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...

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....

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...

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 advertising. The company is now “seeing more positive trends”. EMarketer estimates that Hulu’s ad revenues will hit $3bn in 2021, up 31% on 2020. And GroupM has...