I’ve gotten my hands on some extra Google Chromecast’s and will be giving them away to some lucky readers of my blog. We’ll also be giving them away at the Streaming Media West show in November as well. To win one from my blog, simply add a comment to this post and I’ll pick three random winners in two weeks. I will only ship these within the U.S. so you must have a U.S. based address if you want to win. Good luck!
Sponsored by
EdgeCast continues to expand their network and sales reach with a new telco managed CDN partnership with Chunghwa Telecom’s data communications business group (HiNet) In Taiwan. HiNet will use EdgeCast technology to build a high-performance CDN within Taiwan and provide caching, streaming, acceleration and security services to Taiwanese media and content providers. HiNet will invest from a hardware, colocation and bandwidth perspective and EdgeCast will contribute their software and manage the newly built CDN.
This is a big deal for EdgeCast as Taiwan is one of the most difficult markets to reach, has a very high population of Internet users, is a tremendously desirable CDN market for traffic termination, and is a fast growing market for CDN customers. Once built, HiNet will be EdgeCast’s local reseller and will take their new offering to all of HiNet’s enterprise customers, where they are a major market leader for IP infrastructure in Taiwan. It will also give HiNet an excellent domestic CDN to service all their big enterprise and content customers.
This is another example of EdgeCast once again beating out other larger CDNs whom offer licensed/managed CDN services, as multiple CDN vendors were competing for Chunghwa Telecom’s business. EdgeCast has the most licensed/managed CDN deals in the market, and this deal structure with Chunghwa Telecom is very similar to ones they have done with PT Telecom in Indonesia and Telia in the Nordics.
EdgeCast says they now carry more than 5% of all worldwide Internet traffic, have 4Tbps of egress capacity deployed, and at their current rate of growth, is on a run rate of over $140M in revenue by the end of 2014. Based on my estimates, EdgeCast’s managed/licensed deals will account for about $15M in total revenue for the company in 2013.
A majority of executives, 59%, say bandwidth limitations are currently the leading technical obstacle to OTT adoption. Quality of service and quality of experience—which may also be related to bandwidth issues—is also seen as an obstacle by 55%. “OTT services need to be able to consistently provide content that is high quality, doesn’t cut out, break up, or freeze,” says one respondent. “Consumers want to be able to watch content without these distractions that can ruin the entertainment experience.”
To a large degree, this may tie in with bandwidth capabilities as far as achieving video quality, but also extends to the quality of the viewer’s experience as well. Quality of experience (or quality of mobility) also addresses the personalization, brand and user-interface experiences of the video delivery, in tune with consumer preferences by the devices they use.
When looking across the primary industry segments, pay-TV operators tend to downplay the impact of bandwidth as a technical limitation. Many offer their own broadband networks, and thus are simply able to piggyback OTT offerings directly through this channel. Of most concern to pay-TV operators is being able to technically manage content security. Ironically, only 30% of content providers surveyed are experiencing any technical limitations in terms of content security. At the origination end of content, there may be less concern or involvement with downstream security requirements.
OTT services can be delivered in a linear fashion, meaning the live streaming of channels, or video on demand, in which users can download and view libraries of videos and other content. When asked about the types of services that are most important to offer for OTT video delivery, most respondents see the potential in video on demand (VoD). VoD leads the list by a wide margin, cited by 79% of respondents. In addition, looking a few years down the road, live, linear content—a metered approach measured in minutes per day—will increase in importance, rising from 48% to 63%. A majority, 54%, also see it as a market for those seeking catch-up TV and time-shifting. The view that video on demand is the sweet spot of OTT is shared across the major industry segments covered in the survey.
Full results from the report, entitled “OTT Video: Coming to a Paid Channel Near You” is available as a free download from the StreamingMedia.com website.
An average broadcaster today has to balance two contrasting realities to make its business work profitably. One is transitioning to digital, tapeless, file-based and IP workflows – simultaneously or in lock-step with each other – and the other is to manage the business side and make content available for a variety of screens, device types, and networks, on-demand and anywhere. These two imperatives are seemingly disparate, yet highly intertwined. Most often, restrained by limited budget and resources, companies focus on specific point solutions that help them take care of immediate needs, forcing them to scramble to build and/or buy components sub-optimally just to keep their heads above water.
However, in doing so, these companies, though taking care of a tactical challenge, actually add more complexity and miss the strategic business imperative. Such siloed deployments aimed more on certain aspects of the underlying production workflow, are often isolated from the larger organizational perspective, inevitably hampering collaboration and interoperability between different functions, systems, and knowledge workers.This leads to longer cycle times, resource redundancy and effort duplication around the workflow, and sub-optimal investments in unviable products as well as processes – something that a media company can ill-afford.
Many broadcasting companies have implemented media asset management (MAM) to manage the content assets within a highly collaborative production workflow, and facilitate content discovery, production and repurposing, and, in so doing have experienced tangible benefits. MAM can eliminate redundancies as well as ensure higher level of quality check (QC) at every step of the process. Importantly, it can help achieve cost savings and efficiencies by empowering collaboration, cycle time acceleration, intelligent discovery while reducing redundancies, and the cost of lost or misplaced work among others.
Frost & Sullivan did an analysis of the time and cost savings for just content acquisition from external suppliers for one program series per week. Needless to say, such tasks and similar ones, repeat through the workflow. Hence, if applied, MWRW multiplies the benefits several times over, especially for a programmer who collates and distributes numerous programs.
