IBC365 Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: CDNs: Delivering a Seamless and Engaging Viewing Experience

Posted on 31st March 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

This video brings together broadcasters, telcos and CDNs to talk about the challenges of delivering a perfect streaming experience to large audiences. Eric Klein from Disney+ addresses the issues along with Fastly’s Gonzalo de la Vega, Jorge Hernandez from Telefonica, Adriaan Bloem with Shahid moderated by Robert Ambrose.

Eric starts by talking from the perspective of Disney+. Robert asked if scaling up quickly enough to meet Disney+’s extreme growth has been a challenge. Eric replies that scale is built by having multiple routes to markets using multiple CDNs so the main challenge is making sure they can quickly move to the next new market as they are announced. Before launching, they do a lot of research to work out which bitrates are likely to be streamed and on what devices for the market and will consider offering ABR ladders to match. They work with ISPs and CDNs using Open Caching. Eric has spoken previously about open caching which is a specification from the Streaming Video Alliance to standardise the API between for CDNs and ISPs. Disney+ uses 7-8 different provers currently and never rely on only one method to get content to the CDN. Eric and his team have built their own equipment to manage cache fill.

Adriaan serves the MENA market and whilst the gulf is fairly easy to address, north Africa is very difficult as internet bandwidths are low and telcos don’t peer except in Marseille. Adriaan feels that streaming in Europe and North America as ‘a commodity’ as, relatively, it’s so much easier compared to north Africa. They have had to build their own CDN to reach their markets but because they are not in competition with the telcos, unlike CDNs, they find it relatively easy to strike the deals needed for the CDN. Shahid has a very large library so getting assets in the right place can be difficult. They see an irony that their AVOD services are very popular and get many hits for a lot of the popular content meaning it is well cached. Their SVOD content has a very long tail meaning that despite viewers paying for the service, they risk getting a worse service because most of the content isn’t being cached.

Jorge presents his view as both a streaming provider, Movistar, and a telco, Telefonica which services Spain and South America. With over 100 POPs, Telefonica provides a lot of IPTV infrastructure for streaming but also over the internet. They have their own CDN, TCDN, which delivers most of their traffic, bursting to commercial CDNs when necessary. Telefonica also supports Open Caching.

Eric explains that the benefit of Open Caching is that, because certain markets are hard to reach, you’re going to need a variety of approaches to get to these markets. This means you’ll have a lot of different companies involved but to have stability in your platform you need to be interfacing with them in the same way. With Open Caching, one command for purge can be sent to everyone at once. For Adriaan, this is “almost like a dream” as he has 6 different dashboards and is living through the antithesis of Open Caching. He says it can be very difficult to track the different failovers on the CDNs and react.

Gonzalo points out how far CDNs like Fastly have come. Recently they had 48 hours’ notice to enable resources for 1-million concurrent views which is the same size as the whole of the Fastly CDN some years go. Fastly are happy to be part of customers’ multi-CDN solutions and when their customers do live video, Fastly recommend that they have more than one simply for protection against major problems. Thinking about live video, Eric says that everything at Disney+ is designed ‘live first’ because if it works for live, it will work for VoD.

The panel finishes by answering questions from the audience.

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Speakers

	Eric Klein Director, Media Distribution, CDN Technology, Disney+
	Jorge Hernandez Head of CDN Development and Deployment, Telefonica/Movistar
	Adriaan Bloem Head of Infrastructure, Shahid
	Gonzalo de la Vega VP Strategic Projects, Fastly
	Robert Ambrose Co-Founder and Research Director, Caretta Research

Video: How to succeed in OTT in 2020

Posted on 28th May 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With the streaming market maturing, keeping ahead of competitors requires a layered strategy, particularly for entrants to the market who don’t have Amazon levels of funding. There are success stories out there, so what are the ingredients for success? This recored webinar looks at these questions an shares advice on succeeding in today’s market.

Rahul Patel from Ampere Analysis is first giving an overview of the OTT/streaming market. Within the UK and the US, we now see, he explains, 35% of subscriptions belonging to those 45 and older thus the market is maturing and increasingly offering a wider choice of genres to a wider selection of people. In general, services stand out through their content which is often done through original productions with Netflix now investing almost the same in original programming as the BBC does across all its channels. Rahul shows statistics showing that the percentage of non-US productions is increasing with Netflix and Amazon prime both trying to create programming which is more appealing to their non-US viewers.

