At the Streaming Media West show, taking place Nov. 19-20 in Huntington Beach, encoding guru Jan Ozer will discuss factors to consider when choosing an on-demand enterprise video encoding systems from the likes of Digital Rapids, Elemental, Harmonic, Sorenson, and Telestream. Factors incorporated into the analysis will include performance, output quality, quality control options, format support, expansion options, programmability, and other variables. If you’re considering buying an enterprise encoder or upgrading your current systems, you’ll find this session particularly useful.

It’s not too late to get a pass to the show and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DR13, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $595 and gives you access to 40 sessions and how-to presentations and 100+ speakers. You can also register for an exhibits only pass and get access to the show floor, both keynotes and all the networking events, at no charge. #smwest

The BBC iPlayer is the largest VOD service in the UK, with 6 million users every month. Last year it served 36.5 billion minutes of content and supports over 600 different devices from IPTVs to mobile phones and games consoles. At the Streaming Media West show, taking place Nov. 19-20 in Huntington Beach, Stephen Godwin, Senior Technical Architect at the BBC, will detail how the BBC moved their live and on demand transcoding workflow to the cloud and highlights the performance and flexibility benefits they got in return. Learn how the BBC integrated cloud-based systems with its broadcast infrastructure to build a resilient video solution.

It’s not too late to get a pass to the show and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DR13, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $595 and gives you access to 40 sessions and how-to presentations and 100+ speakers. You can also register for an exhibits only pass and get access to the show floor, both keynotes and all the networking events, at no charge. #smwest

At the Streaming Media West show, taking place Nov. 19-20 in Huntington Beach, Caleb Silver, Director of Business News at CNN will explain how the path to live video streaming dominance is a dense thicket of old consumer habits, resilient technology and billions of dollars in traditional advertising that need to be re-routed towards a new experience. His presentation will examine the trends and differences in consumer consumption of live streaming media versus broadcast and where are they coming together in ways that are working for the audience, the content companies, and their advertisers. Learn what the competitive landscape looks like for streaming mass media and who is winning.

It’s not too late to get a pass to the show and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DR13, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $595 and gives you access to 40 sessions and how-to presentations and 100+ speakers. You can also register for an exhibits only pass and get access to the show floor, both keynotes and all the networking events, at no charge. #smwest

I’m pleased to announce that Dan Ackerman, Senior Vice President of programmatic TV for video technology provider Adap.tv, will kick off our annual Streaming Media West Conference and Exhibition, taking place November 19-20 at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa, in Huntington Beach, California. Attendance to the keynote is included with a free exhibition pass.

Adap.tv, now a division of AOL Networks after AOL’s acquisition in September 2013, most recently announced that Adap.tv and AOL’s combined efforts topped comScore’s U.S. Online Video Rankings for September. AOL served up 3.7 billion video ads during the month, the largest number by a single property ever recorded by comScore.

Ackerman leads a brand new business group within Adap.tv that is developing innovative programmatic, or automated, technologies that serve the TV and video advertising industries today and in the future when video has fully converged, regardless of screen. His keynote will focus on some of the massive shift in video advertising across all screens happening right now in video, particularly how it is bought and sold by advertisers and publishers, and how these changes have necessitated the need for content and media technologies that adapt as quickly as the consumption habits of digital video viewers.

Dan will be joined by more than 100 speakers from leading media, broadcast and MSO companies discussing the latest business, content and technology subjects around online video. You can register for an exhibits only pass and get access to the show floor, both keynotes and all the networking events, at no charge. And it’s not too late to get a full pass to the show, using my own personal discount code of DR13, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $595. #smwest

At the Streaming Media West show, taking place Nov. 19-20 in Huntington Beach, encoding guru Jan Ozer will outline what cloud encoding is and how it works for both live and on-demand applications. You’ll learn the types of applications that work well with cloud encoding, using mini-case studies of actual users, and the factors to consider when choosing an on demand and live cloud encoding service, including qualitative and performance results from recent reviews. You’ll leave knowing how cloud encoding works, which applications are particularly well suited for the cloud and how to choose a cloud provider.

