Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of ecommerce giant Amazon, plans to make inroads into the over-the-top (OTT) content providers market in India with their data analytics and artificial intelligence platform. Speaking to ET, Bikram Bedi, the head of India region, Amazon Web Services said that globally, and here, media & entertainment has been a huge focus for the company. They work with OTT platforms or linear TV platforms like Hotstar, Voot (from Viacom18), Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sony, Zee TV, NDTV.com, The company's service called Midas from Elemental allows customers to monetise video offerings. Amazon Web Services will help OTT, media and entertainment players in the entire media life-chain right from downloading content to delivering it to customers. "So around analytics on video, we've launched a platform called Rekognition, which allows you to take video streams, store them in S3, and then analyse.

Difficult times for operators call for questioning old orthodoxies to win. For the better part of a decade, telecom companies have suffered through declining revenues, cash flow, and return on investment just as tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others have mushroomed by building their businesses on the operators' own infrastructure. While these tech visionaries have enjoyed well over $1 trillion in combined market-cap growth by innovating and thinking differently and adeptly, telecom companies have tried to compete by implementing the same old survival tactics: cutting costs, reducing the workforce, and timidly entering into new business adjacencies. The trouble is that playbook no longer applies. It's time the telecom companies embrace this new reality and rethink the key orthodoxies that have shaped their industry since the first phone call was made about 140 years ago. If not, the alternative is dire.