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 …

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 together of …

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 recently, split …

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. For older …

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 user interfaces, …

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 in VOD …

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 interview, she …

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 automated processes …

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 meant, and …

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. And as …