Talkies Case Study

About the Customer

Talkies is a digital entertainment platform that offers a wide array of content in regional Indian languages, specifically Tulu, Kannada, and Konkani. Launched by Swayam Prabha Entertainment & Productions, the platform provides users with access to movies, web series, dramas, TV shows, and traditional performances like Yakshagana. Users can enjoy ad-free streaming through subscription plans, with new content released weekly. The platform is accessible via mobile applications on both Android and iOS devices, as well as through a dedicated TV app for larger screens. Additionally, Talkies features “Talkies Reels”, allowing users to watch short-form content without the need for login. The service aims to make regional entertainment easily accessible, offering options to watch content online or download for offline viewing, ensuring flexibility for users to enjoy their favorite shows and movies anytime, anywhere.

With a complex multi-region deployment and a growing technology stack, Talkies recognized the need for robust cloud governance and financial management to maintain competitive advantage and operational excellence. The Media Supply Chain solution modernizes Talkies's content workflow, managing and orchestrating various media services, data services, storage, and digital transport services for both linear and non-linear distribution channels.

Service Partnership

Talkies partnered with AppSquadz and AWS to tackle these challenges head-on. Leveraging AppSquadz’s expertise in cloud engineering and AWS’s robust cloud services, the collaboration aimed to create a transformative solution tailored to Talkies's unique needs.

Challenges Experienced by Talkies

• Media Supply Chain Inefficiencies:

Talkies struggled with fragmented content workflows, requiring extensive manual intervention for processing, quality control, and distribution. The lack of automated orchestration led to delays in content delivery, with processing times averaging multiple hours per content piece. Quality control was inconsistent across their regional channels, resulting in varying standards and frequent content rejection. The absence of standardized workflows across different content types resulted in inefficient resource utilization and increased operational costs by approximately 35%.

• Limited Digital Distribution Capabilities:

The organization faced significant challenges in meeting modern audience expectations for digital content delivery. Their existing infrastructure could only support basic streaming capabilities, resulting in frequent buffering issues and quality degradation during peak viewing hours. The platform lacked essential features such as multi-device support, and content personalization leading to a 45% drop in digital viewer retention.

• Content Piracy and Digital Rights Management (DRM):

Content piracy represents a critical challenge for Talkies, threatening the platform's revenue streams and the intellectual property rights of content creators. The key issues include digital rights protection complexities like preventing unauthorized screen recordings of premium content, blocking illegal downloads and redistribution and implementing multi layered encryption for video streams. These issues require a complex multi cloud security architecture to protect sensitive video content and implement robust encryption and compliance measures for content storage.

Content piracy represents a critical challenge for Talkies, threatening the platform's revenue streams and the intellectual property rights of content creators. The key issues include digital rights protection complexities like preventing unauthorized screen recordings of premium content, blocking illegal downloads and redistribution and implementing multi layered encryption for video streams. These issues require a complex multi cloud security architecture to protect sensitive video content and implement robust encryption and compliance measures for content storage.

The Solution We Delivered

AppSquadz delivered a comprehensive solution to Talkies that not only addressed their media supply chain management and content delivery needs but also enhanced the scalability, security, and performance of their platform.

The following are the key aspects of the solution we delivered to ensure the platform's success:

• Intelligent Media Supply Chain Automation : We implemented an end-to-end media supply chain solution using AWS Media Services, revolutionizing content processing and distribution workflows. The solution included AWS Elemental MediaConvert for automated transcoding across 15+ formats, supporting both broadcast and digital delivery standards. In addition to this we enable intelligent content cataloging with advanced metadata management. We also integrated AI/ML services like Amazon Transcribe for converting spoken language in audio and video files into text, Amazon Translate for automatically translating text between different languages.
• Comprehensive D2C Streaming Platform : We developed a state-of-the-art streaming infrastructure capable of handling millions of concurrent viewers. AWS MediaPackage was also deployed for just-in-time packaging, supporting HLS, DASH, and MSS protocols across 20+ device types and implementing multi-DRM support, ensuring content protection across various platforms. We enhanced content delivery using AWS CloudFront with edge optimization, reducing latency by 60% and improving streaming quality across diverse network conditions.
• Advanced Digital Rights Management (DRM) Infrastructure : We designed a multi-layered security architecture to protect content and intellectual property by using AWS KMS for encryption key management, AWS CloudFront with signed URLs and signed cookies which enabled secure content distribution, AWS WAF for protection against potential content piracy attempts, AWS Shield for advanced DDoS protection and Multi-factor authentication (MFA) and role-based access controls (RBAC).

Results:

By implementing this comprehensive solution, Talkies achieved:45% optimization of cloud infrastructure costs, enhanced ability to scale content delivery infrastructure, 40% increase in viewer engagement, 50% improvement in streaming quality and 30% reduction in content delivery costs.