Hotly debated at IBC 2015:
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.
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.
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 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.
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.