DishHome Delivered Nepal’s Biggest OTT Moment

Dish Media Network (DishHome), one of Nepal’s biggest entertainment and internet companies, set out to raise the bar for live sports streaming. The goal: deliver the Siddhartha Bank Nepal Premier League (NPL) as a premium, subscription-only OTT (over-the-top) experience that could rival the experience of leading global OTT platforms. With millions of fans watching across Nepal and the global diaspora, DishHome needed to guarantee reliability, ironclad security, and flawless uptime. Partnering with Akamai, it unified application hosting, live video processing, delivery, and security on a single, edge-based platform — and successfully streamed all 32 matches of NPL Season 2 without a single disruption.

The NPL is more than a tournament. It is the launchpad for the nation’s cricket ambitions, drawing packed stadiums, global stars, and massive online viewership. After more than 50 million views on YouTube in its first season, the Cricket Association of Nepal (CAN) wanted something bigger for Season 2: a premium OTT platform that could deliver every match live, ad-free, and at broadcast-quality — anywhere in the world.

CAN selected DishHome as the official OTT partner and broadcast rights holder. For DishHome, this was both an opportunity and a risk.

“This was the first time we were streaming a sports event of this scale,” explained Amit Shakya, Head of Broadcast & Communications Technology at DishHome. “And we were also launching DishHome GO as a premium, subscription-only app. Failure wasn’t an option.”

DishHome had to serve two very different audiences simultaneously: local viewers across Nepal, often on inconsistent mobile networks, and a global diaspora demanding high-resolution, low-latency streams. More than 20% of viewers — and up to 25% of bandwidth — came from outside the country, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe, and the Middle East.

“With so many variables, our strategy was to minimize friction in the tech stack,” Shakya explained. “We didn’t want to stitch together five vendors and hope for the best.”

Just as critical was security. Every stream sat behind a paywall. Any leak or piracy would directly impact revenue — and damage DishHome’s brand as a premium broadcaster.

“When we got the rights, security immediately became the biggest challenge,” Shakya continued. “The app and the content had to be protected from day one.”

DishHome turned to Akamai for one simple reason: proven experience delivering the world’s largest live sporting events. From the Olympics and FIFA World Cup to nearly a decade of record-breaking Indian Premier League seasons, Akamai had already solved the problems DishHome faced — at far greater scale.

“We needed speed, scale, security, real-time support, and cost efficiency. There was no better choice than Akamai,” said Shakya.

Akamai demonstrated that capability by delivering a complete end-to-end video pipeline covering transcoding, packaging, and content protection as a proof of concept. Then it rapidly tripled capacity inside Nepal in mere weeks to ensure content was delivered locally — reducing latency and improving quality for domestic viewers.

For NPL Season 2, DishHome deployed its entire OTT stack — from application hosting to live video processing, delivery, and security — on Akamai Cloud.

“From the moment the live feed left the stadium, everything happened on Akamai,” Shakya said. “We didn’t have to orchestrate multiple vendors. That drastically reduced variables and latency.”

Key Akamai solutions included:

• LKE: Managed Kubernetes Engine: Hosted the DishHome GO application on a scalable, production-grade Kubernetes platform.
• Media Services Live: In concert with Media Services Live, Ateme on Akamai Cloud handled live ingest, transcoding, packaging, and adaptive bitrate delivery for reliable and secure streaming.
• Object Storage: Stored static assets reliably and cost-effectively at global scale.
• App & API Protector: Secured applications and APIs against DDoS, bots, and application-layer attacks in real time.
• Image & Video Manager: Optimized images for faster load times and improved QoE.
• Edge DNS: Ensured fast, resilient name resolution especially during traffic spikes.
• TrafficPeak: Provided real-time observability into performance, user behavior, and piracy attempts.

Akamai also tailored bitrate ladders to match real-world conditions, delivering higher bitrates to fixed-line viewers on large screens, while optimizing streams for mobile users on bandwidth-constrained networks.

“We were operating on a really tight timeline, but Akamai quickly configured the entire setup,” said Shakya.

Live sports leave little room for error. Akamai’s teams worked side by side with DishHome throughout the tournament, proactively monitoring the entire delivery chain from ingest in Nepal to last-mile playback.

“Technology is only as good as the people behind it. Akamai’s experts became an extension of our digital engineering team,” Shakya said. “Any potential issue was resolved before it impacted viewers.”

The result: zero downtime across all 32 matches.

Security performed just as strongly. As Shakya underscored, “With events of this size, adversaries are always looking to take down the origin infrastructure. Akamai deployed enterprise-grade application security to protect against all known and unknown security threats in real time, absorbing those attacks before they could reach us.”

Akamai mitigated more than a million cyberattacks, including DDoS campaigns, bot traffic, and application-layer threats. Advanced content protection and session tracking helped stop more than 15 million piracy attempts in real time.

“Our entire stream was behind a paywall,” Shakya underscored. “Akamai’s security worked like an invisible digital cell, protecting us 24/7.”

The results exceeded expectations. “We grew our premium OTT reach by 200% year over year,” said Shakya. “We delivered all 32 matches quickly and reliably to over 3 million active users across 180 countries.”

DishHome served more than 3 billion views during the tournament, recorded over 700,000 app downloads in three weeks, and sustained historic traffic spikes of more than 7 billion hits — all without a single outage.

“This proved that Nepal’s digital ecosystem is ready for world-class live streaming,” Shakya said. “With the right partner, we can compete on a global stage.”

Paras Khadka, Secretary of the Cricket Association of Nepal, agreed. “With DishHome as our official OTT partner, the Nepal Premier League reached fans across Nepal and around the world. This partnership allows us to grow cricket sustainably while delivering a premium experience to fans everywhere.”

Beyond one tournament, the partnership laid the groundwork for DishHome’s long-term OTT ambitions. By consolidating its entire workflow onto Akamai, DishHome reduced complexity, improved cost efficiency, and gained the confidence to scale further.

“Instead of managing multiple vendors, we had one trusted partner,” Shakya said. “That efficiency is critical to our bottom line.”

He concluded: “Trust defines our partnership with Akamai. It delivered exactly what it promised — a scalable, secure, world-class platform that helped us elevate our brand with total confidence.”

Dish Media Network (DMN) Limited, known as DishHome, is one of Nepal’s fastest-growing broadcast and internet service providers. Founded in 2009 as the country’s first Direct-to-Home (DTH) television service provider, it now connects to more than 2 million households through satellite TV, Fibernet, cable TV (SIM TV), T2 TV, and IPTV (Prabhu Digital). An expansive network of 5,000+ dealers and service franchises service customers across the country. In 2020, DishHome launched its FTTH internet service, DishHome Fibernet, which now serves 300,000+ retail customers.