For the past two years we’ve been hearing a lot about low/ultra-low latency streaming, with most of the excitement coming from encoding and CDN vendors looking to up-sell customers on the functionality. But outside of some niche applications, there is very little adoption or demand from customers and that won’t change anytime soon. This is due to multiple factors including a lack of agreed upon definition of what low and ultra-low latency means, the additional cost it adds to the entire streaming stack, scalability issues, and a lack of business value for many video applications.

All the CDNs I have spoken to said that on average, 3% of less of all the video bits they deliver today are using DASH-LL with chunked transfer and chunked encoding, with a few CDNs saying it was as low as 1% or less. While Apple LL-HLS is also an option, there is no real adoption of it as of yet, even though CDNs are building out for it. The numbers are higher when you go to low-latency, which some CDNs define as 10 seconds or less, using 1 or 2 second segments, with CDNs saying on that on average, it makes up 20% of the total video bits they deliver.

Low latency and ultra-low latency streaming are hard technical problems to solve in the delivery side of the equation. The established protocols (i.e. CMAF and LL-HLS) call for very small segment sizes, which correlate to much higher requests to the cache servers than a non-low latency stream. This could be much more expensive for legacy edge providers to support given the age of their deployed hardware. This is why some CDNs have to run a separate network to support it since low-latency delivery is very I/O intensive and older hardware doesn’t support it. As a result, some CDNs don’t have a lot of capacity for ultra-low latency delivery which means they have to charge customers more to support it. Based on recent pricing I have seen in RFPs many CDNs charge an extra 15-20% on average, per GB delivered.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that many vendors don’t define what exactly they mean by low or ultra-low latency. Some CDNs have said that low-latency is under 10 seconds and ultra-low latency is 2 seconds or less. But many customers don’t define it that way. As an example, FOX recently published a nice blog post of their streaming workflow for the Super Bowl calling their low-latency stream “8–12 secs behind” the master feed. They aren’t right or wrong, it’s simply a matter of how each company defines these terms.

In Q1 of this year I surveyed just over 100 broadcasters, OTT platforms and publishers asking them how they define ultra-low latency and the applications they want to deploy it for. (see notes at bottom for the methodology) The results don’t line up with what some vendors are promoting and that’s part of the problem, no agreed upon expectations. Of those surveyed, 100% said they define ultra-low latency as “2 seconds”, “1 second” or “sub 1 second”. No respondent picked any number higher than 2 seconds. 90% said they were “not willing to pay a third-party CDN more for ultra-low latency live video delivery” and that it “should be part of their standard service”. The biggest downside they noted in ultra-low latency adoption was “cost”, followed by “scalability” and the “impact on ABR implementation.” Of the 10% that were willing to pay more for ultra-low latency delivery, they all responded to the survey saying they would not pay more than 10% per GB delivered.

Part of the cost and scaling problems is why to date, most of the ultra-low latency delivery we see is coming from companies that build their own delivery infrastructure using WebRTC, like I noted in a recent post. Agora has been successful selling their ultra-low latency delivery and I consider them to be the best in the market. They were one of the first to offer an ultra-low latency solution at scale, but note that a large percentage of what they are delivering is audio only, has no video, is mostly in APAC and being used for two-way communications. Agora defines their low-latency solution as “400 – 800 ms” of latency and their ultra-low latency as “1,500 – 2,000 ms” of latency. That’s a lot lower than other solutions I have seen on the market, based on how vendors define these terms.

Aside from the technical issues, more importantly, many customers don’t see a business benefit from deploying ultra-low latency, except for niche applications. It doesn’t allow them to sell more ads, get higher CPMs or extend users viewing times. Of those streaming customers I recently surveyed, the most common video use cases they said ultra-low latency would be best suited for was “betting”, “two-way experience (ie: quiz show, chat)”, “surveillance” and “sports”. These are use cases when ultra-low latency can make the experience better and might provide a business ROI to the customer, but they are very specific video use cases. The idea that every sports event will go to ultra-low latency streaming in the near-term simply isn’t reality. Right now, no live linear streaming service has deployed ultra-low latency but with fuboTV having disclosed how they want to add betting to their service down the line, an ultra-low latency solution will be needed.  That makes sense but it’s not the live streaming that’s driving the need but rather the gambling functionality as the business driver for adopting it.

