FEED Spring 2021 Newsletter

There’s an audience out there that wants to watch your content, but in a world flooded with video, how do you reach them?

n times of crisis, the natural instinct is to withdraw. Certainly in the last year, many businesses have adopted that approach – conserve resources, ride out the storm.

Despite the uncertainty, there may be no better time to launch an OTT video business. Of course, the high-end VOD market is near-on saturated, but opportunities for delivering the right content to the right people in interesting ways are there for the taking. There are thousands of global niche interests, with audiences in the millions, starving for first-rate content. Within these interests there is opportunity for a variety of content types, from entertainment to education, passive viewing to deep participation. So, exactly how is a niche content provider – small sports league, hobby channel, network covering a tiny geographical area – expected to reach

of trends – and opportunities – in the OTT and streaming video marketplace. “In 2020, we saw a huge demand on our systems with a 300-to-400% increase in consumption, across the entire set of verticals and use cases,” says Gilboa. “Even for mainstream media and telecoms, we've seen an acceleration in streaming. If anyone had a doubt that streaming is mainstream for television, Covid-19 proved that it was. We’ve even seen a change in primetime. Suddenly, morning in Europe became primetime when schools were closed.”

audiences in a saturated market? FEED spoke with Gideon Gilboa, executive vice-president of media and telecom at video cloud company Kaltura. The company provides video SaaS solutions to a wide variety of customers, from enterprise video use to education, to streaming for media and telecoms. They are in an ideal position to see a cross-section

THE MORE SUPER-AGGREGATORS THERE ARE, THE GREATER THE NEED WILL BE TO DRAW UNIQUE CONTENT INTO THEM

TAKING THE PLUNGE Last year, Kaltura observed that a number of companies they worked with were taking the plunge and launching new streaming services. These were broadcasters who did not yet have a direct-to- consumer service, or telcos continuing their move from legacy broadcast to IP video and cloud TV. “We’re seeing more and more telcos that have already done a ’generation one’ system, now looking to migrate to a modernised API-centric, SaaS-type

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