Netflix in talks with Reliance Jio, Airtel and others for seamless streaming experience for its Indian consumers

Online streaming service Netflix has changed the way people around the globe watch TV, while internet streaming has created more options for entertainment content online, and demand for online video content has grown, varying internet conditions and bandwidth limitations have resulted in a less than satisfactory experience - buffering problems, intermittent outages, and high data cost often leave fans in India frustrated and ready to tear their hair out.

Although the global Internet television network has tried many ways to deal with the connectivity issues in India like adaptive screening and recently launched download feature but the streaming experience is still far from seamless. But this could change. Netflix is in talks with all telecom operators like Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone and others to sign them in on their Open Connect project. Through this project Netflix is looking to place custom-build caching servers called Open Connect Devices in data centers of all these major internet services providers, which means Netflix customers in India will not have to stream a show from servers all the way in the U.S. but from a copy hosted on a server closer to it in Asia. More importantly, these Open Connect Devices will also work on Netflix’s algorithms that will enable it to determine the popular shows based on users’ current watching behaviour and proactively cache predicted content. That could bring a sea of change in the way you stream your favourite series on Netflix sans buffering.

Netflix has also changed their encoding system from “One size fits all” to a per-title encoding which can give customers better video quality under low bandwidth for titles with “simple” content. While this move will improve the quality of mainly cartoon shows this will be of little or no help for the action thrillers that people usually love to watch on Netflix.

Netflix has come to see that the choices of shows on their streaming service are similar all across the 190 countries Netflix has presence in but that’s not the case with internet connectivity. Bandwidth limitations are proving to be difficult for the online streaming service in some of the key markets like India. So Netflix is hoping to start Open Connect in India as soon as possible so that Netflix fans in India can finally enjoy their quality shows with a quality streaming experience.

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