Live sports streaming is one instance where most consumers would probably say they would like to see ultra-low latency implemented, but it’s not up to the viewer. There is ALWAYS a tradeoff for streaming services between cost, QoE and reliability and customers don’t deploy technology just because they can, it has to provide a tangible ROI. The bottom line is that broadcasters streaming live events to millions at the same time have to make business decisions of what the end-user experience will look like. No one should fault any live streaming service for not implementing ultra-low latency, 4K or any other feature, unless they know what the company’s workflow is, what the limitations are by vendors, what the costs are to enable it, and what KPIs are being used to judge the success of their deployment.

Note on survey data: My survey was conducted in Q1 of 2021 and 104 broadcasters, OTT platforms and publishers responded to the survey, who were primarily based in North America and Europe. They were asked the following questions: how they define ultra-low latency; which applications they would use it for; if they would be willing to pay more for ultra-low latency delivery; the biggest challenges to ultra-low latency video delivery; how much latency is considered too much for sporting events and which delivery vendors they would consider if they were implementing an ultra-low latency solution for live. If you would like more details on the survey, I am happy to provide it, free of charge.

While traditional broadcast networks have been able to rely on live content to draw viewers, we all know that younger audiences are spending more time in apps with social experiences. To better connect with young viewers, companies are testing new social streaming experiences that combine Hollywood production, a highly engaging design and in many cases WebRTC technology. (See a previous post I wrote on this topic here: “The Challenges With Ultra-Low Latency Delivery For Real-Time Applications“)

Within the streaming media industry, there is a lot of discussion right now about different low/ultra-low latency technologies for applications requiring two-way interactivity. Many are looking to the WebRTC specification that allows for real-time communication capabilities that work on top of an open standard and use point-to-point communication to take video from capture to playback. WebRTC was developed as a standard way to deliver two-way video and provides users with the ability to communicate from within their primary web browser without the need for complicated plug-ins or additional hardware.

WebRTC does pose significant scaling challenges as few content delivery networks support it natively today. As a result, many companies utilizing WebRTC in their video stack have built out their own delivery infrastructure for their specific application. An example of a social platform doing this would be Caffeine, which built out their own CDN with a few IaaS partners to facilitate the custom stack necessary for them to deliver ultra-low latency relays. Keeping latency low also involves custom ingest applications that Caffeine built out to keep latency low glass-to-glass.

Another hurdle to WebRTC streaming is that it incurs a higher cost than traditional HTTP streaming. The low latency space is a rapidly evolving field in terms of traditional CDNs support for ultra-low latency WebRTC relays and http based low latency standards (LL-HLS and LL-DASH). So cost, sometimes as high as three-times regular video delivery and the ability to scale are still big hurdles for many. You can see what the CDNs are up with regards to low/ultra-low latency video delivery by reading their posts about it here: Agora, Akamai, Amazon, Limelight, Lumen, Fastly, Verizon, Wowza/Azure.

One problem we have as an industry is that very few companies have put out any real data on how well they have been able to scale their WebRTC based real-time interaction consumer experiences. One example I know of is that Caffeine disclosed that in 2020, they had 350,000 people tuned in to the biggest event they have done to date, a collaboration with Drake and the Ultimate Rap League (URL). While getting to scale with WebRTC based video applications is good to see, we can’t really talk about scale unless we also talk about measuring QoE. Most companies are an ABR implementation within WebRTC, doing content bitrate adaption based on the user’s network connection leveraging the WebRTC standard similar to http multi-variant http streaming but adapting faster relative to what’s afforded by the WebRTC protocol. This is the approach Caffeine has taken, telling me they measure QoE via several dimensions around startup, buffering, dropped frames, network level issues and video bitrate.

Some want to suggest that low-latency based streaming is needed for all streaming events or video applications but that’s not the case. There are business models where it makes sense but many others where the stream experience is passive and doesn’t require two-way interactivity. For platforms that do need it, like Caffeine, people are reacting to one another because of exchanges happening in real time. Chat brings out immediacy amongst participants, whether being called out by a creator or sending digital items to them, fans can change the course of a broadcast in real-time, driven by extremely low latency at scale. In these cases, culture, community, tech and production come together to elevate the entertainment to a whole new level. For Caffeine, it works so well that average watch times were over 100 minutes per user in 2020 for their largest live events.

