics was one of the points raised so how is you know probably a cdm helping in all this? Yeah first of all I can hear some good points here like Saboni also raised out some good points which cdm can do which talks about the low time, the cash aid ratio and how exactly security is very very important which sometimes we only neglect you know the security and there are three parts to this question I would say one is definitely how we deliver anywhere in the world where definitely the bandwidth is low, how we ensure the the right experience of the users and what role does a complimenting or a good cdm technology play here so see we all are in general as cdms you know we have the geographically distributed platforms of servers delivering web content to end users where we minimize the time taken to load a web page and the currently increasing traffic load puts extra strain on the capacity of a cdm infrastructure so it's very very crucial not only for us for all the cdms to continually increase capacity and deliver services with high performance even in the situation where there is increasing traffic demand so I have myself seen you know cdm technologies have helped applications amazingly on that front because when users request information on the application interface and the request has to reach only the nearest data center and reward back the users so the signal need not travel to the original server so this makes for lesser load and cuts down congestion on the network servers which will definitely help delivering lower latency due to fever hops so we as in a limelight you know we always help in improving the quality of the services for media and broadcasting in particular where we help with a lot of things like some of the things which I can talk about is with reducing the website load time because where the content is delivered to the website by the nearest cdm server it reduces the time taken by a website to load hence it gives the better user experiences a faster page load time and people end up spending more time on the website as the bounce rate is reduced similarly we also help in reducing the bandwidth cost because bandwidth cost is one of the primary expense for any website and if you talk about a good cdm it helps in reducing the hosting cost of the website one point definitely which you know Bothery also raised is very very important is increasing the security of the website and mobile application because the online content delivered with the help of cdm is much much more secure and optimized and if you talk about you know getting the content to the right user which is a critical part of the workflow and it can be difficult it can be complicated to manage but it requires that multiple formats of the same content to be available which needs to be a delivered and in all the required bit rates right and the process is in place to select the right content for the device that the content is to be lived on because there are multiple devices somebody is watching the content on phone similarly some smart TVs or big screens or laptops tablets whatnot so services like which we do have which is multimedia device live and similarly multimedia device on demand and live push ingest these kind of services help to produce content in the right formats in a dynamic way I would say and while moving the processing up to a cdm edge and letting the producer you know whose hour is producing the content concentrate on getting the production and high quality right so our delivery services take care of creating all the formats and we make sure they are delivered with high efficiency and for greater quality as well one of the things which I also want to touch upon is because I just heard just not remember somebody raised the point about the last mile acceleration and how exactly we're interconnected in the last mile one of the services which we do have is about the web acceleration services certainly which helps to improve the performance of websites and applications by accelerating the interaction between users and applications we while we also have a last mile acceleration where we offer a variety of techniques I would say including TCP optimizations compressions you know are delivered to the client from the cdm edge beyond this we also have a mechanism which is the website and application device detection basically which is the device identification with configurable actions based on results which helps you easily customize content by device and deliver the optimal experience so these are some of the things you know I would say which we can do for different devices experience where people are consuming the content in remote access at different bandwidth conditions on multiple devices and also ensuring they get the best and user experiences through our leading cdm technology provider like limelight in this case okay on a lighter note you know I think six seven years back we were all talking about BYOD bring your own device I hope you all have got your coffee bring your own coffee you know to keep yourself refreshed that's one of the takeaways of the COVID-19 you know interactions so you know Aditya I understand you have to you know stop and so just you know probably some closing remarks from you and also to understand you know what are your investment priorities of course I know Wes would love to understand that you are investing in cdm but what are those you know three four things which you are you know planning and prioritizing well this is a complicated question I guess this is kind of a more of a trick question because you know it is not just the cdm but yeah we have to invest in almost all of the latest upcoming things so first thing being like mainly video centered our consumption is mainly video centered so you know the first thing what I would like to invest in would be kind of you know new technologies for transcoding the content video content so that I could have lighter videos which can you know go to the consumers so that would be the first thing another industry trend what I can see coming quite fast is you know UAD screen televisions 4k streams and 8k streams so with that probably you know that would be a lot of data to serve in so again to serve that kind of a data we need to have a right cdm strategy in place so that if any of my consumers watching over the connected devices I should not have a fear of losing