IDN Media Goes Live with High-Quality Streaming on AWS

Headquartered in Jakarta, IDN Media aims to be the leading digital media business in Southeast Asia. The company has a dominant presence among the the millennial and Gen Z populations in Indonesia, serving over 90 percent of this population with a monthly active user base of approximately 80 million. The diverse range of businesses in the IDN ecosystem include IDN Creative, a digital agency; IDN Event, an experiential marketing agency; and IDN Research, an independent fact-tank providing insights into attitudes and trends among Indonesian millennials. 

IDN Media also manages a variety of content platforms which offers online news and entertainment. In 2020, the company launched the IDN App, a unified platform for all its content. The following year it launched IDN Live, which integrates live streaming into the user experience within the IDN App. 

Initially, IDN Live was hosted on bare-metal servers. Although it was colocated with the IDN App and other platforms, the maintenance cost of the live-streaming infrastructure was high, and managing the service required specialized expertise. Moreover, IDN Media faced difficulties in maintaining stream quality during traffic spikes, which could surge up to 50 times.

“Buffering, lagging, and poor stream quality negatively impacts the user experience,” says Winston Utomo, CEO, and co-founder of IDN Media. “We were concerned that viewers would become disengaged and leave the streams, resulting in loss of engagement by the viewer and frustration for streamers.”

IDN Media engaged Amazon Web Services (AWS) to explore Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS), a managed live-streaming solution. To compare the capabilities of Amazon IVS with its in-house infrastructure, IDN Media conducted a proof of concept. Louis Larry, vice president of technology at IDN Media, says, “The team conducted a thorough testing to ensure that they could prevent any unforeseen issues during the migration. After successful testing, we began our migration process.”

The migration to Amazon IVS revolutionized IDN Media’s live-streaming capabilities. According to Utomo, “Before implementing Amazon IVS, we could only handle 10 concurrent live streams. Since the transition, we’re able to host hundreds.” Previously, the latency rate averaged 15 seconds, but it has now been reduced to less than three seconds. Utomo also highlights several other benefits of the Amazon IVS service, such as providing a comprehensive dashboard on streaming performance, which facilitates effective monitoring. 

The scalability of Amazon IVS was put to the test during a recent live-streaming event featuring Indonesian pop star Zee JKT48. The event featured a challenge between Zee and social-media influencer Arief Muhammad around eating nasi padang, a popular Indonesia dish. Over 50,000 viewers accessed the live stream without experiencing any technical difficulties during the 1.5-hour broadcast, in which the two participants actively attempted to persuade each other and the audience about the ideal way to eat. 

Following the success of migrating IDN Live to Amazon IVS, IDN Media made the strategic decision to migrate all its content platforms to AWS. The company’s IT team employed a lift-and-shift approach for subsequent migrations, using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to run web applications and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for databases. The team also used Amazon CloudFront for caching, which helped to reduce the loads on the server instances. “Our databases on Amazon RDS are currently handling more than 1,000 requests per second without any performance issues,” comments Larry.

By going all-in on AWS, IDN Media has reduced IT costs by around 30 percent, seen significantly less downtime across its platforms, and increased time to market. “We have been able to deliver a faster, more reliable service to our customers, now that we’re running on AWS,” comments Utomo.

IDN Media’s migration to AWS has also helped the company achieve its immediate goals of expanding its user base and providing more personalized content to readers. Looking ahead, IDN Media believes the switch to AWS will contribute to its more long-term goals of adding new revenue streams and creating new opportunities for growth. Utomo says, “By leveraging the scalability of AWS services, we can innovate quickly while ensuring customers enjoy a high-quality experience.”

IDN Media is also confident that it can innovate its way to the pinnacle of the digital media market in Southeast Asia. As it moves into a phase of building cloud-native applications on AWS, the company has begun using services like Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Aurora, a database built for the cloud. “It’s part of a continuing process to explore new ways to use AWS to improve our business processes and deliver innovative services to our customers and audiences,” concludes Utomo.