Most Americans can get internet on their TV — but they’re still mostly watching plain old TV

What’s working, and what’s not with OTT video experience

Adaptive bitrate streaming Gary Hammer, SVP Sales and Business Development at SmartLabs, focused on one of the fundamental buildings blocks of the OTT video revolution: “Adaptive bitrates have revolutionized viewing on multiscreen devices. We’ve certainly seen greater customers satisfaction with the quality of the video. It’s much better than just high, medium, and low, and you’re stuck with whichever one you chose.” Virtual channels Barney Withers Green, Sales Director, Media & Entertainment Solutions EMEA at Verizon Digital Media, zeroed in on the oldest form of video distribution, the linear channel. However, the way these channels are being put together online is undergoing a quiet revolution: “The concept of virtual linear, or pop-up channels. Gone are days when you can just deliver a prescribed channel. Whatever your content, you can create an engaging, customized channel. Our customizers have seen a huge amount of success with this.” Data delivers hidden truths Data is one area that is receiving a huge amount of focus in the media industry. Henrik Eklund, CEO at Newstag, is seeing a lot of user data since his news video service launched. Moreover, aspects of the aggregate data have surprised him: “What surprised us the most is when we launched this concept of crowd curation and looked at the aggregate data, we assumed it would be really narrow and be about the Kardashians and Trump. But that’s not really the fact.” Recommendations One of the areas where user data is applied most frequently is in the area of content recommendations. Mr. Hammer does not believe recommendations are necessarily helpful to everyone, especially pay TV operators. “I’m going to be controversial and say recommendations. In a service provider environment, the experience is disappointing. They are not typically drawing from an infinite source of content. They have different relationships with different content providers, and the quality of the metadata is often different. The quality of the recommendations is disappointing.” Mr. Eklund also thinks recommendations have been a disappointment. However, he thinks his company, Newstag, may have the answer: “We have a really fast-moving environment, and 50,000 stories with all of them being consumed all the time. We have data that would be interesting to translate into a long-form experience. If this data can be translated to my mood, I think they can be valid again.” Balance between latency and buffering One way to fix latency, a measure of how far a live stream is behind the original event, is to reduce the amount of video that is buffered by the client device. However, a smaller client buffer means the video playback is more vulnerable to freezes. Mr. Withers thinks many haven’t got the balance right yet: “Latency is the big thing we are seeing lately. People are trying to get the most out of HLS, trying to balance buffer ratio and latency. There’s a lot of people that are trying to get the balance between the two and some of them aren’t getting it quite right.” Why it matters Not every idea is a good one when trying to improve the streaming media experience. Adaptive bitrate streaming, virtual channels, and lots of user data seem to be working. Recommendations and latency reduction techniques are not. Source: N Screen Media

The latest in TV technology – Q1 2017

It's been a while since the last overview of what's happening in the world of TV technology, so it's high time for another update. As always, the year kicked off with CES in Las Vegas, where each of the large TV brands (Samsung, LG, Sony, Panasonic, Philips, etc) presented its plans for 2017. Same as last year, the focus in display technology was on HDR, which is becoming the new normal. While in the past LG was the only company known for OLED technology, many others announced OLED screens as well, although most of these will probably be rebranded LG displays. Another trend was a move towards extremely thin screens, with the logic, HDMI ports, offloaded to a separate module which can be hidden discretely. Old non-sensical hypes like 3D TV or curved TVs are going away. In the area of software, there were relatively few changes. There were the usual updates to webOS, Tizen, etc, but no major shifts. The only problematic case appears to be Firefox OS, which runs on some Panasonic TVs, for which the development team inside Mozilla was scrapped. In the console space, Sony is stronger than ever with its PlayStation 4. It has sold a massive 53 million consoles, dwarfing Microsoft's Xbox One sales, which are roughly half. Meanwhile, both Sony and Microsoft are steadily working on improving the software on their consoles. The next big step will be Microsoft's introduction of its Project Scorpio Xbox at E3 in June. The big news in the console space was the launch of Nintendo's new Switch console, which is basically a handheld which can also be docked to a TV. While very interesting, Nintendo has chosen to focus exclusively on gaming for now. Video streaming capabilities are expected to be added later on, but none are present on the device right now. With regards to set-top boxes, Apple appears to finally be working on a 4K and HDR version of its Apple TV. Currently, it's the only major TV platform which hasn't got that capability yet. NVIDIA pushed out a new version of its SHIELD TV at CES">CES, where Amazon">Amazon announced that it is licensing its Fire TV OS to Smart TV brands, similar to how Roku TV and Android TV work. Amazon also significantly overhauled the user interface of its Fire TV software. Roku is finally deprecating its old legacy SDK in favour of the much more versatile and pretty SceneGraph SDK. Outside of the major players, Caavo announced a set-top box to connect them all, although the price is very high at $400. Meanwhile, the shift in political power in the US has resulted in a new FCC which is unlikely to force any changes to the operator set-top box landscape in the US.

More than half of OTT-homes take multiple services

Of these multi-OTT households, 81% use Netflix plus some other service or combination of services, typically Amazon or Hulu. “Not only are more households subscribing to OTT video services than ever before, but also the average number of subscriptions per household is increasing as well. The OTT video pie getting bigger, and it is getting deeper as well,” said Brett Sappington, senior director of research, Parks Associates. “What we are seeing is consumers adding to the number of sources that they use to access interesting content. This growth is critical. It means that video services do not necessarily have to displace a Netflix or other large service in order to gain market share. Services can potentially find success as a complementary offering as well.” “A common assumption is that consumers who pay for multiple subscription OTT video services would not need to, or have time to, use free OTT video service options. Yet, we find the opposite to be the case. Only 30% of households subscribing to one subscription service use at least one free, ad-supported online video service,” Sappington said. “That number jumps to 47% of households subscribing to three subscription services and 63% if a household subscribes to five or more services.” Parks Associates’ OTT Video Market Tracker has research services for North America and Europe to track the content offerings, business strategies, and subscription numbers for OTT services in these regions. Additional data from these services include: with the exception of Netflix and Amazon Prime, OTT services are experiencing churn rates exceeding 50% of their subscriber base. 69% of US broadband households subscribe to at least one OTT video service (3Q 2017). More than 50% of US broadband households that use OTT services subscribe to multiple OTT video services, compared to 20% in 2014. Source: Broadband TV News