Business

ZEE5 relies on AWS Elemental MediaTailor to bring viewers personalized ads across live and on-demand video streams while maintaining broadcast-level quality, with more than 3000 transactions per second (TPS) supported at traffic peaks to date.

ZEE5 streams content around the world to more than 76M users in 12 languages per month. Launched in 2018 by Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited, one of India’s leading media and entertainment companies, the ad-supported platform has become one of the biggest OTT platforms in India, connecting viewers with Zee Entertainment’s extensive content library, which is 260K hours and growing. To help efficiently monetize and scale live and video on demand (VOD) content, ZEE5 leverages solutions from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Media Services, including AWS Elemental MediaTailor, which is used for Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) and has already delivered more than 100M programmatic ads across more than 18 live channels.

“When looking to launch SSAI, we had a long list of requirements for the right solution and AWS MediaTailor hit all the marks. It allows us to easily scale our infrastructure to meet the demands of millions of users, capture and report ad metrics, and quickly integrate with multiple CDNs and third-party services,” said Tushar Vohra, Head of Technology, ZEE5 India. “Deploying it with our existing VOD and live linear setup was so simple, and now, each user can customize their experience.”

The service also uses AWS Elemental MediaLive to process video for more than 80 live channels, AWS Elemental MediaConvert to transcode hundreds of hours of video, and AWS Elemental MediaPackage to perform just-in-time packaging for more than 20 of its channels, ensuring the content stream format aligns with the end-viewing device.

AWS Elemental MediaTailor has proven especially useful for monetizing unexpected high-demand viewing events. Using the solution, ZEE5 is able to easily scale SSAI, and with no upfront costs, and since AWS MediaTailor delivers automated reporting based on client and server-side ad delivery metrics, ZEE5 can accurately measure ad impressions and viewer behaviors with ease. It also gives ZEE5 the flexibility to integrate with Amazon CloudFront, Akamai, and the DFP ad server, as well as with client devices such as JioPhones, which run on KaiOS and third-party analysis platforms like Moat Analytics.

In closing, Tushar shared, “Nearly 40-percent of users access ZEE5 using a phone running KaiOS, so it was paramount that our SSAI solution integrate with it, and AWS Elemental MediaTailor gives us that capability, so that we can meet the demands of both our viewers and advertisers. Another key factor in our decision was the ability to deliver programmatic ads to end-users, which we could achieve using AWS Elemental MediaTailor with DFP.”