Amagi Media Labs: The Startup That Changed the Way the World Streams TV

Every business story begins with an idea. Some fade quietly, while others take root and change the way industries operate. 

Amagi belongs to the latter.

What started in 2008 as an idea in the minds of Baskar Subramanian, Srividhya Srinivasan, and Srinivasan KA, is now a global media technology company. 

Their brainchild has reimagined the way modern-day television and streaming work.

How? Gone are the days of reliance on heavy infrastructure to deliver content. 

Amagi uses the cloud to give broadcasters and platforms more freedom and control. It has heralded a silent revolution, built at a time when the media industry was uncertain about its future.

At the heart of this journey is Baskar Subramanian, whose approach towards technology shaped the way he did business and solved problems. Alongside his co-founders, he built not just a company but a new way of delivering content to millions of viewers across the world.

This is the story of Amagi’s rise, its milestones and obstacles, and the determination of its founders to keep moving forward. Read on.

What Is Amagi?

Simply put, Amagi is a media technology company that runs on the cloud. 

It helps TV networks, streaming platforms, and content owners manage live and on-demand video without relying on heavy hardware. 

In Sumerian, Amagi means freedom. As such, the name Amagi is the perfect fit for a company that wanted to empower local advertisers with the freedom to do more with less. 

The company specializes in building 24/7 broadcast channels, distributing them to Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV (FAST) platforms, handling live sports and news, inserting ads on streaming services, and providing analytics to track revenue. 

It also supports disaster recovery, making broadcasting more reliable and cost-effective.

Amagi works with major broadcasters, digital-first networks, and streaming services across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. 

Over the last two years, the company has doubled in size and turned profitable. It has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Toronto, London, Paris, Lodz, Zagreb, Sydney, Seoul, Singapore, with operations in New Delhi and an innovation hub in Bangalore. 

Their team is 850-people strong and growing.

The company’s long-term plan is to make broadcasting fully cloud-based, as it believes the flexibility of cloud systems is stronger than traditional hardware setups. Also, the company aims to be the global leader in SaaS technology for TV and streaming.

So far, Amagi has become a key player in the shift toward streaming. Long before FAST platforms took off, the company was already helping content brands set up linear channels quickly, distribute them, and earn revenue through ads.

Today, more than 300 content distributors work with Amagi to expand their reach on FAST. The company’s immediate emphasis is on building the most comprehensive technology stack for streaming distribution. 

Understandably, Amagi also wants to strengthen its position as a leader in the FAST space.

Over the years, Amagi has grown into one of India’s biggest success stories, crossing $100 million in annual recurring revenue. 

Once a simple cloud-based broadcast solution, it has now reached global scale with major deals signed with companies like NBC and Comcast. And with an IPO being announced recently, there’s going to be no looking back!

“We are looking at an IPO pretty soon... somewhere in the next couple of years, given, I think, we are pretty profitable as a company. To give you context, from half a million dollars in 2016, we are at about $150 million right now,”

Baskar Subramanian speaking at the 15th edition of TechSparks Bengaluru 2024

The Powerhouse Behind the Mission

Baskar Subramanian grew up in Coimbatore. 

His beginnings were simple, but his outlook towards the world was not. Being left-handed and dyslexic shaped the way he learned things. 

He realized that traditional methods often worked against him, but computers didn’t. 

To him, the logic of machines made sense in ways classrooms sometimes didn’t, and this early connection pulled him towards technology.

The spark stayed with him through his career. Together with Srividhya Srinivasan and Srinivasan KA, Baskar built Impulsesoft, a company specializing in Bluetooth audio solutions. 

The startup was acquired by SiRF Technology in 2006, giving the trio both confidence and capital. But they weren’t done. They wanted their next venture to solve a bigger problem.

They turned their attention to television. Despite being a mass medium, TV advertising in India was lackluster. The same ads played across the country, ignoring differences in language, culture, and consumer behavior. 

National brands spent heavily, but regional brands were locked out. It was wasteful for advertisers and a missed opportunity for broadcasters.

The three founders saw a gap; and a chance. In 2008, they launched Amagi, starting with geo-targeted advertising. 

The idea was simple but powerful: show different ads in different regions, all on the same national feed. It gave regional businesses a seat at the table and helped broadcasters open new revenue streams.

“When we launched geo-targeted ads, we weren’t just offering tech—we were redefining TV’s value proposition for regional advertisers,” recalled Srividhya Srinivasan.

This laid the foundation for what Amagi would become. As audiences shifted from cable to streaming, the company pivoted. It grew into a cloud-native platform, offering tools for content creation, playout, distribution, and monetization.

And throughout, Baskar’s early challenges and the trio’s belief in timing and innovation helped Amagi stay ahead of the curve. They were focused on their vision to make media more accessible, more flexible, and more relevant for everyone.

