OTT viewing has boomed during this crazy year and as a result, content discovery and recommendation has never been more important. How are audiences finding TV shows and movies to watch? How do they access hidden gems or titles they might have missed? How are they made aware of both …

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 and developed …

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 country has …

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 broadcasters launch …

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 is such …

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 of RampRate …

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 and form …

During this episode of OTT Question Time (filmed on Thursday 20^th 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, film studios, …

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 of over …

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 OTT Question …