Taking

Entertainment
Across Borders
Building OTT for the masses

© 2019 Axinom. All rights reserved

media@axinom.com • Tel +49 911 80 109 0
Contents
Contents .........................................................................................................................................................................1

Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................. 2

The OTT industry ......................................................................................................................................................... 3

The Trends ............................................................................................................................................................... 3

What makes an OTT service? ................................................................................................................................... 5

Choosing the content and model ...................................................................................................................... 5

The backend basics .................................................................................................................................................... 8

Scaling the service ..................................................................................................................................................... 9

Building for Scale and Evolution ....................................................................................................................... 9

Delivering across screens .................................................................................................................................... 9

Personalizing with integrations ....................................................................................................................... 10

Different ways to monetize ............................................................................................................................... 10

About Axinom .............................................................................................................................................................12

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 and languages, no standard out-of-the-box

Introduction solution can fulfill the need for a video

service aiming to go international. Hence, in
the end, it’s not just the content that makes
the service successful; it’s also the reliable
Over-the-top (OTT) services have drastically
backend that can provide a seamless
transformed the video and entertainment
experience over multiple screens.
landscape with premium content and new
technologies. However, in the current media The question that arises is: How
consumption era, the viewers are to thrive in the OTT world?
undoubtedly the king, and their expectations
This paper investigates the needs and
of content and experience decide the fate of
various nuances of an OTT platform that aims
a service. The race to please the viewer is
to go global with its content and generate
quite evident by the fierce battle of OTT
revenue. So, keep reading to find out how
players for high-quality content, immersive
different stages of media workflow needs to
experiences, and ultimately, the viewer
be optimized and managed to serve a
loyalty. The motivation is the boom of the
massive global audience.
OTT industry and a very fruitful projected
user base of over 700 million by 2023. Axinom powered service, Zee5,
reached 56 million subscribers
In this diverse global market, where choices
around the globe within a few
in content and experience differ with regions
months of its launch.

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The OTT
industry
OTT is growing at a faster pace than ever, and
the outlook is healthy, with a CAGR of 17.4%
and an impressive projected revenue of USD
245bn by 2028 (Future Market Insights, 2018).
No wonder that everyone wants a piece of
this proverbial pie. Established providers like
Netflix and Amazon are spending billions of
dollars in producing original content.
Whereas traditional media and
telecommunication giants such as AT&T,
Disney, and Fox, as well as e-commerce
retailer such as Flipkart (a Walmart company)
are pouring money to build their own OTT
platforms, either with a motive to cash-in on
their original content or to engage their
users further.
In 2018, Netflix spent an
estimated $13 billion on original
content, whereas Amazon spent
$5 billion.
One more shift that’s apparent these days is
the demand for linear and live programming
on multi-screens, like that of VOD content;
evident with growing number of TV
Everywhere services as well as MVPDs, which
exists in 3.7% of all households owning a TV
in US with a much higher foothold amongst
18-44 year old.
Even though this booming industry has
caused much disruption already in the way
media and entertainment are consumed,
from the large box TV to cord cutting, the
evolution has not stopped. Consumers are
becoming more demanding, and they no
longer want to wait for a video to buffer.
Research by the University of Massachusetts
shows that the viewers start to abandon a
video if there is a delay of more than 2 sec in
the start up. Moreover, every second of
added delay adds 5.8% to this abandonment
rate.
Whereas another research by IBM showed
that almost half of the subscribers are willing
to give up the service because of buffering,
delay, audio sync, and other technical issues.
The Trends
The growing user demand for flexibility,
personalization, and freedom, to get the
content they want, how they want and where
they want is leading to a much faster cord
cutting phenomena, with 64% of UK 18-24
year old preferring streaming over watching
TV. In the US, similarly, the share of
traditional TV got shrunk by 4.3% in 2018, a
loss of 3.2 million viewers.
While it’s understandable that flexibility is
the prime reason why viewers prefer
streaming and VOD services than traditional
mediums, it’s also the quality of the content
that pushes them to do so. Device-shifting
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has also become an expected behavior of the
multi-screen viewer, as two-thirds of the
young viewers in the UK choose to stream
video content on multiple devices at the
same time.

