The Shifting Media Landscape at IBC 2015

This year’s IBC has been among the most keenly watched and best attended in history. As always, there were some great product launches and upgrades, however the highlight of the event was marked by the great discussions, panels and presentations about the changing media landscape.

Hotly debated at IBC 2015:

• The mainstream arrival of OTT and D2C business models
• The demand for smart monetization technology
• The readiness of IP for primetime with cloud, 4k multi-screen delivery

Disruption and the drive to new business models was the consistent theme of IBC.

OTT has reached a tipping point in 2015 with HBO Now, Sling TV, Sony’s Playstation Vue and other big and smaller player taking the leap to develop direct to consumer video model. But it’s not going to be easy with rights, management, distribution, discovery, personalization and monetization issues all being thrown into disruption, and what was on display at IBC was the industry’s attempt to grapple with the change.

The urgent need to innovate business models and the tech stack

Content providers and distributors are faced with a serious challenge to innovate and fast. The competitive context pushes companies to enrich their offerings and adapt to their customers’ needs. Flexible pricing models, product bundles, high definition broadcasting, multi-device support are areas of innovation. Innovation to lower the cost of every link in the video value chain and deliver decent returns.

Viewing patterns change significantly

It’s not a big surprise that there is a big shift towards mobile. People nowadays spend more time on mobile than on TV. Viewers want move, be connected and have bigger screens – hence smartphones are their first screen.
Broadcasters have to react to change, fast. The bottom line is that people want great content on the best screen available and cross-device delivery is a must.

Kaltura is in the thick of it with it’s Next Generation of OTT solutions

Kaltura Innovation Lab: MediaX was on display in the Kaltura IBC Innovation Lab where we showed projects that we believe will enable companies to tackle the challenges of the changing media landscape.

• Winning valuable users is a major challenge for any company going OTT and Kaltura has partnered with SAP to provide a unique marketing, engagement and monetization solution that builds audience and converts them to paying users.
• The Quality of Services is critical to a good experience and here we have partnered to bring advanced QoE services.
• Advanced media preparation with Harmonic allows us to provide new localization metadata and 4k video Technicolor STB delivery to the big screen.
• With IBM we have leveraged Spark, Hadoop and Watson big analytics engines to bring detailed business intelligence and content recommendations based on user patterns.

Vodafone Spain announced that they are launching catch-up and VOD services for the TiVo set top box, powered by Kaltura. Aligning with the trends in customer behavior of wanting to watch content on their own schedule, Vodafone expects these services to boost viewer engagement. Thanks to our OTT TV modular and unified backend, we were able to get the services up and running quickly.