On Sunday, 11 October 2026, at the Chamundeshwari temple atop Chamundi Hills, Abhinava Gavisiddeshwara Swamiji of the Gavi Mutt in Koppal offered flowers to the goddess during the auspicious Dhanur Lagna. That opened the 11-day Mysuru Dasara, Karnataka's Nada Habba. Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, ministers, legislators and hundreds of seers were there. Viewers in living rooms, newsrooms and phones around the world watched it live.
That feed came from us.
For the seventh year in a row, Fusion Minds is the official technology and live-streaming partner of Mysuru Dasara. This year is different in one important way. The system behind the broadcast is no longer an in-house rig that we rebuild every autumn. It is a product, called Strata, and Dasara 2026 is its public launch.
The brief hasn't changed in seven years
Dasara is one of the oldest continuously celebrated state festivals in the world, with royal patronage going back to 1610. You can't re-run its moments. The inauguration happens once, inside a fixed astrological window. The Jamboo Savari procession passes each point on its route once. If the stream drops, nobody gets that moment back.
So the brief has been the same every year. Every channel, every platform and every government page gets the same clean feed at the same moment, with no excuses.
Day one, by the numbers
- 25+ television channels took our uplink. The feed went directly into their own playout chains.
- 5+ simultaneous live streams went out to the major social platforms. They were cross-posted to the Chief Minister's official page and to other Government of Karnataka handles in real time.
- 15+ team members on the ground covered camera positions, vision mixing, encoding and uplink at the venue.
- 4+ engineers watched the platform live, from ingest to edge.
- Zero downtime. No dropped frames on the uplink, no stalled streams, and no "we'll be right back" slates.
By the end of the day, the Chief Minister's Office had sent us its appreciation for the coverage. After seven years, that still matters a great deal to us.
200% surge headroom, by design
Festival traffic doesn't grow gradually. It spikes. Thousands of people join in the same ten seconds when the lamp is lit, and again when the golden howdah comes into view. The usual fix is to over-provision servers and hope that's enough. That works until the day it doesn't, and it costs a lot every other day.
Strata absorbs up to 200% of planned peak load because of how it is built, not because we add servers on the day:
- Origin shielding with a tiered cache. Viewers almost never reach the origin. A surge is absorbed by edge and mid-tier caches that already have the segments.
- Encode once, package many. One contribution feed is transcoded into an adaptive bitrate ladder a single time. It is then packaged for HLS and DASH, for broadcast handoff and for every social destination. The work doesn't multiply with each new outlet.
- Redundant contribution paths. We run primary and backup uplinks over separate networks, and failover is automatic. A bad cable at the venue doesn't take the stream down.
- No single point of failure in fan-out. Each social and broadcast destination runs on its own. If one third-party platform has a bad minute, the other streams keep going.
We built all of this the hard way, over six Dasaras, before we gave it a name.
From festival rig to platform
Strata is the stack that ran Dasara, packaged for anyone who has to stream live video and can't afford to fail. It is available in two ways.
1. Strata Cloud (platform as a service). You send us a feed, and we handle the rest: transcoding, adaptive packaging, global cache distribution and multi-destination fan-out to broadcasters and social platforms. This is the same pipeline that served 25+ channels on day one.
2. Bring Your Own Server (BYOS). You run Strata on your own infrastructure, whether that's your data centre, your cloud account or a sovereign cloud. You keep full ownership of your hardware, your data and your audience. We supply the software, the architecture and the operating playbook. This suits broadcasters and government bodies with data-residency requirements, and OTT operators who already have capacity and need better software to run on it.
Built for the OTT models that are growing now
The economics of streaming have changed. Pure subscription is no longer the default, and the platforms that are growing tend to combine several revenue models. Strata is built to support them:
- FAST channels (free ad-supported streaming TV) are scheduled linear channels with server-side ad insertion, so ads are stitched into the stream and ad blockers can't remove them.
- Hybrid AVOD + SVOD tiers let you run free-with-ads and premium ad-free tiers from the same library and the same pipeline.
- Live event pay-per-view (TVOD) covers concerts, sports and cultural festivals, where a single night has to be right first time.
- Regional and vernacular OTT, the fastest-growing part of the Indian market, needs reliable delivery to tier-2 and tier-3 cities and their networks. Strata's bitrate ladder and edge strategy were tuned on exactly those viewers.
- Telco and broadband bundles (B2B2C) need white-label delivery with the reliability numbers telecom partners write into contracts.
- Simulcast to social means live on your own platform and on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and X at once. It is the reach model that Dasara has been proving for seven years.
What seven years taught us
Live streaming at state scale is mostly a discipline problem rather than a technology problem. You rehearse failover until it's boring. You don't trust any single network. You measure what reaches the viewer, not what leaves the encoder. And the system you run on the biggest day of the year should be the same one you ran on every quiet day before it.
Dasara 2026 is on until Vijayadashami, and we're streaming every day of it. If you run a broadcaster, an OTT platform or a public event that can't afford to go dark, talk to us. Strata is ready for your next live day.