-Describe Vecima Networks and the company’s core focus?

Vecima Networks focuses on developing integrated hardware and scalable software solutions for broadband access, content delivery and telematics. We build technologies that transform content delivery and storage, enable high-capacity broadband network access, and streamline data analytics.

–When was the company founded and how has its strategy changed since then?

The company that became Vecima Networks was founded in 1988 with a primary focus on designing and building hardware used by several large technology providers to the service provider space. Over time the strategy shifted from building hardware for others, to building hardware and software for direct sale to the world’s largest network operators. With the acquisition of Concurrent Technology in early 2018, Vecima gained a nimble software company with a rich heritage in the video streaming and storage market, dating back to the earliest days of video-on-demand. Today Vecima is able to solve the challenges media and broadband professionals face with scalable end-to-end delivery and access solutions.

–Who do you see as your biggest competitors and how do you differentiate yourself?

We have a varied business with plenty of competitors but, in terms of the video market, we view AWS/Elemental and Velocix as our two primary competitors. We differentiate ourselves in two ways: offering true compute / cloud agnostic solutions and moving faster than anyone else to meet our customers’ changing commercial and technology requirements.

–What do you see as the biggest opportunities in the video / technology space and what are the biggest challenges?

For the video industry as a whole, our biggest opportunity is to continue our march towards unfettered access to high value content enabled by ubiquitous broadband access. The biggest challenge is predicting consumer trends and providing them with the content they want, where and when they want it. With content costs increasing, and the sobering costs of migrating various access networks to next-generation, ultra-high capacity technologies, the consumer trend of moving away from single content aggregators can make traditional business cases difficult to justify.

–What innovation or development do you think has had the biggest impact on the video market as it stands today?

For me it’s clearly the development of a nearly infinite content library. The infinite library has driven drastic changes in access networks, CDNs, user interfaces, consumer behaviour, and even how and by whom content itself is created.

How do you think the video market and viewing habits will look five years from now?

I see consumers willing to spend more on truly high value content, especially content which lends itself to creating a community of viewership. Live sports is an excellent, obvious example of this, but so are the ultra-popular episodic offerings we’re seeing emerge and get better and better every year. At the same time viewing habits will continue to evolve with more people consuming more of the infinite content library than the year before.

These two habits will lead to three main requirements for us as an industry: continue creating content that people love and connect to as large geographically dispersed communities; make the infinite content library readily available to any subscriber on any access network, on any device; and enable increasingly compelling user interfaces, differentiated quality, and unique services bundles.

For Vecima Networks, we have to enable our customers to deliver the content at a higher quality than anyone else and help solve the capacity and reach problems of tomorrow.

-Describe Edgeware and the company’s core focus.

Edgeware spent its first 15 years developing products to solve internet issues to enable the delivery of video content. We introduced our video-optimised content delivery network (CDN) portfolio that enables the delivery of modern TV and video services from the edge of the network and at huge scale.

Over the years, we have increasingly been working to modify the TV stream in order to make TV work on a variety of devices and screens glitch-free. This includes personalising the stream for the user through dynamic ad insertion, made possible by our increasingly popular segmentation, packaging and Ad Enabler products.

We’ve recently made our award-winning content processing technology available through the Edgeware Cloud Service, which allows users to benefit from Edgeware’s technology expertise and cloud hosting in one entity.

Our content processing technologies such as Virtual Channel Creation and Cavena-based OCR subtitling – giving customers everything they need to prepare TV content for OTT delivery – are also included in the cloud service.

Edgeware currently has more than 200 customers in 70 countries around the world and is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with staff across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

-When was the company founded and how has its strategy changed since then?

When the company was founded in 2004, the main strategy was to help telecoms operators roll out a TV service with DSL and FTTH broadband and triple-play proposition. This service was PayTV via IPTV.

Edgeware initially focused on the large amount of data required for VOD time-shift capabilities. Our CDN and Live-to-VOD products began to address its challenges, including the huge volumes of unicast video traffic – especially when the linear base service evolved with IP-enabled capabilities. The solution was storing the most popular content far out at the edge of the network. But at this time, our focus remained on IPTV.

