This video tech firm plans to enter BFSI, pharma, and a host of other areas

The Gurugram-based company has had double-digit growth during the past few years and of the top-10 OTT players in India, seven are its clients

Indian video technology company MultiTV, founded by ex-AT&T executive Vikash Samota in 2016, is looking at expanding its focus beyond streaming services and virtual events to areas such as banking, financial services and insurance, pharmaceuticals, education, retail space and governments across geographies such as Africa, America and Europe.

“Every OTT player wants to showcase the best quality content. Creator by MultiTV is an end-to-end OTT platform that effortlessly delivers up to 2x higher video quality, while enabling up to 30 per cent bandwidth savings for end-users through intelligent video transcoding and a higher video compression ratio,” said Vikash Samota, Founder and CEO of MultiTV Tech Solutions Pvt Ltd.

MultiTV’s technology also allows its clients to realise cost savings of up to 40 per cent.

The Gurugram-based firm says it has had double-digit growth during the past few years and of the top-10 streaming or over-the-top players (OTT) players in India, seven are its clients.

Samota graduated in engineering and worked with AT&T in the US for three years. In 2010, he started his entrepreneurial journey with Cyberlinks, which does end-to-end development of mobile products.

While running the services business, he realised that video can be the next big thing and that there was a need for a very simplified, hassle-free video solution for enterprises.

“With the rise in video consumption on OTT platforms, every brand should account for their platform to be capable of auto-scaling and have a redundant set-up in case of a fail-over to ensure that the OTT platform runs seamlessly 24X7. We enable our customers with both as per their needs. Our system dynamically adapts to the incoming requests to scale/descale itself and provide a cost-effective high-concurrency solution,” said Samota.

Through its virtual events platform called BeLive, MultiTV delivers more than 20 virtual events daily, and has hosted over 6,000 virtual events to date.

Its video technology stack, which the firm owns the intellectual property rights for, processes more than 1.5 million hours of video every day.

Every year, over two billion people watch videos streamed from the MultiTV video platform. Last year, the firm streamed events such as Sangeet Setu, a series of virtual concerts by 18 Indian artists during the pandemic, and the Indian Film Festival on television, OTT, social media, and so on.

Leading virtual conferences in India, such as RE-Invest, the renewable energy investors meet, also use MultiTV’s solutions for their virtual event design, delivery, and streaming across multiple platforms.

“By 2022, we expect our customer base and revenues to double. The platform is easily customisable, and because MultiTV owns the IP, it will make it relevant for any industry or category. However, including the existing markets like virtual events, OTT etc, the company is also aiming to focus on BFSI, pharma, education, retail space and governments across geographies such as Africa, America and Europe,” said Samota.

The pandemic, which required most industries to go virtual overnight, saw MultiTV’s revenues increase three times. Its customer base also went from 50 to 250 clients.

Between February and April last year, at the peak of worldwide lockdowns, global internet traffic surged by nearly 40 per cent, driven by video conferences, online gaming, streaming and social media, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

At this rate, web traffic is set to double by 2022, with mobile internet users expected to jump to 5 billion by 2025 from 3.8 billion last year, according to the IEA.

“We present a customised user experience based on customer’s need for use cases such as AGMs, product launches, sales meet, online-expo, conferences, and digital concerts, all fully customizable to fit their brand and customer needs. We serve clients across telecom, auto, consumer electronics, retail, insurance, pharma, among several others,” said Samota.

The company has also worked on a new version of its product for event management firms, which is customisable, fully secured and meets international standards and General Data Protection Regulation, Europe.

The pandemic has had a positive impact on the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market, said Samota.

“We see a rise in the demand for cloud-based business continuity tools and services, high dependency on virtual interactions/public cloud services and increased spending on cloud services by all major industries due to COVID-19,” he added.

As of 2020, more people worldwide were streaming video content into their homes than ever before. About 77 per cent of all global Internet traffic is devoted to streaming video, and 85 per cent of US Internet users stream online video. The rise in video streaming has been driven by improving Internet connection speeds, increasing content options lockdowns and remote working.

Samota however, sounds a bit of caution as well. As countries begin to come out of lockdowns and the effect of the pandemic, reduced industry spending can affect the adoption of PaaS solutions and services.