An alternative to original programming is to focus your offering. For example, services such as AcornTV focus on UK crime drama, Crunchyroll is focussed on Japanese-made programming and Mubi is 100% films. Though in one market, a very narrow niche may not provide the customers needed to make the service viable, but expanded across all markets, that can all change. Another way services are attracting subscribers, Rahul details, is through bundling either with multiple services being discounted when purchased together, free subscription with hardware purchase or partnerships between big players such as network operators.

As the stacking of services continues to increase, Rahul foresees a future role for aggregators and simplifying the subscription to one payment. Aggregation would involve a single search interface unifying disparate services and could be provided by giants such as Apple and Amazon.

US Industry Avg SCOD Uplifts. Source Reemah Sakaan, BritBox

Next up is Reemah Sakaan from BritBox, which launched in the US in 2017, now in the UK as of 2019 and soon Australia. She explains their journey to market discussing how it can take long time to get rights and forge a true identity, but once that is done, an easy to understand offering can be quickly taken up by viewers. Reemah notes that Covid-19 has pushed a hugh change in viewership both in terms of viewing hours but also subscribers and underlined the importance of their embedded live feed which allows them to go live with special events such as the Royal Wedding along side the traditional VoD offering. This helps them be a unique service and maintain differentiation from competitors.

The last of the presentations is from Simon James from Applicaster. Applicaster’s focus is on providing apps for streaming services. Major issues are in scaling your app on all platforms and trying to manage testing across different OS types and versions. Simon says that the effort needed to keep up with all of this can sap energy and innovation from the team. It also makes it hard to be agile and respond to the market and viewers within the pandemic being a fantastic example of why.

The video ends with a Q&A covering increasing subscriber churn which may lead to annual discounts rather than a monthly subscription. Reemah explains that the first 100 days is key in keeping subscribers. Other questions cover the need for consistent user experience across platforms, approach to expansion and the applicability of your content to your viewers.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Reemah Sakaan Group Director, SVOD at ITV Chief Brand and Creative Development Officer, BritBox Global
	Rahul Patel Analyst, Ampere Analysis
	Simon James Head of Sales Engineering, Applicaster

Webinar: Broadcaster VOD: Delivering the next-generation of catch-up viewing

Posted on 28th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With Amazon, Netflix and so many other VOD services available, broadcasters like the BBC and Discovery are investing a lot in their own VOD services, known as Broadcaster VOD (BVOD) in order to maintain relevance, audiences and revenue.

Commercial broadcasters such as Sky, ITV and Channel 4 are trying hard to attract advertisers and “have all launched new ad formats, struck deals with ad tech vendors to build marketplaces and set up programmatic teams to manage them” according to a report from digiday.com. As such this means that the battle for advertisers wallets is moving more towards VOD from linear.

Date: Thursday 30 January, 14:00 GMT / 9 a.m. ET

With this in mind, IBC365 will discuss the business models, platforms and strategies being used by BVOD platforms. They will look at the BBC’s move to build a deep content library of free-to-view box sets, and to the importance of data, personalisation and addressable advertising models.

Further more, this webinar will talk about the commercial and technical requirements to build a BVOD to a standard that’s going to stand on its own in this increasingly crowded, but well-funded marketplace.

	Richard Davidson-Houston Founder, Finally Found Ltd.
	Roma Kojima Senior Director OTT Video (CBC Gem), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
	Niels Baas Managing Director, NLZIET

Webinar: Creating brand loyalty and new TV revenues with next-generation voice control

Posted on 18th October 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With smart speakers, mobile phones and computers all sporting voice-controlled interfaces, it’s no surprise that smart TVs, Apple TVs and others can be voice controlled. This webinar looks at how much consumers expect control and what they expect.

Getting voice right, can be a really big differentiator in terms of enjoyment and confidence of a service and the speakers discuss how that can enhance retention and growth.

As seen with a recent update to Apple’s HomePod which allows it to recognise who’s speaking, voice can be used for personalisation, security and privacy when carefully applied to the service.

The webinar will also discuss fraud reduction and ecommerce opportunities.

Speakers

	Sebastian Reeve Director, EMEA, Intelligent Engagement Nuance Communications
	Pieter Vervoort VP Entertainment Products, Liberty Global
	Daniel Whaley Senior Architect, Product (Voice & AI) BBC

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