Authors – Abhilash Suryanarayan (OTT Practice Lead), Shekar Dongdi (Test Manager)

The advancement in mobile internet through introduction of 5G, has laid a strong platform for Telecommunication companies to expand their customer base by infringing into various other domains like – OTT, BFSI, Fintech, E-commerce, and other domains. Currently, Telcos and OTT platforms partner with each other for a mutually beneficial monetization channel. Additionally, Telco gets the advantage over OTT’s massive content streaming globally, resulting in massive data consumption. Similarly, OTTs get the access to Telco’s huge user base, which radically decreases OTT’s user acquisition costs. This way, Telcos are meeting their growth in customer base, while OTTS are benefiting through monetizing their VOD contents with the reach ISPs have.

Consequently, for stable content streaming on cellular networks, high quality streaming is needed, which is seldom met while watching movies or longer format of contents. With 5G, users will rejoice high-quality streaming on their cellular network. Speaking of Telco, it is not always about mobile internet. Broadband also plays its part. Hence, even in broadband service, similar partnerships are being seen.

This blog addresses telco crossovers into OTTs and how advent of 5G will disrupt OTT’s Platform architecture soon and reason behind the disruption and how this may occur. Historically, Telcos have been steadfast on Quality of service, while OTTs are driving to push Quality of Experience. However, OTTs have realized Quality of Service also plays a key role in enhancing customer experience. Telcos lacked sufficient levels in Quality of Service (QoS) for offering a higher Quality of Experience (QoE) as they were ineffective on ways to improve their QoS to support an OTT use case. In this case, QoE in most common term refers to unbuffered streaming, which is directly proportional to the content playback experience or QOE.

This advent therefore is suspected to build a bridge across the pure-play CDN (Content Distribution Network) providers, meaning CDNs who were responsible to bring QoE to end users will now be threatened for business value with both Telco and OTT operators. So far, CDN’s have capitalized on the opportunity to become the liaison between the two domains Telco and OTT.

Let’s understand how CDN’s are behaving as intermediary between TELCO and OTT?

In the digital entertainment world, QoE is directly proportional to unbuffered streaming and other factors, but for sake of this discussion, lets focus on seamless viewing experience. OTT players lose  memberships when there is a lack in QoE. Similarly, drop in OTT  subscriptions causes dip in data traffic affecting business for Telcos. Since  unbuffered streaming is one of the critical factors for customer retention and  acquisition; CDNs are planting local servers for content distribution  globally and are using large size caching to store content regionally and  hyper locally to reduce buffering by avoiding round-trip transit to the content  server. Thereby acting as a catalyst for streaming experience.CDN’s are QoE brokers for OTT’s and play the role of market disrupters, who have pushed users to increase data and content usage. Within this ecosystem, CDN’s have become the main influencers and profit earners, as their involvement has been largely in providing local servers. They also address the Security aspects and function as Shock-absorbers for the OTT Content servers.

Since Telcos follow a content aggregator model, they do not offer original contents, but only aggregate them from different OTT providers. For instance, Vi Movies & TV, Airtel TV+ and Airtel Xstream have content from ZEE, Voot, Netflix, and other OTTs. OTT companies tunnel visioned on developing their own digital applications and contents, they too are transitioning into a content aggregation model as it has proven to be an alternate/additional monetization channel to sustain users and revenues.

Live streaming, which is one of the most popular among audiences, has 10 times longer viewership than VOD content. Consequently, it faces challenges related to quality streaming owing to consistency of network bandwidth and network coverage. CDNs help offload the excess workload from the origin servers to the network. Meanwhile it takes a lot of computing power for a single server to respond to requests, and even more so for video live streaming, CDNs protect the source servers from overload and keep it operational. With CDN adaptation, it becomes much more scalable, along with stream quality and performance improvements.

Drilling into Content Aggregation business model for Telcos

This was initially implemented by Telcos to monetize the data consumption on their network. They achieved this by accumulating contents from numerous OTTs, developing a Reco-engine, which understood user behaviour and suggested content best to match respective interests of its userbase. Now, OTTs realized they could benefit partnering with Telcos as they would be able to use the Reco-engine and promote their contents without much effort. Additionally, they could use Telcos 5G infrastructure and Edge computing technologies to enhance their QoE to their end users with a mission of increasing user acquisition without having core dependency on a CDN. CDN’s will now be more of an assist than an impact in a 5G ecosystem.

