OTT Question Time

Over the past couple of years, and whilst the world has been in various shades of lockdown, film studios and distributors have ramped up the number of their titles available to watch via PVOD. Not without some reluctance. A PVOD-First strategy means potentially leaving a lot of money [...]

At this week’s OTT Question Time, Thursday 17 February, 4pm UK, we talked about the broadcasters, films studios and operators all over the world that have decided to launch their own stand-alone OTT services and go direct-to-consumer. These companies may already have dipped their toes in the water [...]

If you’ve ever had a Star Wars night on VCR, a Friends fest on DVD, or gotten lost in a Lost box set on Blu-ray, you’ll know that TV and movie binge-watching isn’t a new phenomenon. What’s different now is the wide availability of titles to binge on, [...]

If you're analysing the environmental impact of OTT streaming you can choose to jump down any number of rabbit holes. The most obvious one is how much online video is actually being watched by any given person over the course of, say, a year? And what does that [...]

When we talk about The Streaming Wars who do we think of as the major players? Amazon, Disney and Netflix, undoubtedly, but also, given its huge customer base and deep pockets, Apple TV+? And surely Sky too as a trusted, multi-territory brand with bags of experience? But outside [...]

Sky’s launch, last month, of Sky Glass – the company’s new Smart TV – was celebrated in both the trade and national press. For consumers, Sky Glass offered the chance to subscribe to Sky TV without the need for a satellite dish or a separate set-top box. For [...]

At this week’s OTT Question Time, Thursday 28 October, we went to Germany! Not literally, alas, but we discussed the country’s flourishing OTT landscape with a panel of resident experts: Ralph Wagner, CEO of Axinom, the independent media consultant, Anette Schaefer, and Stefan Blickensdörfer, CTO of 3SS. Together [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]