Sep192013September 19, 2013August 31, 20210Commentby Nicolas Weil

[IBC 2013 Talk] The Future of OTT Platforms

Posted in Frameworks, Open Source, OTT, Workflow

Today many content providers must change of OTT platform after the first implementation of their service (or even before first deployment) because it’s a dead end : either the platform is deceptive in terms of overall features coverage or missing sub-features, or it doesn’t evolve quickly enough compared to the competitive pressure of premium OTT markets. And we can’t really blame the content providers for this, as it’s always a very difficult decision to take when you have to choose your OTT platform service/solution provider: you are pressured by the competition and you need a fast time-to-market, and in the same time you would like to ensure long-term platform evolution capacity and technical control on it. Usually you end up with the solution offering the quickest time-to-market – or pretending so. You also end up with feature zones unfinished or finally covered with the help a third party solution – thus clearly challenging the idea of decent one-stop-shop OTT platform provider…


Apr012013April 1, 2013August 31, 20212Commentsby Nicolas Weil

EBU BroadThinking 2013 – the state of the art rendezvous for OTT and Hybrid TV // DAY 2 & DEMOS Report

Posted in Broadcast, CDN, DRM, Encoding, OTT, Repackaging, Second-Screen, Workflow

Nothing was more welcome after day 1 of EBU BroadThinking 2013 than a good night of sleep, in order to reset the tech hype counters and make some mental room for two new sessions on broadcasters’ CDNs and the latest advances of #hybrid platforms. What would be the best broadcasters’ CDN architectures today, what would be their smartest (green) evolutions, would CDN-Federation standards finally bring interop reality over hopes, what would be the most advanced deployments and future of HbbTV, how it compares with YouView in the UK : day 2 agenda was looking quite attractive – and indeed the presentations were packed with valuable informations and experience feedbacks.


Mar302013March 30, 2013August 31, 20212Commentsby Nicolas Weil

EBU BroadThinking 2013 – the state of the art rendezvous for OTT and Hybrid TV // DAY 1 Report

Posted in Broadcast, CDN, Curations, DRM, Encoding, OTT, Repackaging, Second-Screen, Workflow

Geneva in late March doesn’t feel as wild as a Las Vegas boulevard, but still there was a reasonable amount of gaming excitement at the EBU headquarters, where several events were following each other, beginning with a #dash Interoperability Forum meeting which was closely followed by the BroadThinking event, where industry actors and broadcasters come to show off their latest implementations advances and/or share the results of their real-life deployments or research studies. A good way of managing the transition between TV Connect and NAB…
Where Broadcast meets Broadband : that’s the promise of the EBU’s hybrid event which flies between industry competition, standardization efforts and broadcasters’ realpolitik – all wrapped in a warm and funny ambiance provided by the various speakers and the EBU team. The 2013 edition was a major success because it allowed the participants to get a rather good idea of the general trends of the industry, and at the same time to go deep in technology when needed, while having opportunities to discover edge tech demos on the lobby attending the conference room.


Feb032013February 3, 2013June 24, 20210Commentby Nicolas Weil

Player, encoding & repackaging strategies for multiscreen OTT projects

Posted in DRM, Encoding, OTT, Repackaging, Streaming, Workflow

Last December, I was speaking (in French – did my best for the English subtitles) during a webinar organized by DBee, which topic was “How to address the challenges of #multiscreen diffusion”…


Nov232012November 23, 2012January 18, 20151Commentby Nicolas Weil

OTT Video Services : Trends and Technologies [slide deck]

Posted in DRM, Encoding, OTT, Repackaging, Second-Screen, Streaming, Workflow

This study aims at isolating the main OTT Video Services trends (End-user driven & Production driven) and at pointing out relevant technologies with their maturity estimation and corresponding Vendor + Technology offer tuples.


Jun162012June 16, 2012August 28, 202115Commentsby Nicolas Weil

How to build a Netflix-like multiscreen OTT service (part 2)

Posted in OTT

As multiscreen OTT/TV Everywhere offers do proliferate while each video tradeshow approaches and connected devices multiply, it’s difficult to monitor all of them and get a 100% accurate idea on who’s got the best offer. Basically your ideal technical partner will most likely be a unique target depending on your background (telco/content owner/TV channel…), your needs (target devices, business models, time to market…), your workflow constraints (CMS, billing, deployed transcoding engines, already deployed apps…) and your budget. Nevertheless, what I tried to do first is to isolate a list of actors whose offer is end-to-end and sufficiently versatile to cover the most common use cases and devices, then provide a complementary list with actors who provide less information but are also known in this market, and then wrap up the post with a bunch of ideas on how you could DoItYourself with less integrated/locking-in solutions. This way, you will end-up with a complete panorama of available technical solutions in mind.