Some Insights

• India’s 5G subscriptions are expected to reach around 350 million by 2026.
• 5G telecom networks are expected to power up to 2% of India’s GDP which is around $180 billion by 2030.

Overview on how 5G and Edge Computing technologies are transcending Telco and OTT domains

5G networks use high-frequency bands, enabling faster data transmission between cell sites and user devices. 5G data rates are ideally expected to hit around 10 GB/s, which is 100 times faster than 4G LTE networks. CDN’s have been using the 5G technology and using them in setting up their hardware environment to cater to 5G. Virtualizing this hardware, we enter the world of Edge computing. Edge computing minimizes network distance between client and server by bringing computation to network. On implementing Edge Computing, contents can be cached on user’s device by using its computational capabilities to leverage network’s computing powers to ensure a better QoE to customers. As network infrastructure capability evolves and telcos build higher computational capability into their sim cards, the device industry will undergo an upgrade. Today people relay more than their smart phones than their laptops or computers as they have equivalent or greater computational power, both graphically and in terms of performance. Similarly, Telcos are upgrading their SIM cards to have higher computational capabilities, so a layer of processing can happen on client side as well. The combination of 5G and Edge Computing paves way to a higher network processing speeds and lower latency rates resulting in greater QoE and QoS.

According to survey, India is expected to become the fastest-growing telco advertisement market with an annual growth rate of 11% between 2020-23.

5G technology is addressing issues with respect to QoS. As it uses frequency spectrum under 6 GHz. Though the 6 GHz bandwidth range is not a significant improvement over 4G, it does offer the flexibility needed for a seamless or reduced buffered viewing experience given the frequency spectrum in which the content streaming is available. Consumer offerings use frequency bands available at 28–40 GHz, with ability to fall back to 6 GHz bandwidth range where large distances are to be covered.

Predicting the future of Telco and OTT partnership

Companies using with CDNs, would head towards disruption by exploding the data consumption with ISPs in the next 5–10 years. OTT has always envisioned to function on CDN architecture, and this will now get a boost – CDS will now be optimally exploited for higher QoE by OTT platforms. Now, all OTTs will start looking at reducing the cost of ownership with pure-play boutique CDN player and consider having a bundled service engagement with a its B2B contracts with Telcos. Telcos themselves will contest with pure-play CDN infra players and this will be an interesting phase for us to watch the disruptions.

Government initiatives for Telco industry- The Future, what’s up with 6G?

In India’s 2022-23 Union Budget, Indian government has allocated US$ 11.11 billion to the Department of Telecommunication to develop 6G technology. It has also formed a Sixth-generation innovation group and is planning to develop 100 smart city projects, where IoT will play a vital role.

While worldwide CDNs have often been able to meet demand for VOD OTT services, live OTT streaming poses more complexities. Live OTT services are causing traffic surges that are so high that they can overload networks, which has put OTT industry at an inflection point. During popular sports events, millions of people simulcast the live streaming. In such a scenario, QoE issues, such as rebuffering and low streaming quality, can arise unless network operator has forecasted extra capacity for the peak audience load.

Did you know?

The average traffic per smartphone in India was 18.4 GB per month in 2021 and is expected to grow to 50 GB per month by 2027.The added live OTT traffic directly results in higher network costs, needing the investment in network upgrades. According to global CDN figures, peak OTT traffic is expected to grow by 70–80% on a yearly basis. With 5G, consumer messaging will be focused on higher bandwidth and lower latency, which will make multitude of streaming videos available via internet. Without a huge capital outlay, anyone with a 5G connection can be a content originator, making it possible to content creators to access their markets with higher streaming quality than ever before.

Serverless architecture will be one of those things that will come up in the future and IGS’s quality engineering perspective is all set to adapt to it. A lot of analytics will be direct to ISPs because they have richer access to analytics than a CDN. Since CDN market is fragmented, looking at Telco network, they are aggregated and are directly available to the users. Let’s not forget that they have international tie-ups in terms of roaming. Hence, there is Telco aggregation happening and therefore, global data availability in terms of data analytics is much higher than a pure-play CDN player.

The total revenue generated by mobile operators in 2021 was around 1.08 trillion US dollars and within 2025, it is expected to increase by a whopping amount – 100 billion US dollars.