them out so definitely some investment in the systems and I will say better cdm again content is always looking so right you just cannot go without any investment in content so content will always be so that is a you know primary area okay you know maybe maybe you can talk about some of the top three four you know trends you see this industry is witnessing and you know that's where next two three years are going to be well in terms of digital what I see there's a high surge what I see would be coming in because during the pandemic after pandemic what I can see you know even many many of my friends on a personal level have stopped subscribing to newspapers and all so people have shifted to digital mediums over there however there are quite a few which you know although although there are many which find it inconvenient so paper still has a you know touch base feel so primary that is one and video technology trend is something I see as you know booming in whether you see any industry education media entertainment and even the way we are having a meeting right now or conferences right now so a surgeon video and then again you know technical searches like 8k videos and 4k videos so even we are not I don't know even right now you know we have difficulty in the streaming high definition videos so there will be a lot of challenges going which are going to come along with 4k and 8k absolutely so these are the challenges and the opportunities I see all of them together okay great great so thank you thank you Aditya I guess you know you have some other yeah one of the thoughts that you're on yeah engagement to take up so thanks for being with us today thank you very nice to hear the interesting views thank you okay uh meanwhile just requesting audience if you have any questions please feel free to ask them in the Q&A section and we'll be taking them along uh coming to you Sarvani you know again the same question you know one what are those three four things which you see uh there are you know that the industry and essentially you people will be busy in as an industry okay and what would that mean in terms of investments in focus okay so I agree completely with many of you who have been stating that videos are the hottest trend videos that will be more and more videos and text based content cannot compete with the you know the attraction of video based and now in today's mobile centric world people are even using their smartphones to watch and share videos of all kinds live streaming is a big hit and content is king will remain continue to remain king but now it's more and more about context and targeted contextual and targeted text so it's very important to understand the target audience their behavior patterns their preferences and have a deep understanding of these data insights which will also help in targeted advertising so monetization comes in which we are all interested to do so a lot a lot of our investments are going to be to tackle this to to be able to transmit and deliver video content optimally with minimal buffering and with the platform and CDN in place now the next focus would be on CX I think we aim to provide a smooth customer experience and by providing very compelling and personalized data so we wish to build a DMP a good data management platform to and manage analyze the data around our customers to understand the behavioral patterns the geographies the demographics the contextual part of it to be able to optimize our journeys and serve the content because which is preferred by that consumer because you see at the end of it however cliched it may sound serving the right content to the right consumer is still a challenge that is a pain area however much we worked on it I think we need to work a lot more on that to understand the preferences so we recently did a use case with mighty hive and we learned to build dashboards which gave a lot of insights but you know even the mindset of journalists and content creators does not change overnight so they need to also learn how to use those dashboards effectively and serve the right content to the right consumer so then that is one area then we need to work on the monetization bit and now with cookies as I hear slowly phasing out I know that is going to be a challenge so again having a deep insight on that and on programmatic buying we need to you know prove the best performance of our way so there has to be a lot of today's advertisers demand a lot of transparency and they demand accountability and relevance so all of that will have to be worked upon to you know be able to monetize the content more and more another trend I see is that of omni channel which is already set in because you know users have increasingly multiple devices and multiple channels so you can't afford to be not present all over so and most businesses I think are investing in multiple channels they have a website they have an app they have social media presence but having said that I don't think many businesses get it right when it comes to omni channel which transcends this multiple channel and kind of provides a very seamlessly integrated experience across all channels so I think we need to work on that too ideal would be a place like you know an experience like Netflix where you stop watching a movie on your smart TV and you could resume again on your smartphone or on your iPad or an Amazon where you add items to your card from your phone and then on your laptop you can finish shopping so that kind of seamless and consistent experience across various channels we need to work on that too most businesses are doing multiple channels but I don't think they're using it to engage and connect with their consumers but it's not that integrated seamlessly so that is one trend which has already set in and has to be worked upon so that's one thing apart from that there are many other I don't know if it can be called a trend the sudden surge in traffic from tier two and tier three cities is something which also needs to be an offer so that is one trend that we set in so our investment plan is more and more around DMB I think okay so interesting like I believe what it is hinting towards is personalized and you know personalized content personalized delivery of content and maybe you know other interest areas that's that's something interesting so Badri if I may you know rope in you here and