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.
Netflix’s technology and development budget has gone from $163m in 2010 to a whopping $1.83bn ten years later – an increase of over 1,000%. Certainly, large chunks of this increase can be apportioned to storage, content delivery and staff costs but what are they spending the rest of the money on? That’s the topic up for discussion at this week’s OTT Question Time on Thursday 21 October, 4pm UK. Together with Tom Williams, CEO of...
Designing OTT user interfaces and experiences for Smart TVs presents some unique challenges. Compared to smartphones and tablets, which can be deeply personal devices, television sets were – and increasingly are again – where families watch together. TV on a TV is watched from a distance rather than up close. Navigation and search are controlled via handheld remotes or voice. And there’s a whole lot more screen real estate to play with and fill. How do you...
At this week’s OTT Question Time (Thursday 30th Sept, 4pm UK) we talked about the supercharged growth of the children’s OTT market over the past few years. Absolutely, some of that expansion can be accounted for by more kids having been at home, for longer, during the pandemic but what’s just as interesting is the change in their viewing behaviours (by type of service and device preferences), the buying decisions of parents, and the knock-on...
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...
