Modernising OTT for a hyper-connected audience

OTT platforms are evolving with microservices, Al-driven content workflows, and smart CDNs to deliver seamless experiences at a global scale.

- BY SARVANRAJA NADAR

With digital entertainment now being consumed on devices, in time zones, and across geographical regions, over-the-top (OTT) services have evolved from mere video-streaming solutions to sophisticated technology platforms.

The core architecture of OTT infrastructure is being reimagined end-to-end in reaction to increasing viewer expectations and demands during live events or global releases.

Three key pillars fueling this change are: integrated content lifecycle management, elastic cloud infrastructure on a microservices foundation, and cognitive content delivery networks (CDNs) optimising Quality of Experience (QoE).

FROM MONOLITHS TO MICROSERVICES IN OTT

The legacy monolithic architectures, once a standard in OTT, are now falling short when it comes to concurrency and performance expectations of today. In a monolithic architecture, the components of an application are strongly coupled together, making them hard to scale selectively. Any increase in user activity—whether log- in, playback, or payments—compels the whole system to scale, which leads to resource inefficiencies and higher costs in infrastructure.

Microservices-based designs address this challenge by compartmentalising OTT applications into separate services—such as login, content display, recommendations, advertising, and subscription flows. Each can scale independently as needed. A sample is a login service that would need to scale rapidly during a popular live event, while content recommendation services would require less frequent scaling.