Future of Multi-Platform

Strong feedback from the Media + Networks survey suggests that most media companies embrace the current wave of technological disruption as a welcome opportunity to get closer to audiences, notwithstanding the commercial challenges that clearly exist.

By Adrian Pennington

On-demand, the ability to move seamlessly across different screens, new content formats (including short-form and mobile-first) as well as VR/AR are all evidence of the sector’s dynamism and entrepreneurship.

One big question remains: How to monetise all of this activity? In terms of priorities for the next 12 to 24 months, the survey hit upon a desire to get the technical architecture right, with respondents emphasising the need for “reliable streaming” and “moving all infrastructure to the Cloud”. This suggests a more general view that OTT is about to undergo a step change.

Traditional hardware defined video architectures are costly to deploy and maintain, exceedingly complex and don’t scale easily. Cloud-native solutions have emerged as a way for operators to launch broadcast and OTT services in a matter of hours, rather than the months of old.

Cloud ready for primetime

Accenture’s view, provided to Media + Networks, is that shifting to the cloud is a key way in which broadcasters will keep pace with agile OTT rivals. 

“Cloud solutions help broadcasters realise four potential benefits,” states the consultancy. “Faster speed to market, which closes the gap on the service delivery cycle of OTT entrants; scalability to handle spikes in workload, including live events and popular new services; the ability to collect, store and conduct analytics on vast amounts of data; and driving ongoing service innovation through agile development – a culture of fail fast, fail cheap and move on.”

Virtualized hardware has provided tremendous economies of scale against conventional on-premise solutions in multiscreen TV rollouts. Public cloud networks, in particular, provide a competitive landscape for media companies who do not own local infrastructure to use pay-as-you-grow compute, storage and networking for their OTT services.

The complete Future Multi-platform report covers:

• Cloud delivery
• The role of aggregation and UX
• The post-OTT world
• Media 4.0

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