Streaming media technology has transformed traditional forms of media consumption from packaging to distribution. Now with lots of social media streaming taking place, we are seeing interactive experiences continue to evolve, shaping opportunities in content creation, entertainment, monetization and advertising, with live streaming events being the latest. WebRTC is now the go-to technology being used in the video stack for the applications and experiences that need it, but the future of WebRTC won’t be as mainstream as some suggest or for all video services. WebRTC will be a valuable point-solution providing the functionality needed in specific use cases going forward and should see more improvements with regards to scale and distribution in the coming years.

For many of the largest streaming media related companies, picking best-in-breed video components in different areas of the streaming stack and integrating them into a customized OTT streaming service has become the new norm. API based streaming services combine everything available to customers allowing them to pick the best components between vendors, open source, or completely building it from scratch in-house. A good example is Crunchyroll, which shares a lot on their blog about how they combine their own video development with the best commercial and open source components for their service. Many OTT platforms, broadcasters and publishers take their streaming infrastructure stack very seriously and have invested in engineering expertise, which is a key component in successfully offering a great quality of experience.

Vendors that offer flexible API based video solutions are seeing a lot of growth in the market, which is attracting the attention of investors. Bitmovin, which has been in the industry since 2013 and has raised $43M to date, is currently raising another round of funding, rumored to be in the $15M-$20M range. [Updated April 20: Bitmovin announced is has raised $25M in a C round]  (Mux is raising another round as well) Bitmovin has seen some good growth over the last few years, choosing not to focus on a complete end-to-end video stack, but rather specializing in API based encoding, packaging, player and analytics. By my estimate the company will do $35M-$45M in 2021 revenue.

Bitmovin has benefited from large media companies getting more mature in their streaming stack and expertise, and switching away from less flexible end-to-end platforms, to more highly configurable and modular best-in-breed components. While encoding, packaging and playback are not everything you need to build a video streaming service, Bitmovin and others are trying to be the best in what they do, with a focused core set of offerings. Engineers then choose these components, together with others that are best in their respective category of CMS, CDN, Storage, DRM, Ad-Insertion, etc., to put together a streaming system where they are in full control of every component and gain a large degree of control and flexibility.

When it comes to encoding, Bitmovin takes an interesting approach by not only providing hosted encoding solutions in the cloud, but also a software-only option where customers can deploy their encoding software within the customer’s cloud account. All cloud providers are being extremely aggressive right now to get media companies as clients and gain market share by offering interesting deals on compute and storage, with Oracle being the latest. Leveraging these cloud options together with a software-only approach like Bitmovin offers for encoding, is a great way for some customers to benefit when it comes to costs and choosing the best cloud vendor as part of their best-in-breed strategy. It also gives companies flexibility by not being locked into one cloud provider, as many hosted encoding providers only run on AWS.

For vendors offering API based video solutions, focus is important. You can’t be everything to everybody, trying to solve every problem within every vertical. The approach that Bitmovin and some other vendors take, creates focus by providing specialized and differentiated point solutions, for encoding, player and analytics. Bitmovin can go a mile deep in these services, rather than build an end-to-end service that needs to be a mile wide because of the diversity of customer use cases and needs. This is especially important as the complexity of online video gets higher, with new codecs coming to the market, competing HDR formats, more devices to support, more complex DRM and ad use cases, and low latency requirements. Vendors that try to do everything in the video stack have a good chance of doing nothing really well. Of course, a vendor like AWS does a good job across the entire video stack due to their size and some of the acquisitions they have made, but they are the exception.

Customers who revamped their encoding stack and bitrate ladder with Bitmovin have told me they saw great improvements in viewer experience, a decrease in customer support tickets around buffering and bad quality, and also reduced their CDN and storage costs significantly. Two customers in particular that I spoke to saw a reduction of 60% in terms of their CDN bits delivered, when compared to what they used before. While Bitmovin can’t disclose all of their customers by name, looking at video offerings across the web or via apps, it’s not too hard to see some of the brands that are relying on the company. I see organizations including Discovery, DAZN, Sling TV, fuboTV, BBC, Red Bull and The New York Times that all rely on Bitmovin for core pieces of their streaming video workflow.