Moreover, from the business perspective, the

audience goal has now moved from mass to
targeted. The demand is for unique content,
brands, and a seamless device agnostic
experience with broadcast quality. That
means leveraging on innovation and quickly
adopting the latest and emerging
technologies like 5G, usage, and video
analytics, and AI to push content to the users
through personalized recommendations as 47% of telcos believe that TV
well as use all monetization avenues to
and video services are the best
generate revenues.
opportunities for incremental
digital growth.

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What makes an
OTT service?
Before the advent of OTT, the video value
chain was very monolithic with broadcasters
and operators controlling every step of the
process. Switching cost and availability of
competing services used to be the factors
that kept customers from moving around.
However, that's no longer the case.
An average adult US consumer
spends 5 hours and 24 minutes
on video per day, across devices
ranging from Smart TV to
smartphone
Primarily, an OTT service is made up of
several steps, categorized under three
significant facets (table on page 7). They may
sound vastly distinct, but all the aspects of
OTT are interrelated to a large extent.
The growing scale of available video on
demand and live content, viewer population,
and the need for faster cycle times, have
made the monolithic design of OTT services
obsolete. Now agile backend solutions that
support continuous development, automatic
scaling and personalization are needed.
Breaking away from the monolithic design of
the services also meant the involvement of
many stakeholders, content providers,
system vendors, and specialized services into
a platform. While going for a multi-vendor
approach it becomes crucial that each
component integrates well with others,
utilizing standard microservices architecture
and APIs such as REST or gRPC, and even
when going with a single vendor solution,
such an architecture is preferable for a high
level of scalability, robustness, extensibility
and fault tolerance.
Choosing the content and
model
In OTT, content unarguably is the king.
However, contrary to the popular notion, live
content such as linear TV channels, and niche
content is as popular amongst the users as
the popular VOD content. With the increasing
appetite of the users for high-quality
targeted content, we can quite evidently see
the rise of niche and live content aggregator
services.
For content either linear TV, VOD content or
live events, originally produced or licensed,
can be chosen according to the target
audience. Axinom provides the freedom to
either become a niche service with a very
curated content set like Horrify, a service
targeted at lovers of high-quality horror
movies, or Zee5, a mix of over 100,000 hours
Indian on-demand content and as much as
90 linear channels.
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Next comes the business model; the OTT
industry works on mainly three models -
advertising based (AVOD), transaction-based
(TVOD), and subscription-based (SVOD). Even
though there is VOD at the end of all of them,
the models can be applied for both on-
demand and live content. So, based on your
monetization goal, audience, and content,
you can opt for one of these business
models.
In the Digital TV Europe research, over 93% of
the 560 industry executives showed a
positive attitude towards the growth of SVOD
services, similar growth prospect was seen in
the bundle of subscription VOD and linear.
Whereas, for AVOD and TVOD services only
68% and 53%, respectively, showed a positive
attitude towards growth.
China and the US are the world's
largest AVOD markets with ad
spending of almost $8 billion
each.
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Process Role
Content
Ingestion Media assets are ingested or inserted
into a processing system.
Encoding/Transcoding Conversion of the media file from one
format to another.
Packaging and encryption Putting converted media into
standard packages for playback, and
protection of the content using
modern DRM standards
Metadata management Management of subtitles, audios,
language localizations, thumbnails,
and other assets
Monetization
Business Model Choosing the business model(s)
needed for the market.
Advertising and promotions Insertion of advertising into the
management service or streams, and usage of
promotions for marketing
Platform
Integrations management Integration and management of
various services such as payments,
recommendation engines
Delivery Leveraging CDNs to enable a faster
throughput and lowest latency
DRM (Digital rights Protection of content using DRM
management) standards
Analytics Gathering of user insights, usage
statistics
Solution Consideration
• Secure transfer support for
premium/early window content
• Automated workflow for large
or bulk jobs with logging
• Cloud or on-premise capability
with CMS integration
• Support for multiple bitrates,
devices, and formats
• Cloud capability for auto-
scaling
• Support for DASH, HLS, CMAF
• Support for CENC, CBCS
• Secure implementation with a
dedicated key-server
• Seamless integration
• Provision for manual and
automated workflow
• Provision for multiple user
access and control
• Ability to choose between
AVOD, SVOD, or TVOD models.
• Support for multiple models
and tiers according to regions.
• Integration with own or third
party ad engines
• Dynamic (DAI) or Client-side
Ad-Insertion (CSAI) capability.
• Provision for promo codes,
vouchers
• Use of standard API
• Scalability and flexibility
• Entitlement management
• Provision for multiple CDN
utilization
• Redundancies, load balancing,
least latency routing, and fault
tolerances
• Support for industry-leading
standards such as WideVine,
PlayReady, and Fairplay
• Integration with BI tools for
dashboards, insights, and
visualizations
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 The backend
basics
Content can be self-owned or licensed,
VOD, linear TV, or live events.

