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Content Market in Southeast Asia & Why CDN is Important

  • November
    2022
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With more people streaming videos, playing games, and buying things online, Southeast Asia's CDN market is showing the strongest growth momentum. Reducing the time it takes for each piece of data to travel from the host server to the client will provide lower latency and a more optimised user experience. Find out why a reliable content delivery network is a worthy investment if you want to maintain high-quality Web performance and user experience as you grow your online presence.

 

Did you know? 2020 saw a whopping 40 million new internet users in Southeast Asia. What's more? 70 per cent of the region's population is now online. And over 90 per cent of those 400 million strong users intend to continue using digital platforms post-pandemic. This significant uptick in internet usage in recent years has made Southeast Asia one of the most lucrative markets for content providers, application developers, and OTT providers. With a population fast approaching 700 million people and a combined GDP valued at over USD 3 trillion, Southeast Asia is among the fastest-growing economies in the world. Being located at the centre of a dynamic APAC region, operators and content owners must expand their horizons to harness the benefits that come with growth.

Expanding to Southeast Asia: the Opportunities and Obstacles

While in 2021, the online media market in Southeast Asia stood at USD 22 billion, it is expected to grow to a staggering USD 43 billion by 2025. In fact, the advent of rapid technological development, content consumption, and distribution is swiftly driving a sea change in Southeast Asia's Content Delivery Network (CDN) market. The rising demand for Over the Top (OTT) and Video-on-Demand (VOD) services, combined with the increase in demand for enhanced video content and latency-free online gaming experience, is expediting Southeast Asian CDN market growth.

However, delivering top-tier online videos can be challenging. Content files are getting larger, and users expect HD streaming to happen instantly. Broadcasters who value quality are incorporating live streaming CDNs to meet this growing demand.

The modern Web is a mixture of text, images, audio, and video, with data centres around the world supplying information on a 24/7 basis. However – as the internet gets more congested – streaming performance suffers, and end-users grow frustrated.

To combat this problem, organisations are turning to CDNs to provide greater bandwidth, reliability, and security for their content and websites. Used extensively by social media networks, entertainment companies, e-commerce brands, and enterprise businesses, CDNs are quickly (and reliably) making inroads into the Southeast Asian market.

CDN Explained

A CDN allows content providers to distribute content across different geographical locations. A CDN is a network of proxy servers located at various places around the world, which can store a variety of content types such as images, audio, and video files. When a user opens a streaming platform and tries to access a piece of content, the file is usually served from the proxy server closest to their location rather than the origin server. Therefore, enabling faster web performance by locating copies of web content closer to users or facilitating the delivery of dynamic content (e.g., live video feeds).

By reducing the distance between this content and users, the content delivery network helps the website publisher provide faster performance, reduce loading time for its users and control its own bandwidth consumption and costs.

CDN: A vast (Southeast Asia) Market Entry Opportunity

Thanks to high-speed network rollout, reduced data cost, rising demand for video/OTT services, and the surging internet consumption in all formats during and after the pandemic, the next 5-10 years are anticipated to be a crucial growth period for the Southeast Asia digital economy. The disruptive growth is due to the growing number of internet subscribers, the massive mobile internet consumption, and the thriving of e-commerce, live gaming, and online education in Asia, especially in India, China, and Southeast Asia.

Let's take a close look at how content providers stand to benefit from CDNs.

  • Localised Data and Seamless Usage:

When you're using a CDN, the content will be served to the website visitors from the node nearest to their physical locations. This way, the data does not have to travel through multiple nodes to reach a web visitor, speeding up the content delivery time. It is important to remember that this method's effectiveness depends on your CDN provider's data centre locations.

  • Decreased Bandwidth Consumption:

Web hosting companies charge businesses for the data transferred from the origin servers. A content delivery network can store web content copies closer to the end-users, which would reduce the amount of data needed to be transferred from the origin servers, and in turn, lower enterprise costs and bandwidth consumption.

  • Lower Latency:

End-users typically request data from a system, and the system responds by transferring the  data. Latency is the amount of time that elapses between the request and the response. The latency increases as the distance between the end-user and the server increases. CDN servers are located nearer to the end-user, on the "network edge," which reduces latency and improves performance.

  • Effective Traffic Spike Management:

When a video goes viral, a successful marketing campaign is launched, a new feature and patch is released, or a limited-time offer is available, the demand for content can suddenly spike. Load balancing can help distribute the demand across web servers so that traffic spikes do not affect website performance.

  • Enhanced Cybersecurity:

A content delivery network uses automation and data analytics tools to identify firewall issues, MITM (Man in the Middle) threats, and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

  • Amplifies User Satisfaction:

The primary reasons end-users avoid or abandon particular websites are media playback issues, unresponsive applications, and slow load times. A content delivery network minimises these performance issues, leading to increased user satisfaction.

  • Accelerated eCommerce:

A content delivery network (CDN) enables faster loading of product pages on mobile and desktop devices, thereby improving the shopping experience. CDN also allows B2B and B2C eCommerce retailers to deliver applications and content, even during peak traffic rapidly.

Content Delivery Network and TM Global

As content becomes increasingly large, dynamic, and diverse, end-users expect faster, more flawless delivery than ever before. With over 50 CDN nodes within ASEAN alone, TM CDN has comprehensive built-in capabilities to solve delivery challenges, including content protection and asset optimisation, as well as robust customisation tools and features to fine-tune delivery details and even create unique functionality and flows. TM CDN solutions ensure top-notch reliability and speed for your content while keeping operating costs and complexity to a minimum.

If you're ready to partner with a top-tier CDN provider, check out TM CDN and our integrated telco services portfolio. And learn how TM CDN can play a major role in deciding the success of your web applications and websites.

 

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