In addition to encoding, another video component that’s getting more and more attention are video players. Streaming services need to be available on every platform, with the best user experience, which brings a lot of challenges. While it’s fairly easy to make video play in a web browser, playback on mobile devices, multiple generations and brands of Smart TVs, game consoles and casting devices adds a lot more complexity. Despite the availability of a range of open source players, i.e. dash.js, Shaka player, video.js, hls.js, Exoplayer etc., it starts to become one of the main pain points of media companies, making sure their video works properly across every platform.

Every time I do an industry survey on QoE, problems with the video player or app is the number one complaint that OTT providers say they hear about from users. Dealing with DRM and video advertising on a 2016 Samsung Tizen or 2016 LG WebOS are among the common challenges, same as playback on PlayStation and Xbox, platforms that companies like Brightcove, JW Player or THEOplayer do not support for playback. Thus, going deep on players became important over the past years for Bitmovin and something the company has focused heavily on. From what I hear, they have aggregated hundreds of large customers in the player space and I noticed during March Madness that WarnerMedia was using Bitmovin’s player as well.

With the additional funding Bitmovin is securing, they will be an interesting company to watch as they have a deep understanding of the video stack and the way engineering teams build streaming services. They aren’t the only vendor offering some of these services in the market, but many of the other names people know have less than $10M in total revenue and are much, much smaller. Scale matters in the market and I expect we will see more video developers and engineering teams deploying Bitmovin’s APIs across their video offerings.

[Updated April 9: I like seeing this, V-Nova has replied to my post with their thoughts here: https://lnkd.in/d46pQSB]

For companies that supported the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) over the past few years, a lot is at stake to be able to deploy AV1 as soon as possible. There are signs that things are starting to move and the biggest ones are probably the upcoming WebRTC support, AV1 support in Chrome, and Android 10 support. Notably these are all Google projects.

That is great, but while marketing is giving visibility to what has obviously been a breakthrough project, broadcasters and operators alike are still shying away from the AOM technology. More than half of those surveyed in one of my recent industry surveys would like to deploy AV1 in their video services within the next two years but are concerned about hardware support. And, in fairness, reception has been mixed. Broadcom recently announced support for the codec, while Qualcomm support still seems far off.

As of now, it seems as if it will take a while to get the critical mass of device hardware support to make AV1 a success. Many encoding experts who track the topic in greater detail than I do suggest a timeline for adoption of at least another 5 years. In the meantime, AV1 may be confined to niche services and trials delivering low resolution video such as Google Duo in Indonesia. But I’d argue it doesn’t have to be this way, since we live in a world where the processing power in our hands offers up a lot of opportunities for better video experiences. Software decoding is possible and there are solutions out there that can enhance the potential of AV1 to the point of making it viable by serving high-quality premium services this year, not years down the road. AV1 with LCEVC is the solution that has been staring us in the face all along and is starting to get some adoption.

One thought that intrigues me is that there is an MPEG standard, the very organization that AOM tried to disassociate from, that could form an amazing technical combination. MPEG-5 LCEVC is the first enhancement standard that can improve the computational and compression performance of any “base” compression technology. That “any” is the radical part. This new standard could actually accelerate AOM and push AV1 out faster and more efficiently, by making it run on mobile handsets at full HD resolutions.

As both AV1 (from whichever source you choose) is mostly a software encoding and decoding option and LCEVC (from V-Nova) is a software encoding and decoding option, why doesn’t Google and V-Nova combine the two together? In a single software upgrade swoop, we could have full HD WebRTC, web conferencing, and entertainment of all kinds play back on our phones.

We have plenty of new compression technologies in HEVC, VP9, AV1, VVC and one enhancement standard in LCEVC. Yet, most of us are still consuming H.264/AVC video every day, missing out on the better experiences that the new formats could deliver. Let software be king, collaboration prevail, and have “MPEG-5 LCEVC enhanced AV1” deliver better, higher-quality services, sooner.

Last week Kaltura amended their Form S-1 filing, detailing how many shares they were offering to the market and their expected IPO price of $14-$16, in an effort to raise about $275M this month. But like some other tech companies, Kaltura has now postponed their IPO. The market for tech IPOs isn’t great right now and other companies like Intermedia, have also announced they are putting their IPO on hold while they wait for “favorable IPO conditions”. In the last few months, tech stocks have taken a beating on Wall Street and while we don’t know how long it will last, a perfect storm took place preventing some IPOs from going forward.

