OTT

Video: How to succeed in OTT in 2020

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

Webinar: Why data-driven OTT will overtake the Broadcast TV model – The TV Data Revolution

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

‘On demand’ must be the top reason people love streaming services. But for streaming providers, the motivation to deliver these services goes deeper than meeting market demand; The data that can be gathered as people watch is revolutionising business models.

Eyevinn Technology, the Swedish specialist consultancy firm focused on video and distribution brings this data into the spotlight tomorrow, Tuesday 28th, to discuss how different segments of the industry are using the data and why you should have a data strategy. This virtual panel brings together AWS, Braze, Edgeware, Eyevinn Technology, Jump TV, and Kaltura that will shed light on the
benefits you can get having a compelling data strategy.

“I believe we have gathered a very interesting combination of speakers and I can promise an insightful hour with a lot of good takeaways”

Magnus Svensson, VP Sales and Business Development at Eyevinn Technology

We see the evidence of the power of this data in the EULAs for Smart TVs which make it clear that they are watching you. Famously, North American TV Manufacturer Vizio was caught collecting “as many as 100 billion data points each day from millions of TVs,” according to the US FTC. This resulted in a class action suit and a judgement against Vizio.

This virtual panel looks at collecting data in the right way, discussing what data to collect and how to motivate subscribers to share their data. Importantly in today’s global society which needs to serve very privacy-conscious countries, there will be discussion about how to use the data that has been collected. They’ll be looking at how can data be used to understand how to scale your OTT solution, how can data be used to make the experience better and how can data be used to increase engagement and reduce churn.

Register now!

 

Speakers

Johan Bolin Johan Bolin
Chief Product and Technology Officer,
Edgeware
Gideon Gilboa Gideon Gilboa
Marketing and Solutions – Media and Telecom,
Kaltura
Jerónimo Macanás

 

 Jerónimo Macanás
CEO,
Jump Data-Driven Video
Warrick Godfrey Warrick Godfrey
VP, Industry Solutions,
Braze
Simon Frost Simon Frost
Head of EMEA Media Marketing,
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Magnus Svensson Magnus Svensson
Media Solution Specialist,
Eyevinn

Video: Reducing peak bandwidth for OTT

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

‘Flattening the curve’ isn’t just about dealing with viruses, we learn from Will Law. Rather, this is one way to deal with network congestion brought on by the rise in broadband use during the global lockdown. This and other key ways such as per-title encoding and removing the top tier are just two other which are explored in this video from Akamai and Bitmovin.

Will Law starts the talk explaining why congestion happens in a world where ABR (adaptive bitrate streaming) is supposed to deal with this. With Akamai’s traffic up by around 300%, it’s perhaps not a surprise there’s a contest for bandwidth. As not all traffic is a video stream, congestion will still happen when fighting with other, static, data transfers. However deeper than that, even with two ABR streams, the congestion protocol in use has a big impact as will shows with a graph showing Akamai’s FastTCP and BBR where BBR steals all the bandwidth rather than ‘playing fair’.

Using a webpage constructed for the video, Will shows us a baseline video playback and the metrics associated with it such as data transferred and bitrate which he uses to demonstrate the different benefits of bitrate production techniques. The first is covered by Bitmovin’s Sean McCarthy who explains Bitmovin’s per-title encoding technology. This approach ensures that each asset has encoder settings tuned to get the best out of the content whilst reducing bandwidth as opposed to simply setting your encoder to a fairly-high, safe, static bitrate for all content no matter how complex it is. Will shows on the demo that the bitrate reduces by over 50%.

Swapping codecs is an obvious way to reduce bandwidth. Unlike per-title encoding which is transparent to the end-user, using AV1, VP9 or HEVC requires support by the final device. Whilst you could offer multiple versions of your assets to make sure you still cover all your players despite fragmentation, this has the downside of extra encoding costs and time.

Will then looks at three ways to reduce bandwidth by stopping the highest-bitrate rendition from being used. Method one is to manually modify the manifest file. Method two demonstrates how to do so using the Bitmovin player API, and method three uses the CDN itself to manipulate the manifests. The advantage of doing this in the CDN is because this allows much more flexibility as you can use geolocation rules, for example, to deliver different manifests to different locations.

The final method to reduce peak bandwidth is to use the CDN to throttle download speed of the stream chunks. This means that while you may – if you are lucky – have the ability to download at 100Mbps, the CDN only delivers 3- or 5-times the real-time bitrate. This goes a long way to smoothing out the peaks which is better for the end user’s equipment and for the CDN. Seen in isolation, this does very little, as the video bitrate and the data transferred remain the same. However, delivering the video in this much more co-operative way is much more likely to cause knock-on problems for other traffic. It can, of course, be used in conjunction with the other techniques. The video concludes with a Q&A.

Watch now!
Speakers

Will Law Will Law
Chief Architect,
Akamai
Sean McCarthy Sean McCarthy
Technical Product Marketing Manager,
Bitmovin

Video: S-Frame in AV1: Enabling better compression for low latency live streaming.

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Streaming is such a success because it manages to deliver video even as your network capacity varies while you are watching. Called ABR (Adaptive Bitrate), this short talk asks how we can allow low-latency streams to nimbly adapt to network conditions whilst keeping the bitrate low in the new AV1 codec.

Tarek Amara from Twitch explains the idea in AV1 of introducing S-Frames, sometimes called ‘switch frames’, which take the role of the more traditional I or IDR frames. If a frame is marked as an IDR frame, this means the decoder knows it can start decoding from this frame without worrying that it’s referencing some data that came before this frame. By doing this, you can allow frequent points at which a decoder can enter a stream. IDR frames are typically I frames which are the highest bandwidth frames, by a large proportion. This is because they are a complete rendition of a frame without any of the predictions you find in P and B frames.

Because IDR frames are so large, if you want to keep overall bandwidth down, you should reduce the number of them. However, reducing the number of frames reduces the number if ‘in points’ for for the stream meaning a decoder then has to wait longer before it can start displaying the stream to the viewer. An S-Frame brings the benefits of an IDR in that it still marks a place in the stream where the decoder can join, free of dependencies on data previously sent. But the S-Frame is takes up much less space.

Tarek looks at how an S-Frame is created, the parameters it needs to obey and explains how the frames are signalled. To finish off he presents tests run showing the bitrate improvements that were demonstrated.
Watch now!
Speaker

Tarek Amara Tarek Amara
Engineering Manager, Video Encoding,
Twitch