you know want to understand your views how do you see the immediate future of this industry what would be those three four five things which probably are on your roadmap for the next couple of years yes certainly CDM is a tool to reach people a platform to reach more number of people that we are doing now and the the as I mentioned earlier the apart from the CDM the speeds that CMS also makes a lot of difference the that will give a good user experience I forgot to tell you that time so I'm adding that CMS and will help us and presently we started only as a text website a couple of months back and then only two months back we started introducing a video content on our website because the pandemic has gave us more number of viewers than before and so the more and more people are glued to websites than the regular televisions so we are introducing live feed and also the VOD content more and more VOD content so right the the CDM will use a is a media that is the only media to reach out the people and so I see there the the the viewership for the websites and then the specialized content also we are planning in next year or so only for what we are not able to show it on the television certainly we want to show it on the website because the viewer viewers are the we get different types of viewers in the website and the so because the the target audience audience combination is is huge in here and we are one we have to still understand the how to reach out the target audience using these videos specialized videos and there it becomes a number of channels opening of a number of channels in terms of regular television which we cannot do it here in a regular manner but this is easy in a digital era and certainly in the next three to five years I would see there will be a tremendous improvement in the viewership and the consumption of the videos and also the advertisement revenue also will increase substantially for the digital platforms the covid also has been covid is one one excuse I would say okay one example or excuse whatever you want to call but that has that has proved the potential of a digital platform for the any media especially for the news give them the right news at the right time and viewer is there always and okay they will this is my feeling sure sure so I guess you know probably personalization relevancy these are these are some of the things teams coming up moving on to you rd what's what's your view how are you looking at what's what's there out in future yes as rightly you know picked up by all the speakers here it has to be multi-channel omnichannel referential based it has to be highly customized to a customer so that's where you know the challenge is that you know the current technology maybe in e-commerce you get to have the direct access to the customer what is buying what is actually consuming but in news it is slightly difficult to get you to that right you know individualized customer but then yes there are many technology companies that are working on it and you know we also have been experimenting with a couple of them that how do we reach out to an individual individualized customer that's one part the second part is even if you reach to a very you know an individual based on his preferences how do we now create or repurpose that content that actually satisfies the need of everybody like one rightly person said that you need to have a content you know the highest highest quality in your servers and based on the endpoint the person is using you know the streaming happens or the content is delivered you know in a multi-threaded manner a person having a real good network and real nice device can you know enjoy it on a high definite on a very you can have 4,000 or 8,000 k but if a person is viewing the same content in you know low networks and with a low device you should also have a similar experience of consuming that content so our investments primarily as of course content is there and content will be ubiquitous one of the important areas that we will want to invest is to get a hold on the various consumer you know the areas where what kind of content is being consumed by what kind of a person and we are able to sort of repurpose and put that content as Shabani said that they are going to invest in you know DMPs so I think most of the publishers are looking at because the content will be created at one source but it has a multi-source of consumption so and we have to satisfy all the consumers there one important factor you know a study that gave us was about 10 12 or 10 15 years back the partial attention span as we speak of any human being was about seven to eight seconds which has drastically reduced to about three seconds and it is further reducing so as somebody was saying that about two seconds and if you're don't making engaged in two seconds the person just bounces off and goes to somewhere else and that's the biggest fear of losing your customer as well as a brand so today people don't follow that if you want to follow any news like for example today presidential elections they would select adenic baskar or adenic jagaran for a kiwi they will simply go on a google and type presidential elections in us and they get all the choices so here is one of the challenges that how do you make it sticky and how do you make you know your brand also very important person chooses a brand over to read a particular content that this type of content will be delivered by best by this say a news agency or a brand so that's where you know we will be targeting ourselves and one more stats which some you know are coveted the panelists also put out was the fake news the extent of fake news is going to be about 63% of whatever consumption we have on any kind of media now that's going to be biggest challenge even for the most credible you know media brands how do we sort of make out between a fake news and agenda news news has to be you know technology which will which has to support this one of the example where cdn plays a very important role was one of the content people also see newspapers also pick up content from you know various media that is coming like through internet or to tv or wherever and immediately picks up the content looking at it's what you can say interest value and we push that content on our medium and realizing that that was fake and by the time you sort of pull it off it has