After hitting the accelerator to extend the OTT streaming service with 18 live channels to over 76 million users in 12 languages each month, Indian entertainment app ZEE5 is now monetising its reach by delivering more than 100 million programmatic ads.
The ad-supported platform has become one of the biggest OTT platforms in India, connecting viewers with Zee Entertainment’s content library comprising over 260,000 hours of programming. To help monetise and scale live and video-on-demand (VOD) content efficiently, ZEE5 has deployed leverages solutions from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Media Services, including AWS Elemental MediaTailor, which is used for server-side ad insertion (SSAI).
“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 customise their experience.”
AWS Elemental MediaTailor allows ZEE5 to bring viewers personalised ads across live and on-demand video streams supporting more than 3000 transactions per second (TPS) at traffic peaks to date. The service also uses AWS Elemental MediaLive to process video for the live channels, AWS Elemental MediaConvert to transcode video and AWS Elemental MediaPackage to perform just-in-time packaging so that content stream formats align with end-viewing devices.
ZEE5 noted that AWS Elemental MediaTailor has proven especially useful for monetising unexpected high-demand viewing events, offering a smooth path to scale SSAI with no upfront costs. 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.
“Nearly 40% 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,” Tushar added. “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.”