How do Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc, and other OTT platforms works?

With more than 400M users and 100M paid users in 2022, Ott has become such an entertaining part of people’s lives that it is impossible to pull it off. So, as a user what we do is we just open any OTT application like Netflix, Amazon, etc., choose the movie of our choice, and start playing it. But, there are a lot of things happening in the backend for such a seamless experience. As our stories are technology-focused, let’s understand what it takes to provide such a streaming experience.

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Let me share one metric with you, On the Disney+ Hotstar app, which streamed the IND vs PAK live match, the viewership cross more than 1.8 crores of concurrent users. How Disney+ Hotstar is able to scale up to that extent and handle that traffic.

So here we go,

OTT (Over-the-Top) streaming services work by delivering video content over the internet, bypassing traditional cable or broadcast TV services. Users can access OTT streaming services through a variety of internet-connected devices, including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, gaming consoles, and streaming boxes. To deliver this content, OTT streaming services use cloud-based infrastructure and content delivery networks (CDNs) to ensure fast and reliable streaming. Talking about CDN, it is one of the major components in making the screaming content available to you.

Let’s understand CDN in laymen’s language with a very simple example. CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, which is a special way that helps people watch videos on their phones or computers. It’s like having many friends who have the same book, and you can ask any of them to lend it to you if you need it. Similarly, a CDN has many friends (called servers) all over the world who have the same video or app that you want to watch or use. So when you click on a video or app, the CDN picks the friend who is closest to you and asks them to give you the video or app. This way, the video or app can reach you faster, without getting stuck or taking too long to load.

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For example, imagine you and your friends are playing a game on your phones. If your friend’s phone is closer to yours, it’s faster to ask them to send you the game instead of trying to download it from far away. The CDN works the same way, helping you get what you want faster by finding the closest friend with what you need. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers strategically placed around the world that helps deliver content quickly and efficiently to users. CDNs are essential for streaming services because they reduce latency, improve reliability, and ensure that users can access content from anywhere in the world.

Here’s an example of how a CDN works:

• Let’s say you’re watching a movie on a streaming platform like Netflix. When you click play, the movie is delivered from a server in a data center that’s closest to you. This server is called the edge server. The edge server has a copy of the movie, and it starts delivering the movie to your device. If a lot of people in your area are watching the same movie, the edge server might get overwhelmed with requests, and the movie might start buffering or become slow. But with CDN, there are multiple edge servers located in different parts of the world, and your request can be routed to a different edge server that’s less busy, making sure you have a smooth streaming experience.
• Another real-world example of CDN is a website that has a lot of images, like an e-commerce site. Instead of hosting all the images on the main server, which can slow down the website’s loading time, the images can be hosted on a CDN. When a user visits the website, the images are delivered from the CDN’s edge server that’s closest to the user, making the website faster and more responsive.
• In summary, a CDN is a network of servers that work together to deliver digital content faster and more reliably, by caching content at the edge servers and routing requests to the closest server.

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Moving forward let’s understand it more deeply.

• OTT platforms store their content on servers located in data centers across the world. These servers are optimized for delivering high-quality video content to users online. When a user requests to stream a video, the content delivery network (CDN) is responsible for delivering the content to the user most efficiently.
• CDNs use a process called caching to speed up the delivery of content. When content is first requested, it is cached on the CDN server closest to the user. This means that subsequent requests for the same content can be served directly from the cache, reducing latency and improving performance
• CDNs also use load balancing to distribute traffic evenly across their network of servers. This ensures that no one server becomes overloaded and that content is delivered quickly and reliably to all users.
• Once the user selects a video to watch, the OTT platform uses adaptive bitrate streaming to deliver the content. This means that the video is divided into small chunks and sent to the user’s device in real-time, adjusting the quality of the video based on the user’s internet connection. This ensures the user experiences a smooth streaming experience without buffering or interruption.

💡: Hotstar has more than 300M Monthly active users back in 2020.

So, we have reached the end of the story, I’ve tried to make this as easy so that any 5-year-old can also understand.

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