Some have asked what this all means for Vimeo’s upcoming IPO and if they are at jeopardy of postponing as well. As of the writing of this post I don’t have any other details on Vimeo’s IPO except that they were originally targeting an April time frame, which I’m hearing has now been updated to May. Vimeo has not yet filed an amended Form S-1 for the pricing of their shares, so that’s the next step we would expect to see in the process and keep an eye out for. [Updated April 1: Vimeo has announced their Board of Directors as they prepare to spin-off from IAC and said their IPO is scheduled for the end of Q2.]

Even without some IPOs not taking place right now and the potential for others to be impacted, it’s important to take a look at the differences between all the different video companies in the space, especially around the term of “enterprise video platform”. The goal of this post to lay out some of the numbers and differences between vendors, but it is not a complete product review comparison for all vendors side-by-side, with regards to functionality. As always, customers have to look at the strengths and weakness of vendors based on what they are trying to accomplish for their specific needs. All that aside, there are a lot of differences form a numbers standpoint when it comes to vendors in the market, with some overlap of services.

Kaltura had $120M in 2020 revenue, with year-over-year revenue growth of 17%, 21%, 27% and 30%, for each quarter last year. 2019 total revenue was $97.3M. Year-over-year revenue growth was 12% in 2018, 18% in 2019 and 24% in 2020. The company had net losses of $15.6M in 2019 and $58.8M in 2020. Kaltura’s top ten customers accounted for approximately 29% of their revenue in 2020, with Vodafone accounting for approximately 12% of that. The company grew revenue by 24% in 2020, while only increasing sales and marketing costs by $3.9M, compared to 2019.

While I hear Kaltura get compared to a lot of “enterprise” video platforms in the market, many vendors mentioned are not truly comparable from a revenue, scale or product functionality standpoint. Qumu and MediaPlatform are mentioned most often and do have some crossover into a few of the same vertical markets as Kaltura’s, but they are much smaller companies. MediaPlatform (private) had sub $10M in revenue for 2020 and not a lot of cash. Qumu (public) did $29.1M in total 2020 revenue and projects revenue to grow to about $35M in 2021. Qumu was running low on capital ending 2020 with $11.9M in cash and cash equivalents. The company did a raise of approximately $23.1M in January of this year to get more operating capital. While Qumu grew revenue 15% from 2019 to 2020, it’s off of a very small base and the company disclosed that the increase in revenue was “primarily due to a large customer order received at the end of Q1 2020.” If you strip out that single customer, Qumu’s year-over-year revenue would have been pretty flat. In comparison, Kaltura had $27.7M in cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2020 and had revenue grow 5X larger than Qumu.

Some are comparing Vimeo to Kaltura because Vimeo is using the term “enterprise” very heavily, but don’t believe the hype. Vimeo isn’t really an “enterprise” grade video platform from a product functionality standpoint. Vimeo’s “enterprise” offering is almost entirely Vimeo’s core product, simply with different levels of usage-based pricing and is not tied into other pieces of the enterprise video stack. Vimeo doesn’t have deep integration with vendors that enterprise organizations use for ingestion, LMS, CMS, analytics or a large number of third-party on-prem encoders. Kaltura is the opposite with integrations into just about every aspect of the enterprise video workflow, from ingestion to delivery. Companies like Ramp, SharePoint, Google Analytics, Blackboard, Matrix, dotsub and others are all in the Kaltura video ecosystem.

Vimeo has the largest percentage of their customer base paying an average of $17.83 a month in revenue, which isn’t the business Kaltura is going after. Vimeo said that at the end of 2020, the company had 3,300 hundred “enterprise” customers paying an ARPU of $1,833 a month, but the majority of that revenue is from their OTT related product, not “enterprise”, when defined by use case and application. Vimeo’s definition of an enterprise customer is simply the requirement that the customer purchase their plan through direct contact with their sales force. That’s it. This might be why Vimeo doesn’t break out verticals or use cases in their S-4 filing when it comes to what their “enterprise” revenue really consists of. I also expect a large portion of Vimeo’s revenue specifically tied to their OTT product to not renew throughout 2021. At the end of 2020, less than 1% of Vimeo’s subscribers paid more than $10,000 per year. By comparison, almost all of Kaltura’s customers paid at least $10,000 PER MONTH, over the same time.