already gone viral and this is because of the cdn itself because once you pull out it takes a lot of time you know to the last level when it's pulled out there and meantime that you know content has created whatever influence it needs to create amongst those kind of people and especially with our you know our kind of business we are into tier two tier three tier four and whatnot you know down the line and the content which is pushed or taken back really takes a lot of lot of time one of the challenge that we are facing with cdn was we were not able to get a similar result into all the markets so whatever content we pushed actually got pushed in certain time frame in you know the p1 markets or p2 markets but if you talk about downstream in the towns and villages it didn't even appear about four years for sort of four hours so that is the kind of result we get so we are looking at you know where we can have a very seamless you know experience with having these kind of series which can promise us that any content push to any kind of markets reaches every audience in that very particular time like for example an OTP has to be within a fraction of seconds today whereas even the websites today give you that this OTP will last you about two minutes or three minutes that's that's not a benchmark at all so it has to be within some seconds absolutely okay okay so if you may if I may you know ask you about the same thing maybe very quickly if you could just take us through what do you see about the future I think the area which you know Sarbane ma'am has a point out the DMP area is very very important in the recent level we I personally had an experience of you know working on the blue guy or active blue guy DMP level for a personalization level so I think the technology has to enable how personalized the content can be delivered especially when it comes to the you know the digital area where someone is having an app of our level so we call it as you know you know that's the this concept of the B2B and B2C you know business to the consumer level now to the direct B2D or direct to the customer level how can we deliver direct to the customer what is his preference level now understanding the customer is not a one-time job it's an ongoing job you know you know so the dynamism is changing the attributes are changing the the behaviors are changing and even the people are changing in the person one person like for example what I wanted a month ago may not be the thing which I wanted today so it's it's keep changing so keep on understanding your customer and you know keep on improving your you know your your CRM database so basically behind the DMP is basically a CRM which is a customer relationship management and there you will have to work with the first party data which is your direct customers data right then you can find data which is your partner's data and the third party data so that is I think you know enabling that and you know educating that to the our editorial team is the current biggest challenge so that's what I believe what somebody was trying to touch you know apart from having all this technology to make it understand that utilize this technology to have a much more customized delivery to the editorial team is also an equally challenging things in these days okay great uh gunjan your your views on on what do you see how the future would look like yeah I totally agree with everyone this the personal recommendation and everything this is actually the next thing where you actually understand what the customer is like and what he would like to view or read going forward but what I think the forward looking forward looking forward equally more about OTTs and VODs people would much are much likely to actually go through what they want to see and then accordingly watch the news rather than the live you know the DTH kind of stuff okay great let's let's move on to a couple of questions from the audiences so one of the questions is how important edge computing is for broadcasting I think I think it's for everyone you know personally I see cdn as one of the edge computing so to say elements I don't know if any one of you would like to comment on it okay then I don't see you know a couple of I don't see honestly them to be very very relevant for this topic coming to you always now you have heard what what what these experts feel what they have been doing and what they see is going to happen in future any any suggestions from your side because you know you have a global perspective also because you you're dealing with maybe broadcasters and publishers globally so what is your perspective probably what's what's is this something that is being missed out or how do you see what's happening globally with the industry see first of there are a lot of definitely the considering the time I can just share some points regarding the media industry it's in the middle of a revolution and where a fundamental shift of power affecting virtually every media organization you know rather than a broadcaster pushing content it selects out to viewers for them to watch at scheduled times on a TV set but the viewers are now increasingly in charge pulling whatever content they want to consume from whichever media organization and at whatever time suits them on whatever device they want to watch it so for a video audience it's all about experience and the and the media and broadcasting industry I would say is going undergoing a dramatic changes in technology and business models so to stay competitive you need flexibility in your video delivery infrastructure I'm sure like everybody also touched upon the video how video delivery is very important so you can go in whatever direction is required to satisfy and hold on to the audience and as a limelight solution for media and broadcasters you know we provide some of the tools you will need to manage and deliver being it live streaming or on-demand video delivery with the best possible user experience to a global audience and it also helps with a variety of video workload capabilities when I say workload capabilities it helps to reduce the internal workload or simplify video publishing reducing the capex investments where leveraging the cloud resources for content origin storage and cdn delivery obscures the content one of the important things and I believe that is the future of media and broadcasters