From IGS perspective, we are registering these changes today and getting ready for the future, in terms of how we can put up an engineering aspect to quality, when a CDN switches from being a core to an assist mode in the 5G evolution. Our Digital Assurance lab is already procuring 5G ready and 5G inventory to enable the transformation and shifts. From testing point of view, we are realigning our engineering strategies to address these changes. We are factoring in the impacts around these towards our Effort Estimation algos and utilities developed to confirm the QoE for our OTT customers. Our entire reusability test suite for context aware transactions, Casting, Muti-device Registrations, QoE on tethered connections and Gamified feature with respect to OTTs has been reimagined and recalibrated test cases where necessary.

IGS with its vision to be future-proof and being ready to accept the advent of 5G is an intriguing case of modernization for us in OTT practice.

Stay tuned for more insights on the evolving QE adjustments, with 5G playing a significant role in OTT big bang.

Mahatma Gandhi once stated-

Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization

Increasing your workplace diversity is not just a hollow catchphrase but also is the need of the hour for good business. According to McKinsey research conducted on 366 public companies, companies in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity, were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, while those for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.

Today, diversity has become one of the most essential business practices and is not just adopted but engrained in cultures of all successful organizations. Collaboration between individuals from distinct educational backgrounds, professions, skills, personas, gender, race, ethnicity, religions, and geographical regions, enhances value of business decisions in terms of, understanding and decision-making.

Diversity produces creative thinking and leads to organic innovation.  This assists organizations in enhancing company culture, building brand value, nurturing diverse problem-solving skills, and maximizing employee engagement.

In fact, Diversity is reaching to a new dimension where many organizations are exploring diversity beyond the backgrounds, skills, gender and race but of the personas mix within their teams, personas mix such as Idealist, Critical Thinker, Realist and Critic, have also proven as a successful strategy to achieve greater performance and resulted higher job satisfaction rate with enhanced trust among the employees.

Here are a few interesting facts due to a diverse workforce, organizations have observed

Innovation Revenue than others

 Higher Team Productivity 

Job Satisfaction and Employee Retention

For a smarter functioning, variety in thinking ways and ideas are necessary.  Professionals working in a team built on different cultures and ideologies, have proven to find best possible way to excel at assignments addressed to them. This allows organizations to deliver world-class products or services to its customers and fosters an environment that encourages best-in-class innovation. According to Harvard Business Review, varied teams can also result in better problem-solving and decision-making. The more differences a team has in opinions, and perspectives, Higher is the experience shared.The ability to approach problems from several angles and ideate a solution is the root of every innovation. Furthermore, being disparate at work boosts employee engagement and morale, which is one of its main advantages. Even on its own, workforce diversity can induce higher productivity and resilience. Moreover, hiring a diverse workforce can help organisations to stand out and results in a stable clientele.

The diverse nature enables in understanding clients’ requirements in detail from numerous perspectives and can channel marketing and sales effort towards audiences with diverse cultures, practices, and backgrounds.

Empowering people with different personas, abilities, experience, language, and nationality, adds a powerful essence to organizational work ethics, culture, team integrity and productivity. Diverse workforce has become one of the highest rated critical success factors for organizations that are striving to minimize employee attrition rate, land large customers, increase workforce productivity and expand revenue portfolio. IGS believes in embracing diversity and takes it as one of its core values.

HOW QUALITY OF IMPLEMENTATION MATTERS?

Domains such as Banking, Media & Entertainment, Healthcare and Telecom, produce massive volumes and diversity of prolific data and insights of which are key drivers for vast revenues for companies, particularly for those who are on their Digital transformation journey. Today’s businesses are willing to target their marketing to particular people or groups that are aligned with their interests in order to gain end users’ attention without using the conventional push-pull marketing tactics. These strategies are popularly referred as “Intelligent Audience Targeting” (IAT).

Many COTS Solutions and customised user journey analytics are essential to every digital product on market, when it comes to comprehending the end user’s perspective and meeting expectations towards exceptional customer retention and scaled User acquisition. These solutions and platforms provide a clear assessment of how users use products/services and hurdles they face while using them.

Analytics helps businesses understand users behaviour, which can further be used in developing solutions/contents/applications that the customers envision, differentiate and crave for. Furthermore, detailed business insights and information on users’ patterns can define an end-to-end roadmap for client acquisition and business growth.

Recent explosion of M-Tail and OTT platforms in the market demonstrates a sheer picture of how each of the market contenders is making high-end attempts to score over the others in terms of user acquisition and customer retention. There are abundant platforms in these two sectors that have been taking the innovation route to develop strong machine learning use cases to have an AI-driven strategy targeted towards upselling and cross-selling content and commodities to end users. Likewise, AdTech and User Journey Analytics are also shoving adaptive and interactive choices of practicing Ad Revenues and Seamless Quality of Experience that is tailor-made to audience’s preferences.

