Ahead of the ICC tournament, Banglalink unified its streaming infrastructure with Skandha Media Services as single partner to configure, deliver and manage the complete event.
Digital operator Banglalink owns the Bangladeshi sports and entertainment OTT platform Toffee. With exclusive streaming rights for various high-profile global sporting events, Toffee has earned a position among the most popular apps for live sports in Bangladesh.
Having acquired the exclusive digital streaming rights for major ICC tournaments in Bangladesh until 2025, Banglalink took steps to ensure a smooth delivery of live-streams and optimise monetization during its coverage of the international events. The organisation also produced several live shows relating to the tournaments, to stream to fans during the breaks.
Overcoming Fragmented Delivery
Toffee's main challenge was to manage and coordinate multiple partners for different aspects of the event. This fragmentation not only increased operational complexity but also posed risks in terms of reliability and cost-effectiveness. In order to simplify their operations and monetize their inventory, and still be able to reduce costs, Toffee decided to consolidate the entire event infrastructure with a single technology partner.
Toffee chose to work with Skandha Media Services, due to their wide experience and expertise in managing the playout and ad-monetization of other major events for various OTT platforms. Skandha Media Services specializes in scalable playout services using cloud infrastructure, automation, AI and machine learning. By partnering with Skandha, Toffee was able to manage the entire process, from configuration to delivery and inventory management, with a focus on efficiency and error mitigation.
Skandha supported 121 playout streams for Toffee during the event, covering 55 matches, which added up to 605 hours of streaming, in two languages.
In particular, the platform's streaming of the ICC Men's T20 World Cup during peak commuting times was a major hit, attracting about 100 million minutes of viewership in the first week alone. Certain matches, such as the Bangladesh vs Sri Lanka clash, saw over 1 million views.
Optimisation, Automation and Consolidation
Skandha attributes several factors of their implementation with the project’s overall success. Because Skandha managed Toffee’s entire live streaming workflow, they were able to consolidate services and avoid the need to control relationships between numerous vendor partners. This consolidation also reduced costs for Toffee by decreasing the overheads associated with managing multiple vendors.
Skandha was able to optimise Toffee’s workflow in several ways as well, employing cloud resources, AI techniques and automation. Performing switching at the playout level for live and studio broadcasts also made it possible to continuously adapt their schedules to meet demand, and automate more of the playout chain.
Finally, Skandha put robust redundancy measures in place to maintain Toffee’s service throughout the event.
Among the outcomes of the collaboration that Skandha Media Services is most pleased about is their ability to configure, deliver and manage the complete event. This unified the streaming experience for Banglalink’s subscribers, and helped achieve uninterrupted viewing with an extremely low error rate, reflecting well on the reliability and effectiveness of Skandha's quality checks, infrastructure and software services.
One Partner, Simpler Infrastructure
Skandha and Toffee believe their collaboration illustrates various advantages of consolidating infrastructure services with a single, reliable partner, in terms of overcoming operational challenges and delivering competitive results.
"Partnering with Skandha proved not only to be a sound business decision in regard to streamlining our operations and reducing overall costs, but also an enjoyable, stress-free experience," said Ashwin Kelkar, Technology Director of Toffee. "Their expertise and innovation in the field of managing live streaming of big-ticket sports events really shone through.
“Skandha's well-coordinated team gave us reassurance, acting as an extension of our own team. Together, we successfully delivered continuous streams of multiple ICC T20 World Cup events – ultimately fulfilling our number one priority to keep our millions of viewers engaged." www.skandha.in