is you know although it's like appealing to the broadcast quality generation which applies to any organization delivering digital content it's probably more applicable to those organizations whose business model revolves around the delivery of video and these organizations you know they they they live and die by this workflow by the video workflow so what does the future look like for these organizations and things need to radically change to meet these new demands like one is kind of you know moving into the cloud sooner and because to survive media and broadcasters will need to migrate much of their workflow infrastructure to the cloud which helps them to enable these organizations and to reach massive scale without investing a lot on the capex into software and equipment but also helps them to enable to respond and quickly as content changes every now and then second important point is operate in a real time I would say because the the kind of industry we are into and the kind of you know the failure going through the broadcasters officials must evolve their workflow to operate more in real time because many are still transcoding files manually because we have been dealing with a lot of you know our customers where we have been hearing these kind of feedback there are still some cases where the transcoding is happening manually when cloud based resources will do the job more efficiently and provide for content publishing you know that exceeds consumer expectations also important is you know support of new low latency live streaming technology which is the key to improving sports and gaming experiences and the third thing is certainly which I also touched upon earlier which is to be device focused because the broadcast quality generation it lives and dies by their devices and the media and broadcasters must become device focused to ensure that content is available and of high quality regardless of the endpoint so these are my two cents on my thought processes to it but certainly I can address in much capacity there are some questions okay with there's also a question from audience and just wanted to understand you know Sabani and others also talked about this that the opportunity is probably moving towards you know non metros smaller towns and cities so so has the CDN kind of graduated likewise yeah see first of all customers are facing challenges with workflow complexity performance cost some of the bandwidth issues in TR2 and TR3 STs we are seeing demand to provide you know more customization in the CDN workflow to ensure that our customers can control their content distribution which is why you know we have focused on our edge functions as a product it's like similar to you know like ec2 and lambda from amazon it allows customers to deploy their own functions and code to the CDN edge effectively allowing them to create applications custom workflows within the CDN so we are doing the some of the cases we are also doing the last mile accelerations which really helps you know to improve the bandwidth in TR2 and TR3 STs we have the connectivity with most of the ISPs in India and outside of India as well because typically we're talking about India right now I would say we have 1000 plus pairing with the ISPs and with the kind of these products you know which we are investing in the infrastructure and capacities like we recently added three more data centers in India and we're not called POCS we call it huge data centers which is exactly that's how we are distributed we are investing in the technology and like I touched upon edge functions with these edge functions it helps to you know reducing latency which is definitely a challenge for live events and being able to do this for large audiences is hard so we have focused on improving our real-time streaming product as well and we are expecting to have updates available soon which will definitely provide you know increased capacity for live streaming with sub-second latencies so you know with a changing world with some demands from the customer which we keep on hearing there are some requirements from some of our customers and some of our partners we definitely keep on you know increasing more into our capacities and infrastructure having strong connections in TR2 and TR3 STs because we're also being dealing with a lot of edtech platforms these days so okay is there video-based platforms is there but in the edtech space they have primary users in TR2 and TR3 STs and that's exactly what we are working right now okay I think I think we got an elaborate answer to this thank you so so we have we are just approaching to the end of this live program what I personally understood is CDN is all about probably customer delight you know it's not content delivering it's more of customer delight network or whatever we may want so without that perhaps that delight that user experience cannot be related and you know this industry is transforming like anything you know really really some of the great things being worked upon being thought around and we are definitely going to see a lot of transformation in the media industry backed by technology and and some of those fantastic you know tools out there and and I'm sure there will be a lot of you know news in the media about how media is getting transformed in coming times that's something interesting to see with this I would like to thank you all for sharing your time and sharing your views I'm sure everyone in the audiences enjoyed and really you know got some real real insights and benefit from today's discussion once again thanking you all and over to you Khyati. Thank you so much Vezel I think it was a wonderful conversation the audiences are loving it we are seeing a lot of buzz on social media so first day I want to thank all our esteemed panelists thank you for joining us and sharing your insights and thank you Vezel for moderating this very interesting conversation so thank you so much everybody and I would also like to thank all our audience members for being such a active participant in this conversation please keep a check with the E4M page because we have a lot of other events coming up a lot of conversations coming your way with that I would like to thank everybody and have a lovely evening till next time I'm Khyati Kawair who is signing off stay safe everyone thanks everyone thank you thank you everyone