Early Challenges: Changes in the Course for Amagi

“We wanted to be in the media business as we thought that media business was exciting. We started with the whole assumption that we would actually build something out of India, more for emotional reasons. We wanted to build a targeted advertising infrastructure, but one thing that we saw was that India or even the world was not ready for IP-driven targeted ads. At the time, very few companies or even very few consumers were consuming content through IP networks.”

Baskar Subramanian

Amagi’s early years were defined by both promise and pushback. 

The company launched in 2008 with geo-targeted advertising for television. The idea behind this was to allow two people in different cities to watch the same channel, but see different ads. It caught on quickly, and by 2010 the service was live and growing.

But the model had its limits. Most of India’s ad inventory was controlled by four large broadcasters, who together owned more than 80 percent of the market. 

Amagi’s growth depended on them, leaving the company with little control over pricing or strategy. The founders could see they were boxed in.

At the same time, they were trying to push an idea that many in the industry considered radical: moving broadcast operations to the cloud. 

For decades, the business had been tied to heavy hardware, satellite feeds, and capital-intensive systems. The thought of running something as critical as television playout or ad insertion on software felt risky, even reckless, to most broadcasters.

Additionally, the fact that Amagi was not a known global name did not make things easier. It was a startup from Bengaluru trying to break into a market dominated by Western incumbents.

“Convincing clients that the cloud could be just as reliable—if not more—than satellite or fiber was our biggest challenge in the early years,” recalled Baskar Subramanian.

To remove the skepticism, Amagi introduced hybrid models and pilot projects. 

Instead of asking broadcasters to abandon legacy infrastructure overnight, they created small, testable use cases, such as regional content insertion, dynamic ad replacement, and cloud-based channel playout. 

These delivered clear value without major risk. It was a way of proving their reliability, one step at a time.

The transition wasn’t easy, though. Shutting down the India advertising business in 2016 and pivoting to a fully international, cloud-native model was a gamble. But it freed the company from dependence on local broadcasters and put it in front of a global shift.

Slowly, the gamble started to pay off. Amagi’s tools didn’t just match traditional systems; they outperformed them in flexibility, speed, and cost. Broadcasters who once dismissed cloud as an experiment began to see it as the future.

So, there it was! Amagi, a risky idea in an industry tied to hardware, was becoming the very foundation of its next chapter. And Amagi, with its persistence and early conviction, was ready to lead that change.

The B2B Factor

By 2021, Amagi’s customer base had grown by nearly 60 percent, with operations in more than 40 countries. 

Surprisingly, the COVID pandemic played a part in this. As people streamed more content, broadcasters and platforms were forced to adapt quickly. Basically, what might have taken four years happened in less than two.

Other industries like banking and retail had already moved to cloud-based models. It was only a matter of time before the media sector made this move, and it did. 

Suddenly, long-standing aspirations in broadcasting, such as disaster recovery, flexibility, and sustainability, became necessities. For Amagi, these shifts validated years of hard work.

This was also the moment B2B came into focus. 

For years, investor attention in India leaned toward B2C startups. But SaaS changed the equation. A company could now build from anywhere and serve customers everywhere.

Baskar saw it clearly: media had always been capital-heavy, tied to expensive hardware. SaaS changed this. Instead of large upfront costs, broadcasters could pay monthly, starting small and scaling up. What looked modest at the beginning could grow quickly, creating value for the customer and the company.

It was a slower, steadier path compared to chasing consumer markets, but it was built to last. And it positioned Amagi not as a local player, but a global one.

Let It Grow, Let It Grow

Amagi’s growth in media technology didn’t happen by chance. It came from bold decisions made at the right time. One of the biggest was its early bet on the FAST model, which was just starting to reshape content delivery.

FAST gave creators the chance to launch channels without the cost and complexity of traditional broadcasting. This helped them monetize older libraries and reach niche audiences on connected TVs (CTV).

Amagi saw their big break in this opportunity and grabbed it. They decided to build a cloud-first platform that did it all: playout, ad insertion, monetization, and analytics. 

They worked on eliminating technical barriers, making scaling easier. Their platform also enabled broadcasters to smoothly transition from hardware to software-driven systems.

Partnerships added fuel to the momentum. Global ad tech companies like The Trade Desk empowered Amagi to build seamless pipelines for programmatic ads on CTV. 

The result was better targeting, stronger ad operations, and higher returns for content owners as well as advertisers.

“We wanted to build a scalable platform that enabled the entire broadcast value chain to go digital — from creation to monetization,” said Srinivasan KA.

The company’s rise hit a milestone in 2022 when it became a unicorn, raising $95 million in a round led by Accel with Norwest Venture Partners and Avataar Ventures. 