The team at IGS India, by its years of experience with many such multifaceted implementations on client projects, has identified the most widely used solutions in the Market that M-Tail, Banking, Fintech and OTT industries have been adapting. It has enabled IGS to understand the specifics of such Analytics implementation and thereby develop a comprehensive Quality Engineering approach to assure such Analytics implementation. IGS completely understands the urgency for its customers to effectively implement such dynamic analytics to collect valuable business insights.

This blog gives insights into IGS’s approach and point of view towards ensuring Quality implementation of such analytics solutions across numerous use cases.

How IGS’s Data Analytics Validation Service is helping businesses to grow?

IGS’s data analytics validation solution is built on profound analysis and understanding of various User Actions on the Digital Apps (Web, Mobile, Smart TVs and Connected Devices) that are Event Triggers in relation to flags recorded on the Analytics Dashboard. IGS’s reusable Test Assets are developed for distinct top-rated Analytics solutions such as Google Analytics, DFP, Mixpanel, CleverTap, Conviva, Amplitude, AppsFlyer and many more. Our teams develop precise test scripts that identify and validate expected Events, Event Triggers and Register Values on Analytics Dashboards and Networks that improve the quality of Data logged. Quality of Logging is most essential for the richness of insights rendered by respective Solutions to the Business.

Making Ad Revenues work for our customers

In recent years, we have witnessed a momentous rise in Content publishers and M-Tail companies implementing Analytics solutions for Ad Targeting for Smart Upsells and Cross-Sells on Digital Platforms. Many of them implement Double Click for Publishing (DFP) Solutions, AdRolls and Google Analytics towards generating Ad Revenues by targeting to certain groups of customers. IGS understands the KRA of companies in terms of the X Growth targeted by implanting certain solutions for contents or catalogues that generate the highest user visit and impression.

While creating impression for an ad, Ad-analytics reports include real-time data on user actions (Ad Banner Impressions, Ad-skip, Ad-play, navigate to URL). It assists businesses in determining effectiveness of their marketing channels and develop effective campaign strategies according to that. Our ad-analytics testing help businesses in getting a detailed insight into performance of their ad campaigns. Furthermore, it considers, Audience Targeting through Demography, Geography, and Gender. It also validates if ads are reaching the target audience. Advertising analytics helps businesses in identifying what actions users perform on website post-navigating to website homepage through ad campaigns.

Our Test Automation solution (UTAF), built on open-source stack can record several vitals of Ads such as Ad Triggers, Ad-Banner displays, Ad Impressions by Quartile and timestamps for targeted Catalogue or content from the Network interaction logs and validate them against the solution dashboard to confirm data integrity and insights. Likewise, Ad event validations are done for various scenarios such as playing media & trigger ads in front end, while also validating the events & their properties using different tools like- Charles Proxy, Fiddler, and Wireshark.

Our automated Ad Validation has helped a growing OTT platform in driving up Ad Revenues by 3X as a virtue of the robustness and accuracy of AdTech implementation on its platform infused by the solutions’ capability to test more in less time.

To know more about analytical testing, please visit www.igsindia.net

Assuring Quality towards implementing User Journey analytics

The Quality of Experience or more colloquially to video viewing experience, is one of the major factors that influence user adaptation to digital platforms. An analytical survey states that a person spends at least 3.5 hours every day interacting with different apps on mobile or smart devices. This produces deep insights for companies to drive strategies for pushing end users for longer interactions.

There are millions of user actions trigged within an application daily across different demography and geography. Those actions are assembled, stored, and analysed to improve the User Experience. Our user journey analytics validations focus on event validations that create appropriate flags on Data Visualization platforms. The team creates reference Vital Parameter checklist called Cam Sheets, which typically record various tags implemented for various user actions, and their associated values that need to be registered in the network log. Validations against the vitals such as the Data Type of the vital, mandatory, or non-mandatory fields, accuracy of the value captured and whether a Vital can be null or non-null are fundamentals to validate the robustness of implementing the Analytic tags.

Since these validations are laborious and time-consuming, we have developed utilities to run these validations, which are driven by a polyglot tool developed using Java and Python. The utility captures various transactions, user triggers and respective values from the network log and is matched against values registered on Analytics dashboard. The validations include Event Counts, Timestamps, and values against critical parameters. Crash Analytics tags are validated using test harnesses that drive chaos into the scenario by injecting crashes artificially into a user journey. The vitals are validated if any Crash on the device of usage is successfully registered with the required history of the user journey and relevant logs.

