OTT Question Time #37 – The TV & AVOD Advertising Recovery
Following the huge upheaval in the television and OTT advertising market last year, broadcasters and AVOD service-providers are now cautiously optimistic about the prospects for recovery and growth. ITV, for example, reported that its total ad revenue was down 11% in 2020 despite a 17% rise in VOD [...]
OTT Question Time #36 — Industry Mega-Mergers
Consolidation isn’t new in the OTT industry – think AT&T and Time Warner (2018) or Comcast and Sky (also 2018) – but the last couple of weeks has seen a flurry of activity including the AT&T / Discovery deal, the acquisition of MGM by Amazon and the coming [...]
The Future of Streaming Technologies: The Next 5 Years
If not quite as riveting as the latest Netflix blockbuster, the evolution of OTT products – and related technologies – has been a fascinating watch. Over the past 15 years, we’ve seen broadcasters launch their own on-demand services, join forces to form aggregators like Hulu and BritBox and, more [...]
OTT Question Time #35 – How Young People View OTT
Whatever date we choose – 2005 when YouTube went live, Christmas Day 2007 when the BBC iPlayer launched, or even 2004 and my own first experience of on-demand video via a classic Homechoice set-top box – it’s safe to say that VOD was born into a linear world. [...]
50 VOD Professionals 2021 – Nominations Now Open!
50 VOD Professionals – our list of the 50 most influential people working in the UK’s video-on-demand and OTT industry – is back! Nominations are now open and we’d like to hear from you about the brilliant people that you work with: the designers who imagine your new [...]
OTT Question Time #34 – Metadata 101
Whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, metadata makes the OTT world go round. Technical metadata powers the distribution of video files, integrates them with asset management systems, enforces digital rights and renders them perfectly on viewer’s screens. Editorial metadata, on the other hand, makes content discoverable [...]
A Model for Monetising Your Digital Content Catalogue
Kasia Jablonska has been working in the digital entertainment sector for over 20 years now and her focus has largely been around selling content across multiple channels using a range of different business models. I caught up with her a couple of weeks ago and in this video [...]
OTT Question Time #33 – The Build vs. Buy Debate
Whilst many of the first OTT services (circa 2006/7) were built in-house, with existing staff and perhaps using repurposed broadcast systems, by the third VOD product development cycle (around 2012), broadcasters and streaming providers seemed to have shifted to deploying external vendor solutions. This was especially true of [...]
Digital Transformation for Live Performance
The forced closure of performing arts venues due to the pandemic over the last year has been a catalyst for accelerated digital transformation. Ostmodern is hosting a special webinar at 10am (UK) on Wednesday 5th May 2021 - which I'm moderating - to delve into exactly what that's [...]
OTT Question Time #32 – Football & OTT
In the OTT world, content is king and one of the most popular content types of all is football. Best enjoyed live, football transcends pay models and is watched via AVOD, SVOD and TVOD (pay-per-view). It crosses national and international boundaries in terms of where the fans are. [...]
OTT Question Time #31 – Talking about AI & OTT
From personalised content recommendation to addressable advertising, predicting customers who are about to churn to routing video traffic through the most efficient networks, use cases for AI in the OTT industry are on the rise; affecting both front and backends. It’s a fascinating subject and one that we [...]
OTT Question Time #30: Talking about Live-to-VOD
For me, live-to-VOD is the real-time embodiment of the “glass to glass process”: getting content from the camera where the footage is being filmed to the end-user’s viewing device. But the elegance and simplicity of that proposition masks an underlying world of complexity. During this session of OTT [...]
Interviewing Daniel Nordberg of Playground TV
Even before the pandemic hit, and new educational content was created by broadcasters all over the world to help children keep learning while in lockdown at home, kid’s OTT was going places. In 2019, Disney had three animated features – Frozen 2, The Lion King and Toy Story [...]
OTT Question Time #29 – Talking about Netflix
At this week’s OTT Question Time – and after only 28 episodes! – wee finally hosted a session dedicated to talking about Netflix. Is there anything left to say about the streaming giant? Sure there is. We started with a quick history of Netflix’s origins as a DVD-based [...]
OTT Question Time #28 – Taking Payments for Your OTT Service
I’ve been working on a client project this year for a European broadcaster and part of the job has been to figure out how to take payments for their new SVOD service. Should they go direct and perhaps set up accounts with companies like Recurly and Stripe? Maybe [...]
OTT Question Time #27 – India OTT Special
At this week’s OTT Question Time (Thursday 28th January, 4pm UK) we talked about the VOD landscape in India which, according to PWC’s latest Entertainment & Media Outlook, is the world’s fastest growing OTT market. Indeed, with a population of 1.37bn and 40+ major OTT services already in [...]
OTT Question Time #26 – OTT Predictions for 2021
At OTT Question Time this week (Thursday 14 January, 4pm UK), we rang in 2021 with some industry predictions for the year ahead. Together with renowned analysts Allan McLennan of PADEM Media Group, Maria Rua Aguete of OMDIA, Simon Murray of Digital TV Research and Tony Maroulis of [...]
OTT Question Time #25 – Review of the OTT Year
What would 2020 have been like for the OTT industry if there had never been a pandemic? In many ways it might have been business as usual: VOD viewing – compared to linear – would have gently increased along with addressability and AVOD revenues. Disney+ and Peacock would [...]
OTT Question Time #24 – An Introduction to OTT Analytics
How do you know how many people have watched a title on your OTT service? How do you know how much of the show they watched? Whether they switched off after six minutes or enjoyed it so much that they immediately binged through the rest of the season? [...]
OTT Question Time #23 – Addressable Advertising
It’s been nearly two months since ITV launched its new addressable advertising platform, Planet V, and at this week’s OTT Question Time (Thursday 26 Nov) one of the architects of the service, Rhys McLachlan, joined our panel. Together with Leon Siotis, President EMEA of SpotX and John Tigg, [...]