Last week's Streaming Media East show in New York City was once again crammed with content, with five concurrent tracks ranging from virtual reality and 4K streaming to the business of OTT and benefits of a subscription-based vs. advertising-based model. Here are some of the most memorable comments by top execs from the NFL, Comcast, HBO, MP & Silva, SkyVR, Twitch, and more.
Shannon Rutherford, Director of Digital Media Video Operations, NFL
On the challenges of monetizing the live-streaming experience:
The thing that has been an exciting and fun challenge for us is making the digital live viewing experience better than television. There are a lot of things you can do on phone or tablet device that you can't do on traditional television, so that is a very exciting field to be in, and part of that is how you are going to monetize. There have been some interesting challenges that I personally have to solve on making sure we can maximize the monetization. Obviously, [for] broadcasters who have rights to NFL games, those pods are very highly valued, so you cannot lose opportunity on those pods and want to make sure you can maximize. For example, if a user enters [an NFL live stream] mid ad-break, what do they see? Do they see the broadcast ads that are behind it? Or do we dynamically insert right away?
On the need for standard advertising metrics for OTT:
What do publishers and buyers want from a metric standpoint [for OTT]? Do they just want straight impressions? What is going to be the standard going forward, so we can all implement technology that is going to deliver the right metrics. Some require Nielsen, some ComScore. Some require impressions from an ad server; figuring that piece will also be important. We need stability [because] there is a desire to personalize and target the inventory.
William Mao, VP, Digital, MP & Silva
On subscription-based vs. advertising-based models for OTT:
Platforms like YouTube and Twitch have demonstrated that you can build a business without that paywall model as your cornerstone. But, on the other end of the spectrum, you have those [platforms] that were entirely SVOD-focused from the start. It's just a matter of your understanding your viewer base and their willingness to pay if you move forward with a paywall service and if you want to [be] entirely dependent on one revenue source. The whole concept of launching OTT and digital services for a lot of traditional broadcasters is to have another line of business. I would think the same applies to having an AVOD and SVOD and even PPV offering.
On the value of live sports as la carte and subscription-based offerings:
Sports lends itself really well to live streaming as an individually priced service. Even if you think back to when there weren't all these digital and OTT offerings and you were just looking at cable TV, certain sports were already being offered as la carte offerings, like PPV boxing and WWE wrestling. In that regard, it's carried over to the digital side where niche offers [are] built around rugby and Willow Cricket or individual [digital] networks like WWE are launching. Sports is a situation where the time life of content is the shortest: the value of live vs. SVOD catch-up is a bigger chasm for sports than for entertainment content.
Noah Fenn, Head of Video Sales & Strategy, AOL, on the challenges of promoting an OTT channel to the masses:
Discovery in an OTT landscape is very different from discovery in a pure-play digital-online landscape. In OTT, it's not the same feed and sharing structure. It's also not necessarily connected to your phone, so discovery comes down to turning on your device and seeing a bunch of apps. How do you promote the apps? Ultimately, there is a comfort level in the OTT space where you need to be in a certain threshold of [well-known] apps to scale. At the end of the day, it is a very tough transition at the start, but, when you hit that critical mass and you become a must-have app to download, you can attain scale for sure.
Dan Burkhart, CEO, Recurly, on why OTT data may be lying to you:
For example, free trial subscribers are very different than subscribers that come with purchase intent. They have very different churn characteristics and very different lifetime value. So, if you are looking at all of your different marketing promotions and channel partners and just looking at your lifetime value, you're missing the point. What was the price point? Was this customer coming in through a free trial or not? Did they pay right out of the gate? Once you can start to segment your audience in that kind of a way, you find a much clearer understanding for where you can start pruning your underperforming channels and doubling down on over-performing and higher-yield channels.
Allen Broome, VP, IP Video Engineering, Comcast, on customer experience:
In a lot of the testing we're doing on UHD, until we get to screens over 85 in., the average consumer can't tell the difference between HD and UHD. What we're seeing from a quality perspective is high dynamic range [having a huge impact], and that's what we're pursuing. We're going to have some HDR content out fairly soon.
Chris Wagner, EVP, NeuLion, on the current limitations of 4K:
On the content side, 4K is not going to go through the traditional set-top box. It will be delivered via IP, via OTT. If you're a cable provider, broadband is your most profitable product. There are cable providers launching 4K-specific channels using hybrid set-top boxes, such as Rogers in Canada, and 4K trucks can produce 1080p and 1080i. So it's coming. We'll do around 10 4K events this year. [With] 4K sports, if you haven't seen it - we're talking 60 frames, four times the resolution - it's noticeable. It's an experience that puts yo
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