Our flagship OTT customers faced challenges with their releases, which were caused due to showstoppers on incorrect reporting of analytics. Multiple events and duplicate events were originating from more than one entry point tagged to a user action. Validating each scenario across all entry points of an event and its properties was an extremely manual time-consuming activity. These drastically increased the testing TAT for the targeted release. Our indigenous test automation framework solution automated testing of User Journeys and cut Analytics regression TAT by 60%.

When a group of professionals equipped with diverse competitive skills join hands and work on a project, an integrated team is formed. This not only unitizes client and partner teams but also improvises coordination between both teams. Additionally, client and partner teams will be exposed to each other’s work culture and ethics, which will help in understanding business operations, quality expectations and lead to faster project deliveries.

The concept of integrated teams is becoming an extensive choice among different businesses following agile software development model. In scenarios where the business is expecting the delivery really quick, it chooses an integrated team model. It helps them in acquiring the right workforce for the project.

What is the purpose of integrated teams?  

For clients, who find it bothersome to outsource people for their projects, an integrated team is a prominent solution. It not only provides them with skilled professionals who are most suitable for project requirements but also assists them in achieving solutions they envisioned.

The integrated team’s model can benefit businesses in numerous ways. Let’s have a look at how they can help a business grow:

Accountability

Integrated team model induces complete accountability for project completion. As an integrated team involves both partner’s team and client’s team, the group members effectively distribute work among each other depending on their expertise. It naturally creates a sense of accountability for tasks assignees and promotes on-time delivery. Engagement that is built on trust bestows a plethora of opportunities to partners. Hence, it becomes generic to be liable for their own action.

Communication

Implementation of integrated teams ensures there is zero communication gap. As, both teams are working in the same environment, there is hardly any place for misunderstandings regarding process, requirements, functionalities, project progress, status, or delivery timelines. Furthermore, it becomes easier for clients to track progress, which keeps them unbothered about meeting deadlines and project deliveries.

Deliverables

While working within an integrated team, the teams flourish with better coordination. As both teams work towards the same end goal, it encourages brainstorming for generating fresh ideas to resolve hurdles and make headway toward a quality product. Moreover, as high-skilled professionals are working together, it provides timely deliverables, guarantees the best quality solution and ensures all-around incident support.

Quality

When a fresh client is onboarded, by default 100% commitment is given to delivering the highest quality services within the stipulated time. This is only possible when both teams collaborate and understand the requirement, quality standards, tools & technologies being used.

When a fresh client is onboarded, by default 100% commitment is given to delivering the highest quality services within the stipulated time. This is only possible when both teams collaborate and understand the requirement, quality standards, tools & technologies being used.  When workforce lacks coordination, business faces delivery challenges with respect to quality. This can be overcome by having an integrated team working on projects.

Availability

Highly skilled professionals being available during the time of need, addressing the issue would not be a challenge. It comes with an all-round the clock support. There is testing team, development team, support team, and business development team, all working is a common space making it easy to deliver projects.

Polyglot

Integrated teams are formed with a team of competent professionals, who are experts in their own field. Be it the quality engineering, technical support, software development, graphic designing, or UI development, competent and diversely skilled people working together brings boundless learning opportunities for each other.

Continuous Learning

As cross-skilled people working on the same project, it helps all team members to learn from each other. The client’s team can learn about the technology and tools used in the partner’s space and vice versa. Working in integrated team offers a never-ending learning opportunity among workforce, which is one of the main reasons why integrated teams model/concept is becoming more adaptable and successful.

To conclude, the hasty outbreak of Covid19 has colossally affected everyone and had made us compromise numerous things and working from home is one among them. No doubt it has empowered us to continue our job by being safe within our houses, but also highlighted major issues in businesses’ work culture.

Entire team working remotely, there has been a lack of coordination and time management, which affected project deliveries and has had a huge impact on organizations’ revenue. This can be attributed to companies not practicing an integrated team model.

IGS had previously aced a work culture that was integrated, which helped in its growth during challenging times. IGS was used to various business communication tools like Sococo, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat. This helped IGS in creating 100% online integration with its clients and partners and made it expedient for employees to stay integrated with the client’s teams.

This integrated team practice topped with the versatility of using online communication tools, helped IGS and its clients release products faster into the market.