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Since 2012, the number of original scripted shows introduced each year has been increasing at a dizzying pace. Past studies have found that most consumers are happy with this embarrassment of riches, saying they spend more of their time than ever before watching shows they “really like”.
But is it possible to have too much of a good thing and do viewers even know where to start?
With the continued evolution of the TV industry, established operators are working to develop their winning strategy to defend their existing business, while tapping into the consumers’ love affair with SVOD and other services. By taking the user experience as the essential element for future business decisions, they will be able to attract and retain the most valuable consumer segments, just as the distinction between pay-TV and OTT is blurring.
In this series of articles, we will explain broadcasting for IT engineers. Television is an illusion, there are no moving pictures and todays broadcast formats are heavily dependent on the decisions engineers made in the 1930’s and 1940’s. In this article we look at video frames, frequencies used, and what they mean in broadcasting.
Live online video is booming worldwide, especially over mobile, but with big regional differences in drivers. The main factors in most cases are growing availability of OTT access to live sports and improved quality of service (QoS) over cellular networks. These factors are conspiring to boost consumption not just by volume but also duration of viewing, with 4G mobile services increasingly conducive to longer form content, whether on demand or live. Indeed, there is a fast growing move up to various formats of HD for online services even on mobile devices, according to recent data from USA-based video acquisitions firm LiveU.
Advertising on OTT video services is growing explosively, accounting for 30% of all video ad spend by the end of 2017 compared with 8% 14 months earlier, according to data from video ad marketplace SpotX owned by German broadcaster RTL.
Television broadcasting has become more complex with the advent of OTT services. Playout is no longer the final point of quality control. CDN edge points, targeted ad-insertion, multi-language support, and event based channels require the expert scrutiny of broadcast engineers.
The widely held belief that SVOD (subscription VOD) services reduce piracy by making premium content readily available via a legal route has been challenged by an experiment conducted by a group of US and Portuguese academics.
It has been an active year for online video streaming standards with momentum and membership building around several different groupings aimed at ensuring consistent and reliable low latency transmission, especially for live services.
