With market traction fueling new growth opportunities in India and beyond, Firstlight Media announced that Navdeep Singh Aswal has joined the company as Head of Sales, India and MENA.

Aswal, who has helped Tier 1 operators and media companies select and deploy OTT platforms for more than 15 years, will build on Firstlight Media’s initial successes in the Indian market. India’s aha entertainment service has leveraged the efficiency and rapid time to market of Firstlight Media’s breakthrough cloud-native platform as the foundation of its ambitious “glocal” strategy, beginning with the aha 2.0 Telugu language service launch in Q4 2021 and a new Tamil language service that began serving customers in Q1 2022, using the same back end.

“aha’s original infrastructure couldn’t provide the scale they needed, so they turned to our cloud-native platform to achieve rapid time to launch in multiple markets and languages,” said Chris Drake, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Revenue for Firstlight Media.  “As aha’s success continues to generate increased interest in the power of the cloud, Navdeep  will work closely with prospective customers to create collaborative, innovative, winning solutions that leverage Firstlight Media’s revolutionary architecture.”

“OTT’s need to go all-in on the cloud to create truly differentiated video experiences is compounded in India by the need for language customisation, UX alignment, on-boarding, multiple digital payment systems, and other features to address the country’s diversity of cultures, content and languages,” said Aswal. “The Firstlight Media platform’s scalability, agility, extensibility, and unequaled performance already are powering fresh new services like aha 2.0 – a truly global platform which fully understands the regional complexity of the Indian market and consumers.”

Most recently Aswal had been Director of Sales, and Business Development – APAC for Accedo.tv, working closely with Tata Sky, Discovery Plus, Airtel, SonyLiv and other Tier 1 providers. Previously he had led acquisition and partnerships for Digivive Services’ NexGTv, one of India’s first OTT services.  He also has held sales positions with Onmobile Global, Mahindra Comviva, Spice Digital, and other innovators.

Firstlight Media’s platform is designed to build and run scalable applications in the cloud using cloud-native technologies, including containers, microservices, a service mesh, APIs, and immutable infrastructure. The OTT technology stack provides significantly better performance, a modular approach for feature expansion, continuous delivery for rapid iteration, and built-in scalability, observability and security. Forward-looking OTT providers such as aha, PLDT’s Smart, Rogers Sports & Media’s Sportsnet, Struum, and others are using the Firstlight Media platform to deliver services with the flexibility and the agility of the cloud, while equaling or exceeding the reliability and high performance of broadcast.