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As an enabler, Akamai Technologies provides solutions for businesses to be able to transform digitally and meet the growing demands of industries. During the Akamai Media Summit APAC, Parimal Pandya, VP for Media and Carrier Sales, APAC said, “everything that we thought is going to happen in the next 12 to 24 months has happened in the last three months”.

For businesses around the world, this was the reality they were dealing with. The media and content industry in particular experienced a different scenario. Television viewing, streaming content and piracy have all seen an increase.

Louis Boswell, CEO of AVIA, pointed out that while piracy is increasing, the concept is changing. Viewers are behaving differently towards it based on surveys done in ASEAN. COVID-19 has led to increasing demand for more streaming content and platforms.

According to David Ratner of Pioneer Consulting Asia Pacific, certain countries in Asia saw a 58% increase of total time spent on video platforms for June 2020 compared to June 2019. The total monthly active users also increased by 37% year on year for June 2020 compared to June 2019.

Interestingly, 45% of consumers are most likely to remain using video streaming platforms post-COVID-19. Apps like Netflix Party allow groups to watch the same content simultaneously and interact with friends while watching. Short-form videos have also seen an increase in demand, depending on the content, across different industries.

Meanwhile, the gaming industry has also experienced similar growth in what is projected to be the fastest-growing industry during the pandemic, with increasing peak active users and more spending in online and mobile gaming. Games are also being used as engagement tools by major eCommerce and video platforms. Over the next three years, southeast Asia and India will be the strongest gaming markets in the world, which is expected to be primarily driven by mobile gaming.

So how can businesses make the most of this?

Transformation is key and Akamai Technologies’ Satiya Prasath explains that businesses need to embrace DevOps to increase business agility. Specifically, the media, publishing and gaming industry will all need to look into automation. For example, a content operating company would want to look into automating their developing pipelines, especially their media workloads. This is followed by automating visibility for monitoring and reliability and the services infrastructure to be able to scale without any disruption. Simply because consumers are no longer as patient as before, statistics show that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Businesses can end up losing lots of potential viewers and customers due to this.

At the same time, businesses need to understand the importance of security that comes with modern streaming sites. While piracy is still a big concern, cybersecurity should be on the agenda of media CIOs. Akamai observed a 98% year over year increase in credential stuffing attacks against video services. Media CIOs need to ensure their organisation has a manageable security architecture, be able to understand their attackers and demonstrate the business value of security.

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