It’s not too late to get a pass to the show and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DR13, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $595 and gives you access to 40 sessions and how-to presentations and 100+ speakers. You can also register for an exhibits only pass and get access to the show floor, both keynotes and all the networking events, at no charge. #smwest

At the Streaming Media West show, taking place Nov. 19-20 in Huntington Beach, members of the MPEG-DASH Consortium will give frontline reports on the first trials and commercial MPEG-DASH deployments, present available products that enable the end-to-end delivery of MPEG-DASH content and give demos of MPEG-DASH on various platforms. The panelists will discuss lessons learned from that process and provide insights in to the latest guidelines being developed that address ad insertion, multichannel audio, HEVC, as well as 4K/UHD video streaming. The audience will benefit from first-hand experiences of the MPEG-DASH experts and learn what’s up next. Confirmed speakers include:

• Moderator: Richard Doherty, Director, E-Media Technology Strategy, Dolby Laboratories
• Baptiste Coudurier, Principal Software Development Lead, Hulu
• Thierry Fautier, VP, Solutions and Strategy, Harmonic
• Aytac Biber, Sr. Product Manager, Qualcomm

It’s not too late to get a pass to the show and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DR13, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $595 and gives you access to 40 sessions and how-to presentations and 100+ speakers. You can also register for an exhibits only pass and get access to the show floor, both keynotes and all the networking events, at no charge. #smwest

Over the last few months, I’ve seen a lot of customer RFPs in the market sent to me from content owners and publishers looking for an online video platform (OVP) provider. In some cases, these content owners already use a OVP and are looking to change vendors while in other instances, they have a new content business or have been doing things in-house, and now new to use an OVP for the first time. As customers ask me for feedback and share with me the quotes they are getting from the OVPs, the one thing that is consistent amongst all of them is that the OVP vendors are still getting a large percentage of their revenue from the re-sale of bandwidth.

When you look at how these contracts break down, the largest percentage of revenue isn’t coming from platform license fees, it’s coming from the delivery of the videos. And since no dedicated OVP owns their own CDN and simply passed that traffic to a CDN, which they then have to pay for themselves, a large portion of the value of the contract is simply re-selling bits. This is something we’ve known about for years, but many of the OVPs have downplayed how much revenue they get from the re-sale of bandwidth when the truth is, it’s a lot.

Brightcove, the one public OVP in the market, won’t disclose what percentage of their revenue comes from the re-sale of bandwidth through an Akamai or Limelight Networks. I’ve asked them multiple times, but all they will say is that it’s not a lot. But we have no idea what that really means. And while Ooyala and Kaltura aren’t public, they too won’t disclose, on-the-record, what percentage of their revenue comes from bandwidth fees. But from taking a look at all of the vendor’s responses to RFPs, it’s a lot.

As an example, one customer sent out an RFP to move from one OVP to another and of all the quotes they got back, the value of their contract averaged $600k over the next 12 months. Out of that $600k in value, $400K was for storage and delivery, $49K was for platform license fees and the rest is made up of one-time setup fees, support fees, integration fees and professional services for some custom analytics work. That means 67% of the value of the contract to the OVP was from storage and delivery. And since that’s not something they do in-house since they don’t operate a CDN, the vast majority of that revenue is being passed on to the CDN. Even if the OVP is marking up the storage and delivery by 30%, they are only making $90K on the $400K in storage and bandwidth. It’s not bad for simply reselling, but bandwidth and storage prices decline each year.

OVPs that target MSOs tend to get a higher percentage of their revenue from platform license fees, as they aren’t reselling bandwidth and storage, since the MSO is deploying the OVP or TV Everywhere software inside their own network. But for those video platform providers that are selling direct to publishers and content owners, a lot of the value of their contracts is in the resale of bandwidth. Not all of the customers who use an OVP use them for delivery and storage, many have their own contract with a CDN directly and only use the OVP for the cloud based software service. But for those vendors that sell direct to publishers and have a lot of their customers using them for storage and delivery, a large percentage of the OVPs revenue is tied directly to the resale of something they don’t actually own or deliver themselves. That’s something that all of the video platform providers are going to have to change in their business if they really want to accelerate the percentage of revenue that they keep from these contracts.