Chai

An on-demand streaming service with premium originals and licensed content focussed on MENA & South Asia. The atom of the project is simple, make local content easy, affordable and accessible.

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Inspiration

South Asia & MENA tech market are growing exponentially every year. Traditional Media industry is on a rise but finding existing content from that region is a painful task. We want to disrupt this rising market by providing a quality online streaming service that not only provides licensed content but also invest in content creators and movie makers to provide premium watching experience at home.

What it does

Chai (as an Tea) which is an on-demand movie & Tv show streaming service with high production originals totally focussed on MENA Market. Lets say Netflix for MENA. The reason we called it Chai is because its part of life for everyone back home, no day is complete without it and we want to make this as embedded in their life as original Tea.

Chai aims to provide 3 basic functionality

  • All localized content in one place to watch anytime, anywhere(of course with a cup of Chai!)
  • Premium Exclusive content.
  • Localized Ad platform for advertisers and Content creators.

How we built it

We have built the web platform using React for front-end, Python for Backend and AWS CloudFront to host media assets which can be streamed through Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. We will be using ML APIs provided by AWS to build a recommendation engine as well.

Challenges we ran into

50% of this Product is about infrastructure which should be scalable, available and polished enough that it gives you premium content but the other 50% of the challenge is to bring up the payment infrastructure for the countries where payments are all cash-based, bringing up an Ad based infrastructure where we can play with local Ad dynamics as well as acquiring the licenses of existing regional content and getting high production value content.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A big chunk of time was spent figuring how we will building the whole system. With research and some past knowledge we have figured the infrastructure part from a technical standpoint.

What's next for Chai - On-demand Video Streaming for MENA & South Asia

We want to take the learnings from Hackathon and start building the real infrastructure on AWS. There are 4 Big part of this project that we will kickoff:

Customer facing UI - which includes gallery of content and general infrastructure.

Admin UI - which will be used by Chai team for uploading content, analytics and managing localized ADs & Sponsors.

Payment Integration - System that accepts online payment as well as Phone credit balance(local market standard) as a Cash for subscription.

Content Generation - Getting existing license and engage with some of our contacts about the idea.

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