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DishHome Delivered Nepal’s Biggest OTT Moment

Fast-growing OTT provider delivered reliable and secure sports streaming to global audiences

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“Akamai enabled us to deliver a global event with full confidence and without compromise, while paving the way for us to achieve our long-term OTT ambitions.”

Amit Shakya, Head of Broadcast & Communications Technology, DishHome

Bringing world-class streaming experience to a global Nepali audience

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.

High stakes behind Nepal’s fastest-growing sporting event

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.”

Scaling live sports across borders, devices, and bandwidths

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.”

Choosing a partner built for the world’s biggest moments

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.

Hosted, secured, and delivered an end-to-end OTT experience platform

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.

Zero downtime, zero tolerance for piracy

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.”

Results that redefined what’s possible in Nepal

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.”

A foundation for the future of Nepali sports streaming

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.”

You can hear a lot of noise in the background. As you can see, the second season of the Siddhartha Bank Nepal Premier League has been a phenomenal success. And when NPL comes live on DishHome GO, the excitement is double. The clear picture, the sound, the energy. So we needed a partner we could trust, a partner with the proven expertise in technology, platform, and people.

The world knows of Akamai as one of the pioneers in the content delivery network space. We then naturally pivoted into cloud infrastructure where our customers can not only deliver and secure, but also build on Akamai.

 

Our strategy was to minimize friction as much as possible in the tech stack we deployed. We deployed an end-to-end Akamai Cloud platform, which included transcoding, packaging, Live Origin, and content protection. They optimized images with Image Manager, and they secured our DNS and application through SDNS and App and API services. Integrating our application, content processing, security, to ensure DishHome GO had a single future-proof solution.

The app is hosted on Akamai, the data is stored on us. We became a one-stop shop. We successfully handled a record-breaking viewership of more than 3 billion views and a historic traffic spike of 7 billion hits. This is a first for any OTT platform in Nepal. Every time you put something behind a paywall, you can be absolutely sure that there are a whole bunch of malicious attackers who are trying to actually pirate the content.

And which is why you need a defense-in-depth security strategy. It ranges from a combination of media encryption to enhanced proxy detection to token revocation to DRM. So we had to use a combination of several different techniques. With Akamai security controls and also session tracking, we were able to mitigate more than 15 million piracy attempts, which is really amazing.


Along with these solutions, they also leverage our underlying observability platform because as attacks are happening, the ability to, you know, visualize and respond to them in real time. The definitive feature of our partnership with Akamai is trust, complete trust.

We experienced zero downtime across the entire tournament, and any potential issues were resolved before they impacted the user experience. This is testament to the robustness of DishHome and Akamai platform. When we look back in time, this would be a very pivotal moment where we delivered one of the largest sporting events in Nepal in such a short span of time whilst delivering a best-in-class experience.

They delivered exactly what they promised: a secure, scalable, and stable streaming solution that helped us broadcast a global event with full confidence and take the DishHome brand to the next level. We couldn't be more prouder of this story.

About Dish Media Network

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.

About Akamai

Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Our market-leading security solutions, superior threat intelligence, and global operations team provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications everywhere. Akamai’s full-stack cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world’s most distributed platform. Global enterprises trust Akamai to provide the industry-leading reliability, scale, and expertise they need to grow their business with confidence. Learn more at akamai.com and akamai.com/blog, or follow Akamai Technologies on X and LinkedIn.

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