OTT Question Time

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. [...]

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 [...]