Avinash Kumar developed subtitle know-how, lowering reminiscence utilization by 80% for India’s cell viewers
Over 70% of India’s OTT content material is consumed on smartphones, in response to 2025 trade knowledge. This mobile-first consumption sample creates distinctive engineering challenges – significantly on the subject of subtitle processing. Whereas flagship gadgets deal with video options seamlessly, price range smartphones with 2GB RAM and restricted processing energy wrestle with normal subtitle implementations that load total caption information into reminiscence.
Avinash Kumar, a software program engineer at present at Google with expertise at Amazon and Microsoft, encountered this actual drawback at Amazon Prime Video. Commonplace subtitle techniques labored wonderful on premium gadgets however prompted crashes and stuttering on the price range telephones representing many of the market. Customers watching deal movies would expertise app failures each time subtitles have been activated.
Kumar created an answer that modified how subtitles from reside streaming could possibly be reused. The patent addressed take subtitle information from reside streaming, which have been enormous in dimension, scale back them considerably, and reuse them in just-after-broadcast video recordings of reside occasions. In consequence, video reminiscence necessities dropped 30-80% whereas preserving a straightforward job of synchronising the subtitles to their video, on account of incoming bytes.
“Creating techniques for constrained gadgets means rethinking the structure from first ideas,” Kumar says. “The purpose is to not restrict accessibility based mostly on {hardware} specs.”
An adaptive buffer technique can modify useful resource allocation dynamically based mostly on {hardware} specs—how a lot processing energy is on the market will decide how a lot useful resource allocation—in order that it retains captions lined up whereas utilizing restricted compute energy for tens of millions of customers on entry-level good telephones.
Prime Video can serve customers throughout varied financial segments and requires compatibility with any and all {hardware} specs. As well as, if ever carried out, Kumar’s answer would enable the expertise of subtitles no matter {hardware} specs, which might enable extended use and lifetime of older know-how all over the world.
Whereas at Microsoft, Kumar improved Workplace 365 observability infrastructure so that point to diagnose points dropped from days to minutes with monitoring techniques that surfaced significant indicators from giant volumes of information. He’s now at Google, main Terraform consumer library efforts, accelerating the help of Google Cloud Platform sources. Automation he developed decreased deployment processes from weeks to completion, benefiting hundreds of enterprise prospects by lowering configuration errors.
At Amazon, Kumar confronted scale issues of a unique magnitude. He re-architected cargo technology techniques, processing excessive volumes of cargo transactions and eliminating bottlenecks that threatened buyer fulfilment guarantees. The info move structure was rethought to keep away from dropping knowledge integrity underneath this excessive load. Kumar’s work on Prime Video’s reside streaming backend yielded a patent for improvements in processing that enhanced tens of millions of viewer experiences.
Along with offering particular person technical contributions, Kumar has a daily behavior of offering inside shows and demos that concentrate on advanced issues that groups have beforehand solved. These touchpoints share specific profitable approaches to element and handle pitfalls widespread throughout the engineering group, permitting different engineers to profit from these confirmed approaches with out repeating the identical implementation errors. Offering knowledge-sharing venues to groups and organisations is a multiplier that extends the consequences of wonderful work additional and wider to different engineers of their organisations.
Kumar’s tutorial background features a Bachelor of Engineering in Info Expertise from BIT Mesra, India. Kumar is a senior member of IEEE and in addition a member of AITEX. In October 2025, Kumar served as a jury member for the CASES&FACES award, evaluating and deciding on individuals within the know-how competitors. His experience in software program engineering and infrastructure design positioned him to evaluate technical innovation and implementation high quality throughout submitted initiatives. Early successes competing by way of aggressive totally different aggressive programming engagements embrace ending third prize in Google’s On-line Advertising and marketing Problem Social Impression Award and putting within the high 500 within the Fb Hacker Cup 2013, each of that are world competitions and had hundreds of people take part.
Kumar helps instructional initiatives in his house nation of India targeted on kids’s studying pathways {and professional} improvement alternatives, and this illustrates a dedication past the company career. Future plans deal with creating a product collaboratively with people locally whereas utilizing an engineering automobile to unravel sensible issues and serve the bigger group. Engineering can advance enterprise outcomes and produce substantial change by wrapping your technical abilities with social influence.
Processing subtitled video for low reminiscence gadgets is a superb instance of considerate engineering that enables entry to tens of millions. Digital infrastructure that anticipates real-world problem-solving quite than perfect circumstances, is the essence of inclusive tech. Kumar has been constant in his work between CouponDunia, Amazon, Microsoft and Google: establish the constraint, re-think the structure of a system, and set about designing techniques for all customers, not simply customers with the most recent system.
India’s OTT video market is projected to exceed $4.49 billion by 2025, with cell gadgets making up the overwhelming majority of viewership. Engineers that remedy for constraint quite than abundance allow this progress, and in the end facilitate the entry to video after they design and construct a video consumption expertise for all the spectrum of gadgets which can be accessible throughout totally different markets.