Video Ingest and Processing services assists

you in the video workflow, by processing
and preparing the content for consumption
in the OTT service.

Axinom CMS (Content Management System)

takes care of all the content and content
related aspects such as monitoring of
ingested media, metadata, regions,
localizations, business model and plans
management with automated workflows.
The backend interfaces and services
provide a seamless way to integrate various
interfaces and services either out-of-the-
box with Axinom Backend or as a tailored
solution for your own backend in place.

Traffic manager ensures a high QoS through

auto load balancing and lowest latency
route selection using single or multi-CDNs,
as needed.

Frontend SDK consists of various libraries

focused on different aspects of most media
Axinom DRM (Digital Rights Management) is
frontend applications.
a highly scalable multi-DRM service in the
cloud, supporting most popular DRM
standards such as Widevine, PlayReady, and
FairPlay.

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Scaling the
service
Users want a service which allows them the
ease of grabbing the remote and catching up
on their favorite content. Delivering such an
experience to a geographically distributed
audience of millions brings another
magnitude of complexity in service.
Building for Scale and
Evolution
Scaling up to serve an audience of millions,
or the one that is geographically distributed
involves a complete rethinking of the service
workflow, including traffic management,
localizations, and integrations. OTT services
opting for an off-the-shelf solution for their
media and delivery supply chain face an
issue in scalability as such solutions are
usually limited in their capacity and
flexibility of expansion. Such challenges
become more pertinent for live streams such
as sports, as during such events there might
be an unpredictable rise in the viewership
which goes back down upon the end of the
event. Such scalability restrains many
content owners from running, managing, and
delivering content to their viewers.
Besides scalability several localization
factors arise when going global, such as
integrating different UI/UX, adding local
metadata and languages, authorizing local
editors to edit and review the content and
adding local services for payments,
advertisements and more.
Axinom utilizes the microservices
architecture encapsulated in Docker
containers, utilizing standard APIs to give the
flexibility of customization, extensibility, and
the advantage of scaling in a snap to its
customers. This architecture allows faster
development and change cycles and easy
integration and robustness.
Delivering across screens
TV to the phone was a critical transition that
took place in the media industry. Although it
made things convenient for the user, giving
them many choices, for providers, it became
a significant issue. Providing a seamless and
similar experience throughout the screens
became a challenge due to the differences
between hardware and software, causing a
problem of fragmentation.
Contending delivery protocols, video codecs,
and media formats, also add complexity to
the already intricate video streaming
industry.
The advancements in video ingest and
processing services, provided by multiple
experts along with Axinom, and Axinom DRM
(Digital Rights Management) solves this
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through the usage of modern industry
standards in video encoding and encryption
such as HLS, DASH with CMAF and CENC, CBCS
providing support for all the operating
systems such as Android, iOS and DRM
standards such as Widevine, FairPlay and
PlayReady.
With the Axinom backend interfaces and
services, the customers can integrate
recommendation engines and advertising
providers, check entitlement, collect
payments, provide easy onboarding with
social media logins, gather analytics and
much more.