If you look at Vimeo’s ARPU growth, the largest portion of it has come from their top ten customers. ARPU amongst their 1.5M+ paying customers grew only $24 a month, over 5 quarters from Q3 of 2019 to Q4 of 2020. That’s an average increase of only $4.80 per quarter. Vimeo’s “enterprise” customers saw over 100% growth, from their top ten customers that I estimate to be in the $100k-$250k a year contract size. So a small segment of Vimeo’s customers is making up the largest percentage of their highest ARPU growth. On the marketing front, Vimeo calls themselves the “world’s leading all-in-one video solution”, amongst many other high-level and generic marketing terms they use, which means nothing. Kaltura on the other hand is very clear about what they do in the market, with lots of details around product support for solving specific problems based on use case, vertical and size of customer.

Since day one, Kaltura has been in the live streaming space with deep knowledge and experience in what it takes to be successful with live, which requires solving a very different set of problems. As an example, Kaltura was the platform that powered Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference last year and virtual trade shows are a use case Kaltura has been successfully selling into. In 2016, Vimeo tried to get into the live business by building the functionality in-house and then realized how hard it really was. They had to acquire Livestream in 2017 to get into the live business, but live streaming has never been in the DNA of Vimeo as a company. Now, four years after Vimeo acquired Livestream, customers are telling me Vimeo is shutting down the Livestream platform and trying to transition them over to the Vimeo live platform, at a much higher cost, with less functionality.

Vimeo’s live platform does not support streams longer than 12 hours, which is a problem for many current Livestream enterprise clients who have 24/7 linear channels. With Vimeo live, you also can’t restart a live stream without creating a new event as you could previously do with the Livestream platform. Most importantly, the functionality around APIs is essential when it comes to the enterprise video stack and is one of the major deciding factors on which vendors customers use. The Vimeo live API functionality is much weaker compared to the Livestream API. Many of Vimeo’s biggest Livestream customers were deeply using the Livestream API, so that’s a problem for some customers they want to move off the Livestream platform. Customers I have spoken to haven’t seen the value in paying the additional multiple so it puts into question what percentage of Livestream customers Vimeo will be able to retain with the change. By comparison, Kaltura has no limit on the length of a live stream and their platform is open-source, with one of the deepest set of video API functionality in the industry.

In addition to the vendors already mentioned, Kaltura more closely competes with Panopto, especially when it comes to the education vertical and use cases around corporate communications. While Panopto is private and doesn’t disclose numbers, I put their revenue to be around $50M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) last year, with about 40% year-over-year growth. Panopto is well funded, have a very solid platform with scale, and lots of product flexibility targeting specific use cases and verticals. Panopto doesn’t cross over into all the verticals Kaltura sells into as they don’t sell their platform into telecom companies for any cloud TV services. This is a common theme amongst all the vendors, they don’t all compete in the exact same verticals for 100% of their revenue.

Brightcove is another vendor that has overlap into some of Kaltura’s verticals and competes mostly around media and entertainment customers looking for an end-to-end video stack for publishing, broadcast and ad supported business models. Brightcove had $197.4M $194.7M (thank you Brightcove for noticing my wrong number) in 2020 revenue, growing 7% year-over-over, with a net loss of $5.7M, down from the net loss of $21.9M in 2019. The company has projected 2021 revenue to be in the range of $211M-$217.0M, which at the midpoint would be 8% revenue growth. Over the past four years, Brightcove average year-over-year revenue growth was 7.7%. What these numbers show is that the market for certain types of video services and the rate at which they are growing is not as big or as fast as some want to suggest.

Brightcove ended 2020 with $37.5M in cash and cash equivalents. At the end of Q4 2020, Brightcove had 1,051 customers paying an average of $4,400 a year, ($366 monthly) and 2,279 “premium” customers spending an average of $97,200 a year ($8,100 monthly). Brightcove defines a premium customer based on their revenue spend and refers to the non-premium customers as those who use “our volume offerings”, saying it’s “designed for customers who have lower usage requirements and do not typically require advanced features or functionality”. You can read Brightcove’s recent 10-K from February 24 if you want to see all the detailed language on how they bucket their customers based on various products. Like Kaltura, when it comes to the media and publishing space, Brightcove is very deep with their product functionality and API support for use cases around marketing, events and corporate communications.

