Reporting from the Future of Television
I’ve been working in OTT for over 15 years and started VOD Professional in 2011 with the aim of understanding how to build brilliant online video services. I conduct research and analysis, write reports and whitepapers, and help bring clients and vendors together. Catch me on our weekly debate show, OTT Question Time, or join our mailing list to get notifications about our publications, events and best practice webinars.
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I stream and write about broadcasters, film studios, operators, service-providers and technology vendors: OTT products, solutions and strategies.
It’s sounds like the start of a riddle: what part of OTT UIs do you most use but hardly ever notice? Answer: online video players! Online video players have a gossamer quality about them in that they’re both visible and not. They’re the main way – the only way – that viewers can watch content but at the same time we don’t really see them unless we’re forwarding or rewinding or they’re not working properly....
A CMS – a content management system – does exactly what it says on the tin, right? It’s a system for managing content. But when it comes to streaming services, and looking at how content interfaces with both their back and front-ends, what is the scope of an OTT CMS? Does it manage, for example, the process by which video files are ingested and transcoded? What about then adding images and other metadata to those...
One of the best things about linear TV is the sense of a shared experience – of watching, for example, an international football tournament with family or friends and then celebrating (or in England’s case, commiserating!) together. Of tuning in to a worldwide event like the finale of Game of Thrones and dissecting it afterwards, or looking forward to the start of a new season of Love Island in the expectation of intrigue and scandal....
Despite the resilience and stability of the infrastructure, the defined quality of the output, the guaranteed geographical coverage for audiences, and the decades of client and supply chain experience built up in the process, there was always going to come a time when it became cheaper to deliver content via IP rather than broadcast. Has that threshold been reached yet? That was the subject of this week’s OTT Question Time (Thursday 15th July, 4pm UK)....
If you’ve ever found yourself confused about content rights, you’re not alone. I’ve been working in OTT since 2005 and I still don’t really understand why, for example, the Tom Holland Spiderman movies aren’t on Disney+ (Disney owns Marvel, right?), why I can’t find the 2019 season of Masterchef UK, first aired on the BBC, to watch on any platform (AVOD / SVOD / TVOD) or why Usain Bolt’s 100m from the Beijing Olympics is...