This was followed by more success as Amagi raised $109 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion in the same year. They secured $80 million in primary capital from global growth equity firm General Atlantic, and the rest through secondary stake sales.

With these accomplishments, Amagi gathered the funds they needed to expand globally, increase investment in R&D, and partake in shaping the future of streaming.

As of July 2025, Amagi Media Labs Ltd. filed its Draft Red Herring Prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Board of India. The proposed IPO includes equity shares aggregating up to Rs 1,020 crore. Moreover, there’s an offer for sale of up to 3.41 crore equity shares by existing shareholders.

Good Marketing Always Clicks

“B2B marketing isn’t just about visibility—it’s about credibility. We focused on building authority through education.”

Srividhya Srinivasan, Co-founder, Amagi

Marketing has been a quiet but powerful engine behind Amagi’s global rise. The company realized that merely gaining visibility without a clear purpose would be futile. 

They knew their marketing needed to highlight their thought leadership. Accordingly, publishing whitepapers, case studies, industry reports, and customer stories became a huge part of their marketing efforts.

Over time, Amagi positioned itself as a reliable solutions provider, as well as a category creator and trusted partner in cloud-based broadcast technology. 

In fact, their content-first approach was further applied across multiple channels, be it SEO-driven blogs, LinkedIn campaigns, webinars, and roundtables. The final aim was to ensure that Amagi reached the right audience at the right time.

Amagi’s marketing initiatives resulted in more awareness and built credibility, while progressively moving high-intent prospects through the funnel.

Amagi began to track the impact of their efforts across the customer journey by using data and attribution models. 

Using the right CRM integrations and analytics helped them identify the campaigns that worked best and optimized acquisition costs, while leveraging platforms that produced the highest ROI.

Active participation in industry-focused conferences like NAB Show, IBC, and Streaming Media West also paid off. It enabled the company to directly network with potential clients, partners, and media, further strengthening Amagi’s position in the broadcast cloud technology arena.

 Key Takeaways from Amagi’s Journey

Amagi’s transformation from a small Indian startup to a global leader in media technology is a masterclass for entrepreneurs everywhere. Beyond broadcasting, its story shows what it really takes to scale an idea into something that lasts.

Innovate to Solve Real Problems

Amagi started with a clear insight: broadcast advertising lacked flexibility. National campaigns left little room for local relevance, and regional targeting was too costly. 

By introducing geo-targeted ads on national TV, Amagi gave brands an affordable way to run local campaigns at scale.

The result was lower costs, higher impact, and quick adoption. This proved that the strongest ideas come from solving unmet needs rather than creating hyped-up products.

As Baskar Subramanian rightly said: “We saw a need for more agility and control in broadcast advertising—and that’s where Amagi’s journey began.”

Bet Boldly on Disruption

Moving broadcast operations to the cloud was a radical move when hardware ruled the industry. Many thought it was too risky. Amagi’s founders, however, realized that the cloud would unlock efficiency, scale, and speed. The lesson here is that true leadership means betting ahead of the curve and backing it with persistence.

Build for Scale from the Start

Amagi’s SaaS model wasn’t designed just for current needs; it was built to scale across markets. The founders’ foresight allowed it to serve more than 650 content brands in over 40 countries. For entrepreneurs, the message is simple: scalability shouldn’t come later, but must be ingrained in the business strategy from day one.

Partnerships Multiply Growth

Amagi grew faster by partnering with ad tech firms like The Trade Desk and TV makers who helped extend its reach. These alliances weren’t just limited to distribution. They created win-win ecosystems where everyone benefited. Startups should remember: the right partners help you move further, faster.

Lead with Ideas, Not Just Products

Amagi built trust not only through technology, but also through thought leadership. Whitepapers, webinars, and reports educated clients while positioning the company as a voice of authority in cloud broadcasting and FAST monetization. Teaching proved more powerful than selling, building lasting credibility.

Wrapping Up

Baskar Subramanian’s journey from a small-town boy in Coimbatore to leading a multi-million-dollar company tells us of just how far persistence and resilience can take us. 

Having found his calling in computers early on, Baskar took each challenge head-on and turned it into strength. Along with his co-founders, he built Amagi Media Labs into a global company that eventually changed the way the world perceived media technology.

Foresight, innovation, and customer focus are the three pillars that have supported Amagi’s success story. 

From launching geo-targeted TV ads to betting early on cloud-native broadcasting and FAST channels, the company has consistently stayed ahead of industry shifts with scalable solutions. Its growth also underscores the power of strategic partnerships and thought leadership in building credibility and reach.

More than business success, Amagi’s story proves that bold ideas can emerge and flourish anywhere. Moving forward, Amagi is all set to become the world’s leading media technology player.