There are so many high-level umbrella terms used to describe video platforms that it can be confusing when it comes to what vendors really do and who they are targeting with their services. With terms like “enterprise video platform”, “video as a service”, “online video platform”, “business broadcasting platform”, “video cloud platform” etc. many companies may or may not be competitive to one another, depending on what is being compared and your definition of these terms. Amongst all the generic terms I mentioned, you would also hear vendor names including Microsoft (Stream), Zype, Wowza, ON24, Hive Streaming, Frame.io, Zoom, Cisco (Webex), Hopin and many others in the discussion.

In most instances, the vendors I mentioned specialize in other core aspects of the video stack like building video apps, offering API tools for video developers, or focusing on players, video analytics and content management systems. These vendors wouldn’t truly be competitive with one another in an apples-to-apples product showdown. That said, Microsoft, with their Microsoft Stream product, Wowza and ON24 would have some competitive crossover to Kaltura based on product functionality in similar vertical markets. Hopin would compete when it comes to live trade shows and multi-day conferences and Zoom and Cisco with Vbrick compete in the town hall meetings market. If you add up all the use cases for video, verticals, size of customers, region(s) and product functionality needs, there are close to 50 vendors in the “video platforms” market. Many of the vendors names being thrown into the same bucket when it comes to “enterprise video platforms” would simply not be accurate, based on real methodology.

Note: I am an actual user of a lot of these platforms mentioned. I currently have account access to platforms at Brightcove, Kaltura, Wowza, Vimeo, Panopto and others.

Looking for help getting a job in the streaming media industry? Thursday at 6pm ET I’ll be hosting a live Q&A chat, taking your questions and giving out some best practices on job search and placement. You can join the Zoom meeting as anonymous if you like and I’ll be taking questions via chat only and answering them live on video. Below is the Zoom link and the password is: streaming. This is free and open to everyone, so you are welcome to invite others.

Time: Mar 25, 2021 06:00 PM Eastern Time
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/78435691044?pwd=TXBBVkE3YTMwRXJoRlVQQ1lLQlFKZz09
Meeting ID: 784 3569 1044

This week, Limelight Networks announced it was laying off 16% of their workforce, or approximately 100 people. While it’s never good to see people lose their jobs, Limelight’s new management team needed to make drastic changes to the business to re-focus the company. New management typically takes the blame for layoffs but it’s simply because prior management didn’t take the necessary steps needed to put the company on a path to the proper growth and profitability.

Purely from a numbers standpoint, Limelight didn’t have the revenue to support such a large headcount. The company ended 2021 with $230.2M in revenue and had 618 employees. Two customers, Amazon and Sony, account for 48% of their revenue. The company missed both their Q3 and Q4 guidance and ended the year with 527 customers, down from 599 the year before. Also, when compared to other similar vendors in the market, Limelight’s sales team was nearly two times larger, but didn’t have the revenue growth to support it. Over the past four years, Limelight’s average revenue growth was just $11.5M per year, going from $184M in total revenue in 2017 to $232M in total revenue in 2020. The company’s gross profit percentage fell from 43.7% in 2019 to 30.4% in 2020. Simply put, new management needs to make some drastic changes and it starts with headcount.

Outside of the numbers, Limelight also had operational issues from a sales, product and technical standpoint that prior management never addressed. Limelight hasn’t had a full-time CTO in more then five years, which is unheard of for a CDN vendor selling a technical service. The company also has no dedicated Chief Product Officer, which is negatively impacting Limelight’s product road map and ultimately what sales could sell into the market. Limelight also needs to improve their cost structure, which is something the new management team is laser focused on and once done, should save them a lot of money. I won’t go into specific details, but the way Limelight deploys capacity in certain regions is simply not efficient from a dollars standpoint when compared to other CDNs.

Based on some of the changes new management has already made, Limelight is expected to benefit from an annual cash cost savings of approximately $15M. Limelight ended 2020 with nearly $47M in cash and cash equivalents, so the company has capital. The focus for new management will be around guaranteeing better performance at scale (with the right cost structure), offering a new products and a clear product road map, diversifying revenue so they aren’t dependent on two customers for half their revenue, and becoming profitable. In 2020, Limelight’s GAAP net loss was $19.3M, so that’s something they need to improve on so they can get to cash flow break-even or better.

Changes are never enjoyable when it involves layoffs, but in this case it was a necessary task Limelight’s new management team had to accomplish, so they can put the company on a path to faster growth and profitability.