This recently released white paper, entitled “Media Workflow and Resource Management: The Roadmap to Revenue Growth and Reduced Complexity,” analyses the key challenges faced by media companies, especially television programmers, to not only manage their growing content bank but also the business processes and ecosystems tied to the same. This paper also, using illustrative examples, explore feasible solutions that can enable content companies to alleviate enterprise-scale workflow concerns, while reaching the widest audience possible and reap profits.
You can download the white paper for free from the Frost & Sullivan website.
Nearly half of the speaking spots for the Streaming Media West show, taking place November 19-20 in Huntington Beach California, have already been filled. We’ve got confirmed speakers and presenters from Starz, A+E Television Networks, Google, Roku, Comcast, YouTube, The Tennis Channel, LG Electronics, DIRECTV, Redbox, HBO, Vevo, CNN, BBC, Fox Networks Group, CBS Interactive, University of Texas at Dallas, Oregon State University, University of Utah, Oracle, TechCrunch, CBC, Adobe, Cisco, Elemental Technologies, Haivision, Dolby, Ooyala and Ericsson amongst many more. We’ve also got analysts from firms including MRG, Frost & Sullivan, TDG Research and others.
The Streaming Media West website has been updated and now has the latest program details and list of confirmed speakers with another dozen or more speakers expected to be added this week.
The program is filling up even faster than it did last year, so if you owe me some kind of follow up regarding your speaking submission, or I am waiting to hear from you on next steps, please note that the program is closing fast. Once is it filled, it’s too late. I know some will be upset when they contact me six weeks before the show and want to know why they can’t speak, but I have a lot of speaking submissions and spots get filled based on who confirms first. So please contact me ASAP if I am waiting to hear back from you.
Some people want me to chase them down for weeks, which I will not do. If you are offered a speaking spot, and two or three emails from me later you still have not followed up, I will_not_wait for_you, and will move on to the next company. So please, be responsive with emails and thorough with follow-up or your opportunity will go to someone else. I know some shows place speakers last minute, but I don’t do that, unless there is a cancellation. I plan to have all speakers place by October 9th, which is exactly 4 weeks from today.
As it moves into the mainstream, over-the-top (OTT) video is maturing towards a pay environment, with sustainable business models. Premium content delivery is becoming both a more significant component of the overall online video business and a more dominant mode of video delivery.
Video content is not just consumed within the confines of the home either—increasing numbers of consumers are demanding more of the “everywhere” aspect of TV—watching live or catch-up programs on-the-go. The traditional set-top box tethered to the television set, once the center of consumer home-based entertainment, is now but one shared video device in a multi-screen world of personal delivery options.
These are some of the findings of a new StreamingMedia.com survey of 758 media industry executives, which sought to uncover their views on the current and future state of OTT video from inside the trenches. Respondents provided new details about the business, highlighting shifts in models, commercial and technical challenges and security implications for the growing business sector. These respondents in the three key sectors of this industry —pay-TV operators, content providers, and technology providers —already see significant parts of their businesses influenced by the OTT model, in which programming, both live and on-demand, is delivered directly to consumers’ devices, piggybacked on broadband networks.
Key findings of the survey include the following:
Full results from the report, entitled “OTT Video: Coming to a Paid Channel Near You” is available as a free download from the StreamingMedia.com website.
The challenge for OTT video delivery is to be able to provide consistent, secure, and high-quality content to this ever-increasing number of device types, and to be open and flexible enough to accommodate changing consumer preferences. There’s no question in the minds of executives that recently participated in a StreamingMedia.com survey that the prevalence of so many consumer devices from which they can view videos—not only PCs and tablets, but also smartphones and game consoles—means being able to meet a bewildering array of both open and proprietary technical specifications.
To illustrate how quickly hardware changes, the leading viewing device of choice in this survey did not exist three years ago. The survey shows that tablets rapidly have become the most important choice for OTT delivery. 80% of respondents say they are targeting delivery to tablets. 72% are also streaming to PCs/Macs, while 71% are also targeting smartphones. 80% agree that targeting multiple devices for video delivery is a key implementation challenge at this time.
The survey also looked at the most popular operating systems underpinning consumers’ viewing devices. The two leading mobile platforms—at least, leading at the time the survey was conducted—represent the systems most likely to be supported
by OTT providers. Android barely edges out Apple as the most popular target platform for OTT initiatives at this time, with 74% of respondents saying they support this platform. An extremely close second is Apple’s iOS platform for smartphones and tablets, supported by 73%. The PC platform—once the dominant second-screen viewing device—ranks in the second tier of respondents’ platform choices, with another 61% targeting Windows 8 as a target platform, and another 60% targeting MacOS.
While consumers have a wide array of choices in terms of viewing devices, this also continues the fragmentation of the OTT space, in the view of one respondent. “At the moment, you need several different devices to view content from competing companies,” the respondent points out. “You need a Roku, Apple TV, Amazon streaming, and several others, and you still don’t get the full spectrum of available content. There needs to be a way to have all these outlets in one place so the TV area isn’t cluttered with nine different types of content boxes.”
Full results from the report, entitled “OTT Video: Coming to a Paid Channel Near You” is available as a free download from the StreamingMedia.com website.