OTT Question Time

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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? [...]

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, [...]

We’ve undoubtedly been living in a golden age of television. The number of original scripted series in the USA has more than doubled since 2010 (from 216 to 532 in 2019). The range of platforms we can watch on – both in terms of hardware (TVs, phones, tablets) [...]

Disney has played a long OTT game. Through the last decade, the company monetised established distribution channels and pay windows – cinema, DVD / TVOD / EST, SVOD, free-to-air – whilst continuing to make mass audience TV shows and movies. It acquired the Marvel and Star Wars universes [...]

Sweden – in common with its Scandinavian neighbours – has long led the OTT charge. SVT, the national broadcaster, launched its first VOD product, SVT Play, in 2007, HBO Nordic and Netflix have been active in the region since 2012, and Disney+ went live last month. Now, the [...]

All the world seems to be moving to a subscription model – music, editorial, books, gaming, groceries and now even coffee (with Pret a Manger), furniture (with John Lewis) and cycling (with Brompton Bikes). And, of course, TV and movies. But as more film studios, cable channels and [...]

As viewers increasingly shift from watching linear to OTT, piracy and content protection become ever more important topics of discussion for broadcasters, film studios, operators and service-providers. This isn’t just an “interesting” conversation – one industry vendor, for example, told us that “In some countries, the scale of piracy [...]

Tim Davie started his new job as Director General of the BBC last week and amongst the many items in his in-tray will be what to do next with the BBC iPlayer. That was the focus of this OTT Question Time too where, together with Gulliver Smithers, CTO [...]

At this week’s OTT Question Time (Thursday 3rd September, 4pm UK) we talked Part 2 of how to build an OTT service from scratch. In the previous session we focused on first principles, backend strategy, building for where the audience is and using data to help make decisions [...]

During this episode of OTT Question Time (filmed on Thursday 20th August 2020) we talked about how to build an OTT service from scratch. Sure, many of the biggest players already have suites of mature VOD products but the subject is still absolutely relevant for, amongst others, operators, [...]

Premium VOD isn’t exactly new (remember Tower Heist in 2011?) but this year’s lockdown may have accelerated a growing trend amongst film studios and content owners to test simultaneous cinema / OTT release or even go VOD-first. NBCUniversal’s Trolls World Tour, for example, has reportedly generated D2C sales [...]

VOD services all over the world are usually built using a toolkit of common features including content discovery and recommendation, personalisation tools (like recently watched, single sign-on and device synchronisation) and player controls (like live restart, forward ten seconds and subtitling / closed captions). In this episode of [...]