As one of the Middle East’s leading streaming platforms, STARZPLAY is redefining digital entertainment with seamless, high-quality viewing powered by Huawei Cloud. Faraz Arshad, CTO of STARZPLAY, explains how through this collaboration, STARZPLAY ensures scalability, low latency and uninterrupted experiences for millions of users – even during major live events – while continuing to innovate in the fast-evolving OTT landscape.
STARZPLAY, a leading OTT platform in the Middle East, offers VOD and live streaming to more than 3.2 million subscribers across 19 countries where viewers can enjoy premium sports, movies, TV shows and exclusive originals on a variety of devices.
To stay competitive in the dynamic global OTT market, STARZPLAY continues to innovate, driving growth through both subscriptions and advertising. By adopting a cloud-native approach, STARZPLAY achieves optimal scalability and low latency. This enables rapid scaling and load balancing, ensuring smooth and uninterrupted content delivery even during traffic spikes like popular sports games.
In the Middle East, STARZPLAY provides a seamless experience to its customers with the help of Huawei Cloud technology. By leveraging CCI, a serverless compute service, the entertainment provider was able to deploy and manage containerised applications without worrying about underlying infrastructure.
“Huawei Cloud provides us with highly innovative, reliable and scalable services,” said Pankaj Sharma, Director at STARZPLAY. “The ultra-fast scalability of Huawei Cloud CCI ensures smooth streaming of high-quality traffic during the World Cup, enabling us to effortlessly manage traffic spikes ranging from millions, to even billions, of requests. The serverless Digital Transformation has also improved our R&D and operational efficiency.”
At the HUAWEI CONNECT 2025 conference in Shanghai, Alix Pressley – our Director of Strategic Content, sat down with Faraz Arshad, CTO of STARZPLAY, who expanded on the collaboration with Huawei and how the partnership is central to providing an optimal experience to its customers.
How would you define your strategy for leading a team to success?
There are a couple of approaches I take when it comes to motivating the team and achieving success. Defining a clear vision in terms of what we aim to achieve, why we’re doing it and what’s driving us is a crucial starting point and key to understanding how to win.
Second is the operational execution in terms of the overarching vision. I work closely with the team to ensure they have the right architectures in place. I believe in motivating the team to help solve a problem rather than just having them follow instructions. This is one of the biggest contributing factors for generating results.
When these approaches align, the results happen as intended. Perhaps this is one of the reasons we have achieved so much success in the market – by having the right skills, the right resources within the team and offering continued support from the outset.
How do you stay competitive in a dynamic global OTT market whilst innovating and driving growth?
When it comes to innovating in this industry, you need to be at least six months ahead as an OTT and streaming platform. We have been able to innovate for our customers and deliver the kinds of features they’re looking for in our platform.
Those features could be engagement-related, acquisition-related, or focused on the overall life cycle for a customer when they’re watching something, or even the benefits we offer in addition to their plan. If a user is watching a live match, we ensure we provide them with the relevant statistics in real time.
One of the more innovative features we’re currently working on is enabling collaboration between users whilst watching and connecting with their demographic, to deliver a shared experience. We believe this offering will help us as a streaming provider achieve a high level of collaboration between our customers, allowing them to engage more seamlessly.
How do your strategic partnerships ensure you can meet the needs of your customers and continually reshape the digital entertainment landscape?
STARZPLAY works closely with our telco partners in the region, on both a strategic level and on a content syndication basis. When we have any interaction with our telco partners or any other partner, we must bring them up to speed about our payment methods.
The first thing to consider is the telco’s data carrier billing process (DCB) and whether our customers can use that particular method to pay us. We then work with them on other initiatives and consider how we can syndicate our content with their offering and vice versa. We also think about how we can merge or synergise together to offer diversification on a content basis to suit customer requirements.
We also look at engaging on some big initiatives where we give some of our edge computes to their data centre for running localised caching and streaming experiences. This ensures our services are localised and avoids an international bandwidth approach – ultimately delivering a better user experience.
This is how we work with our partners both strategically as well as on a day-to-day basis so that we can achieve and synergise more efficiently.
How do Huawei’s cloud solutions support with scaling, load balancing and the simplification of operations?
With Huawei, it has been a very transformational journey. We initially started using its solutions for content delivery network CDNs, where we knew it could scale better than anyone else.
We began seeing the benefits of using Huawei Cloud CDN and shifted towards other angles where we considered using Huawei compute, databases and media services to process our content.
One thing you’ll always find with Huawei is that with every service it offers, there’s some AI influence or AI evolution incorporated, which makes Huawei a few steps ahead of the market – whatever learnings one can achieve on an individual basis, you have all of those put together as a package for users like ourselves to transfer and adopt.
How central is the support of Huawei for ensuring end-user satisfaction and optimal experience?
Huawei’s support has always been phenomenal – it has been working with us on a 24/7 basis. Having that kind of proactivity and assurance that your workloads are running fine, your services are up, there are no customer issues while they’re accessing your platform; that provided us with the level of confidence we were looking for initially.
And the best part is, it’s continuing; it doesn’t stop after the initial onboarding phase. We still have the same kind of relationship when it comes to support and the same kind of protocols between both teams where we’re confident that if or when an issue occurs, Huawei is on hand to assist.
Watch the interview here.
