100,000 videos migration &
60% lower costs

Aadhan Media is a leading news media publisher catering to a multi-regional and multi lingual audience. An established brand, the Company’s gamut of content covers trending news, elections, interviews & podcasts, biographies & special stories, fact checks & case studies, business, finance & money, entertainment & more.

On Android Apps Store and iOS Apps Store, the Company’s Breaking & Short News app has over 6 million downloads with 4.4 ratings (45K reviews). The App is rated in top 5% in News & Magazines category by Google Play Store. Alternately, on YouTube, Aadhan’s various language specific channels together have 7.5 million subscribers and about 75K videos.

With over 400+ employees and contributors, the Company produces 100s of new content daily and operates 24/7. Everything Aadhan does with video is mission critical.

“We need to go from field to live in < 20 mins. It’s non-negotiable. Any news is ‘Breaking’ for 20 mins before it’s cloned. We gain or lose audience in that window. Tech-human velocity is critical to achieve this” as per Prabhakar Varma, Head of Digital Media at Aadhan.

Aadhan is a modern digital news publisher that operates in a fast-paced, tech-driven ecosystem emphasizing real-time collaboration, automation, and audience engagement. The workflow integrates mobile tools, AI, and cloud-based systems to handle live video/audio from the field, enabling rapid distribution across broadcasting, apps, YouTube, and social media.

A very simplified end-to-end process under the hood at Aadhan included:

• Field capture: Reporters use mobile apps for real-time raw footage, audio, photos, and text during breaking events.
• Ingestion: Secure API/web uploads to newsroom; live feeds auto-convert to VOD with metadata tagging, virus scans, and proxy previews.
• Processing & Research: AI-driven transcoding, adaptive bitrate optimization, audio/subtitle enhancements; journalists select/pre-cut footage from archives/agencies.
• Editing/Post-Prod: Cloud collab for trimming, graphics, VO, captions, watermarks; AI automates routine tasks like captioning.
• Publishing/Distribution: CMS/API push for multi-channel rollout to YouTube, apps, social media using cloud playout software.
• Analytics & Archive: Real-time metrics via APIs; feedback loops for updates; MAM archiving for reuse. Digital-first focus: 70%+ online publishing.

Video touches sensitive parts of Aadhan’s business, so streaming technology had to be fast, accurate, and deeply reliable. As Aadhan’s audience base grew, so did the complexity of its streaming needs and technology. The team was handling over 1000s of videos each month, relying heavily on multi-vendor and custom integrations to route media. These flows were well-intentioned and thoughtfully built, but they placed the burden of precision on the tech team.

“Video is our primary digital content format. We were proud of our tech stack. But we had too many vendors. One for video, another for AI, another for playout, etc. We also support Web, Android, iOS and TVs. It created extra work for tech team and for management. The tech team, integrations, and streaming costs were ballooning as we kept growing,” states Indira Devi Gollapudi - Technical Head of Aadhan Media “And we realized that no matter how well we tried to design those flows, we were never going to be able to predict every situation.”

It was clear that model needed to evolve.

The team started small, introducing FastPix Video API into their internal workflows. From there, they expanded to key workflows and then to their short video app in a way that could be clearly scoped and carefully controlled.

“FastPix with their 10+ video products in one API platform felt like a good fit for our needs. Every step of the rollout was deliberate. We tested, we measured, and we made sure the experience was up to our standard before we expanded”

Within a couple of months, FastPix was handling all our video workflows, and we were able to track the quality of experience with their video data product. In areas like accelerated uploads, fast playback and AI workflows, FastPix was not just matching our earlier vendors like AWS and Cloudflare – it was exceeding it, consistently delivering 90%+ QoE.

The Aadhan team also used the FastPix migration tools to completely move their 100,000 videos from previous vendors all through an automated migration tool within a couple of weeks. And unlike AWS which was charging Aadhan for every resolution created for adaptive bitrate streaming, it was one encoding cost with FastPix.

The financial impact over the next couple of months was significant. Streaming costs greatly reduced by 60% compared to earlier periods, and the team unlocked $1000 in annual total cost of ownership gains.

Finally, as FastPix’ integrated platform covering web, mobile and TV automated more of the repeatable work, Aadhan’s tech team had space to evolve. They could now focus more on evolving AI workflows, news alerting systems and other monetization opportunities.

“This is the work people want to be doing,” notes Indira. “It’s less video engineering and more creative, more impactful, and more fulfilling.”

At Aadhan, video is no longer the always sensitive product. It’s a capability. And Aadhan is focused now on building the new monetization opportunities to expand its business for the long term.