Personalizing with
integrations
An overabundance of OTT offerings has made
the user very critical of the value and the
experience on offer. A service has to offer an
excellent quality of experience to the user to
be able to gain their loyalty. For an owner,
this translates to a service that can quickly
adopt new features and provide a
Zee5 serves content and
personalized experience.
localizations, in 12 Indian and 5
The Axinom CMS and backend interfaces and foreign languages, to over 190
services allow a multitude of integrations, be countries. All managed within
it external partners for content or payment Axinom CMS.
services that are popular in a region.

Through Axinom CMS, the customers can

independently manage and personalize their
OTT service for regions, geography, or
audiences. It allows automated workflows for
all processes: ingestion, transcoding,
encryption, packaging, metadata
management, advertisement insertions,
publishing of content, and content pipeline
and storage management. It can also provide
each user, whether internal or third-party,
with a separate dashboard, customized for
specific roles and data access policies.
Moreover, various policies, access
restrictions, and rules can be defined within
the CMS to respect and comply with the
regional regulations.
Different ways to monetize
Devising a sustainable monetization strategy
in this fast-paced multi-device industry can
be challenging. Any company foraying into
the OTT arena, or looking to expand and
capitalize on their content needs to consider
this crucial step of monetization twice. As a
monetization strategy ultimately leads to
user experience, market share, and revenues.
According to the World
Advertising Research Center
(WARC), global VOD advertising
market would be worth $47
billion by 2023, doubling the
2018 value.

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Being an experienced digital solutions also allows numerous integrations to
provider in the media industry, Axinom facilitate customer systems, payment
understands that each company is different, providers, bundling opportunities, marketing
each content piece is unique, and every promotions through vouchers, promo codes
market needs individual monetization and donations.
strategy. Our digital backend solutions allow
you to choose between AVOD, SVOD or TVOD
revenue models to target different markets
and audiences, Dynamic Ad-insertion (DAI) or
CSAI (Client-side Ad-Insertion) for
personalized advertising. Our architecture

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Are you looking for a solutions various services, our products are capable of

provider and a partner in your handling subscribers, payments, reporting,

global OTT initiative? personalization, and much more.

At Axinom, we believe that every step in
building an OTT solution is vital to its
success. Hence, we take care of the whole
workflow from content preparation and
management to the delivery for the best
experience for your viewers.
Axinom follows a modular and cloud agnostic
approach for all its products and services to
enable seamless compatibility, integration,
opening a wide range of choices and
availability of a varied number of system
components to its customers.

To find out how Axinom solutions can serve Axinom currently employs 150 highly-skilled
and fit your needs, get in touch today at personnel worldwide with offices located in
media@axinom.com or, visit us at Germany, Estonia, the US, and Sri Lanka.
www.axinom.com

About Axinom
Axinom is a digital solutions provider in the
media and entertainment industry, serving
the industry with scalable and robust
products for content management, and
protection. Our products have powered some
of the biggest media, broadcast, and
telecommunications organizations in
reaching a global clientele of millions.

Since its inception in 2001, Axinom has

worked with industry leaders and partners to
create a range of products and solutions,
covering the backend components for a
seamless workflow in OTT. The products are
content management (Axinom CMS), and
content protection with multi-DRM service
(Axinom DRM), supported by globally
deployed backend interfaces and services
with extensive APIs and integrations. Through
numerous possibilities of integration with
third-party or existing customer systems and

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CONTACT INFORMATION

Axinom
media@axinom.com • Tel +49 911 80 109 0
www.axinom.com

© 2019 Axinom. All rights reserved.

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