Get CDN for Speed and Scalability
The content delivery network infrastructure helped the company save 35% of its cost, and further enabled it launch portable digital player Carvaan that comes loaded with 5,000 songs
Saregama, as we all know, is the owner of a rich repository of sound recordings and copyrights of Indian music and by far arguably India’s oldest record label which has been a favorite for music and movie lovers alike. With fans spread across the globe, music available on the go in 14 languages,a wide plethora of artists, symphonies, moods and ambience to choose, Saregama has truly withstood the test of time. Even with the rise of several other streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Gaana, Saavn, YouTube Music and more, Saregama continues to be a favorite for many due to its interesting content.
To ensure it keeps up with the times and that the ‘music must go on’ Saregama was looking for a partner that would help it transform its content distribution and delivery approach in this digital age, cater to the voracious appetite for music and movies of its audience and at the same time support its ever-increasing and digitally evolved customer base that is distributed globally.
At the same time, Saregama also realised that it needs to protect its reputation and continue the goodwill the brand has built over the years as well. Hence, speed and scalability were the two essential ingredients which were crucial in terms of ensuring an exciting digital adventure for its customers. Excessive latency and slow website load times were the erstwhile issues impacting customer satisfaction and retention. Hence, Saregama was keen to find a new service provider that would offer easy scalability, low latency and enhanced customer experience and at the same time be cost-effective.
How Tata Communications Solutions Addressed These Challenges
Saregama chose Tata Communications CDN platform to bring the content closer to the consumer’s doorstep, as Tata Communications CDN network is the only Tier 1 provider globally, making high quality content available to the customers worldwide, in the shortest possible time. Tata Communications’ CDN network offers super dense nodes; in other words high-performance and high output nodes globally which made the Saregama content appear local and virtually immediately available for any time access. This is further supplemented by AI-powered image optimisation capabilities to maintain visual quality across devices for best quality pictures, thereby providing a lag-free experience and the whole-site acceleration to ensure faster page loads on Saregama’s website.
As the Saregama website uses a lot of images and videos to help sell their physical products too, it was
“Speed and scalability were the two essential ingredients which were crucial in terms of ensuring an exciting digital adventure for its customers. Excessive latency and slow website load times were the erstwhile issues impacting customer satisfaction and retention.”
— Avinash Prasad, VP, Managed Security Services, Tata Communications
imperative to keep the target audience in mind. To be able to do so, Tata Communications provided Saregama with its‘on-the-fly image optimisation’ technology that dramatically improved Saregama customers’ web experiences. Offloading content from the source, the CDN can direct traffic optimally between content origin points to avoid stressing infrastructures. Meanwhile, intelligent website caching served content tailored to specific customer groups. This made the entire Saregama website scalable and highly efficient, offering 35 percent cost savings.
The Tata Communications’ CDN also enables an endto-end streaming solution to broadcasters which include down-linking, encoding and delivery of the content to web, mobile and connected TV’s.
Today, with the launch of Yoodlee Films by Saregama, Tata Communications is also able to ensure that videos get delivered faster and the end user gets the best experience. We believe that just like all other content owners, Saregama needs to focus only on the content strategy and be free from worries on distribution and delivery.With Tata Communications’ Live Broadcast service, Saregama can today also stream HD events and 24/7 broadcasts, thus improving the performance of their web properties and video assets.
Whether it’s live streaming, using video on demand or whole site acceleration, the highly scalable, carriergrade global CDN infrastructure has the capacity to tackle unexpected spikes without disturbing the userexperience.
CDN platform is a Tier 1 network infrastructure and is used across sectors such as media and entertainment,
gaming, enterprises, software and technology and e-commerce to provide a seamless end-user experience. Tata Communications’ CDN is further supporting music publishers by helping them to live stream to massive audiences around the globe, accelerate their websites, deliver great performing videos, serve podcasts to millions of subscribers, and ensure that their content is secure.
The Business Impact
Tata Communications was able to successfully enliven Saregama’s customer experience by addressing the user interface through image optimisation, reducing the excessive latency and faster website page-load times. This was undertaken by AI-powered image optimisation, with image file sizes reduced between 30 and 90 per cent with no loss of visual quality across devices, while IT workloads were massively lowered. Not only did Tata Communications manage to get a 2-second website response for the users but also managed to complete this massive transition within a period of four weeks without any disruption to end user.
The CDN infrastructure along with the enhanced service and support resulted in a cost-saving of 35 percent. The increased capabilities led to a shift in the corporate strategy of Saregama, resulting in the launch of Carvaan, a portable digital player with built in hi-fi speakers loaded with 5,000 evergreen Hindi songs. With the change in the business focus from streaming and downloading to online sales, through distributed storage, Tata Communications ensured a smooth and fast migration of a massive 11TB of audio files.
“The Saregama website uses lots of images and videos to help sell our physical products. In such a scenario, Tata Communications’ on-the-fly image optimisation technology puts our audience in the picture. The thought of moving our content to another service provider was, frankly, a scary prospect. But the Tata Communications team took care of everything and the transition was smooth and trouble-free. In fact, our customers simply didn’t realise a massive transition had taken place.”
— Yazad Anklesaria, Deputy GM, Technology & IT, Saregama India