MNC Group Elevates Vision+ to New Heights, Delivering Seamless Streaming to Millions with AWS

Founded in 1989, MNC Group is an Indonesian conglomerate operating in the financial services, energy, hospitality, media, and entertainment industries. Its media and entertainment arm, MNC Media, is Southeast Asia’s largest and most integrated. It produces some of Indonesia’s biggest shows, such as Indonesian Idol, Master Chef Indonesia, and X Factor Indonesia, and operates the video streaming service Vision+.

Vision+ has more than 40 million monthly active users in Indonesia who watch movies, dramas, comedies, and reality TV shows across over 100 channels and video-on-demand (VOD). Recently, MNC Group set out to attract millions more active users by adding live streams of sports events such as major soccer tournaments. Additionally, recognizing the presence of large Indonesian communities worldwide, the group hopes to drive global growth for Vision+.

To pave the way for expansion, MNC Group needed to revamp Vision+'s on-premises over-the-top (OTT) platform, which faced challenges in scaling and handling spikes in demand for live sports events. Additionally, the existing platform lacked adequate security measures to address unauthorized access attempts during scheduled sports events.

To address the scalability issues with its legacy infrastructure, MNC Group decided to migrate its OTT platform to the cloud. After evaluating several cloud providers, the group chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). Roy Debashis, chief operating officer for MNC OTT Network states, "We chose AWS because, while this was our project, AWS demonstrated a strong commitment to our success."

MNC Group developed an architecture on AWS to live-stream events and provide VOD services. It deployed AWS Elemental MediaConvert for VOD content processing and AWS Elemental MediaPackage for packaging of live and VOD content. It also plans to use AWS Elemental MediaTailor for personalized ad insertion in live streams.

As part of the solution, the group is using Amazon CloudFront to prepare, protect, and distribute live streams to Vision+ customers. It is also using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to ingest the VOD assets transcoded by AWS Elemental MediaConvert and Digital Rights Management (DRM) packaged with AWS Elemental MediaPackage before distribution.

To handle spikes during high-demand events, the architecture utilized AWS Auto Scaling, which automatically adjusts capacity across all AWS Availability Zones supporting Vision+ applications. The platform also features a DRM key server running on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance to protect content from being copied or prevent unauthorized access.

In just four months, Vision+’s new OTT platform on AWS was up and running. Says Debashis, “What stood out to us was the support from the AWS team. They were always available for calls and never more than a message away.” The rapid development timeline ensured Vision+ was ready to live-stream matches from the AFC U23 Asian Cup competition, which attracts the men’s under-23 national teams from across Asia.

Debashis comments, “We broke our records for live-streaming traffic during that tournament. Our OTT platform on AWS handled more than 2 million concurrent streams per match on average.” During one game, Amazon CloudFront distributed more than 4 petabytes of streaming data seamlessly—10 times the usual daily amount.

Besides scaling efficiently and delivering high quality service to football fans, the AWS-based OTT platform achieved 60 percent faster video start times and reduced playback issues by more than 40 percent. "Video start times are crucial for live events," explains Debashis. "With AWS, our start time is less than 1.8 seconds, so customers can start watching the action almost immediately."

Just as MNC Group hoped, adding live sports events and a bigger emphasis on original productions has driven significant growth for Vision+. Transactions increased by 700 percent. Vision+ also offered live streams of matches from the UEFA Euro 2024 soccer competition in Germany. “By running our OTT platform on AWS, nothing is holding us back from a technology standpoint,” says Debashis. “We can deliver a great viewing experience to millions more Vision+ customers.”

By using AWS, Vision+ has the flexibility to support subscribers’ spontaneous viewing habits. This type of viewing is associated with events or programs that suddenly gain widespread interest, such as matches between big rivals in the knockout stages of a tournament or programs that receive a surge of publicity on social media. “The spikes are unpredictable,” says Debashis. “But with AWS, we can automatically scale so everyone gets a great viewing experience regardless.”

MNC Group is also expanding Vision+ globally to meet the demands of Indonesians living abroad, plus global audiences seeking Asian content following the worldwide success of Korean dramas. Debashis says, “There is a global demand for Indonesian content beyond the Indonesian diaspora. We can address this demand using the global AWS infrastructure to support our OTT platform.”