Akamai empowers MX Player to deliver seamless viewing experience

MX Player has partnered with Akamai Technologies to provide its increasing user base in India with seamless digital experience.

The onset of the pandemic saw the platform witness not just a massive boost in viewership, but also new subscribers, and a newer audience. This accelerated growth heightened MX Player’s need for infrastructure that could support the scale and availability of the app across different networks and locations. MX Player found Akamai’s media delivery solution to be the right choice in order to deliver a high-quality viewing experience to their customers across different cities. The enhancement in performance and user experience was particularly pronounced in the case of MX TakaTak, a popular short video platform that has seen a rapid surge of users, with a large portion of them coming from tier II and tier III towns.

According to Redseer, the online content consumption in India grew by 35% in April 2020 compared to January 2020. It further stated that short-form video content consumption recorded the most significant jump during the lockdown.

Vivek Jain, Chief Operating Officer, MX Player said, “In the last couple of months, our user base has increased exponentially. The demand to consume content on the go and the need for virtual entertainment amongst the middle, mass, mobile, millennial audience in India is growing faster than ever before. MX Player has seen more than 7x jump in time spent on the app. Even MX TakaTak, which we recently launched, crossed 1Bn video views per day within a month from launch and has quickly become the market leading app in the short video category. We have always obsessed about best-in-class video load times. Akamai is a pioneer in Edge distribution and its presence particularly in tier II and tier III towns has helped us deliver an unmatched viewing experience for our customers across India’s mega cities as well as the hinterlands.”

Commenting on this partnership, Mitesh Jain, India Sales Head, Media & Carrier Division of Akamai said, “Unprecedented demand for content coupled with rapidly evolving user behavior poses a challenge for apps trying to ensure high-quality viewing experience across a complex network topology. We are glad to have partnered with MX Player to help them scale the user base and step up to conform with user expectations of evolving Indian consumers. Given MX player’s ambition, I am sure that this is just a start and we will be accomplishing many more milestones together.”