coverstory_cover story 21/05/2015 18:35 Page 1
large number of our
service provider
customers have now
added catch-up to existing SVoD
services rather than transactional
VoD,” notes Jon Haley, VP, marketing
and business development, Edgeware.
“These are anywhere from two hours
to 30 days catch-up services. These
catch-up services often require an
“A
services. Subscription VoD is not working for
traditional providers essentially because of
the poor content quality: old content, notpremium content. On the other hand, SVoD
is facing new players launching competitive
services on the market.”
Tom Lattie, VP of market management
and development, video products, Harmonic,
accepts that on-demand consumption is on
the rise both with OTT and pay providers.
“In addition to the success of OTT players
such as Netflix, Amazon, and many others,
we’re also seeing growth on the part of
broadcasters and other content providers as
they scale up the complexity and throughput
of their workflows to offer their assets in
many more versions across many more
outlets.”
Nick Walters, CEO and founder at
Hopster, says that in the world of dedicated
Supply and demand
additional subscription or are
bundled for free with premium
subscriptions, which are normally
sports-based packages.”
“Generally the trend is to offer longer
catch-up windows or even cloud-based,
personal DVR recordings and we have
some customers that enable their subs to
keep shows for up to one year. This
generates an increasing long-tail of
viewing which puts both the origin server
and the CDN under immense pressure to
access large storage archives at high speed
and to efficiently cache and deliver large
levels of unicast traffic,” he says.
“Most of our customers have apps for
tablets and mobiles but apps for connected
TVs are less common. Right now we are
seeing a strong demand for replacement of
ads during playback of catch-up and other
cloud DVR recordings in order to provide
new revenue sources for broadcasters and
content owners as an incentive to grant
catch-up licences.”
PACE. Damien Lucas, CTO and cofounder of Anevia, suggests that the growth
of premium VoD services of the type
available five to 10 years ago in IPTV or
cable is slowing down essentially as a result
of the content price and the prices subs are
willing to pay. “Nowadays, catch-up becomes
the most demanded service but
viewers/customers are not necessarily
willing to pay a premium for a quality
guaranteed service. Catch-up is seen now
as a commodity. On the other hand, subs
are willing to pay for a bundle
of non-linear
14 EUROMEDIA
Consumers are increasingly
accessing their desired
content at a time of their
choosing and on a range of
devices, often from
dedicated OTT providers. Is
this set to be the dominant
model for VoD
consumption? What other
options are there for
fulfilling consumer demand
for content and what
obstacles may be
hampering the development
of transactional VoD?
Colin Mann investigates.
OTT providers, you definitely see people
prepared to pay. “In fact, the real
innovation and product differentiation is
coming from stand-alone OTT providers.
Netflix, Hopster, Vessel, Crunchyroll and
YouTube - that’s where the exciting stuff is
happening. People bundling into existing
services isn’t a bad thing to do, but it’s not
the emerging model.”
AVAILABILITY. Ben Gidley, director,
multiscreen solutions, Irdeto, suggests that
for the consumer, the crucial factors are
content availability and a seamless
experience across a range of devices. “They
expect video on demand to be integrated
into the offering as part of the content they
purchase from their operator, not as a
separate service. However, we also see the
emergence of other business models,
especially with new entrant OTT providers.
For example, Advertising Funded Video on
Demand (AVoD) is a free-to-air ad-funded
service with quality content. Going forward
we will see a
mixture of
these patterns,
catch-up content
as well as films
and box sets will
stay popular with
consumers,
however, the AVoD
model is winning at
the moment.”
According to
Simon Trudelle,
senior product
marketing manager,
NAGRA, it is indeed the
approach taken so far,
but it will likely evolve
over time. “A number of
service providers
(including Numericable in
France, a NAGRA
customer) have started
enriching their services with