With more connected portable devices coming to market, and broadband speed increasing, our focus expanded over time to also cover HTTP delivery for TVE and OTT. It introduced another product area, one that addresses the preparation and adaptation of video required for OTT TV distribution. This includes segmentation of the video stream and packaging of the segment into HTTP protocols.

The emergence of OTT and growing number of broadcasters going direct-to-consumer opened up an opportunity to expand our portfolio with ad insertion capabilities. As the evolution towards HTTP and OTT delivery continues, more and more people were asking, and continue to ask, how TV can be transformed with internet and digitalisation.

Our latest contribution to this shift is our Virtual Channel Creation solution, which makes it possible to create theme-based and targeted linear channels by effectively addressing user segments by interests, demographic and location in order to improve the viewing experience as well as ad stickiness. Our key capabilities in the segmentation process has motivated our latest developments, such as enabling glitch-free personalised ads, theme-based channels and the delivery of live OTT content.

-Who do you see as your biggest competitors and how do you differentiate yourself?

We operate in a very competitive space, from international CDN and cloud platform providers such as Akamai, CenturyLink and AWS, to solution providers and generalists with wide portfolios and end-to-end propositions. There’s also a continuous flow of new software companies and open source alternatives coming on the scene.

In the IPTV domain, differentiation is based on performance, scalability and TCO (total cost of ownership). It’s embedded within our DNA; we use it to stand out. However, the HTTP and OTT domain is different. New values such as flexibility, speed of innovation and how easy the solution is to integrate and orchestrate are increasingly important. It’s key to differentiate your offering by having unique features and functionality.

With 15 years of experience delivering video over IP networks, we have a lot of competence and innovations facilitating the delivery, but also expertise in how the TV concept can be evolved.

-What do you see as the biggest opportunities in the video / technology space and what are the biggest challenges?

Discussions about how digitalisation will change how you work and result in lower operational costs are frequent yet perfectly valid. It is, however, not the most important discussion to have. The biggest opportunity with digitalisation is transforming the concept of TV.

IP and digitalisation allow you to create a direct, interactive relationship with the viewer. You can adapt and personalise the experience while capitalising your brand and content. You can utilise different screens and formats across different platforms by connecting an online TV with the web and social media. It can be described as unbundling technically in order to personalise, and then unbundling conceptually from the TV set in order to capitalise across platforms.

However, bandwidth is one persistent challenge. Broadband must be built out to manage the traffic, which can take time. The other challenge is managing all streams in multi-network and multi-CDN environments, while being able to measure and manage the quality. In a fiercely competitive industry, it’s important to innovate in terms of format and service, but when doing so, not fail in delivering the expected quality, which remains very high.

-What innovation or development do you think has had the biggest impact on the video market as it stands today?

Time-shift capabilities changed the way people consume TV, from being tied to a viewing timeframe to having the option to watch whenever suitable.

Multi-screen capabilities have also greatly influenced today’s video market. The singular screen TV set has been made redundant thanks to portable devices, such as smartphones and tablets, which take TV content anywhere at any time.

-How do you think the video market and viewing habits will look five years from now?

A combination of international giants with greater budgets will ramp up fiction and entertainment formats, complemented by local news providers, documentaries and drama with smaller budgets. We’ll see the borders between classical print and TV blur as newspapers increasingly use video, as well as social media networks publishing premium video.

Eventually, and given developments and its direction over the last few years, TV will grow to become a social media product. And with mobile phones enabling owners to capture content quickly and easily, we anticipate user-generated content will greatly motivate this. This will differ quite a bit depending on market and age group. However, it’s clear where we are going. In evolved markets with good broadband, age groups and segments (20-50 years old) will choose streaming TV over the internet by default, regardless of content genre.

As on-demand viewing increases, live events will be the main driver behind linear viewing. Alternatively, a personalised linear channel, like a personalised playlist, will be stitched together for the viewer. New TV formats will increasingly utilise the opportunity to personalise, but also interact – opening new modes of storytelling and ways to enjoy sports and e-sports.

Portable devices will gain ground as alternative screens both for short(er) form content, especially for small kids where the touchscreen element adds an interactive dimension to the viewing. Large TV screens will remain the preferred screen of choice for premium content thanks to its lean-back sofa experience, implying that portable screens are compliments rather than alternatives.

-Describe Vewd and the company’s core focus?

Vewd is the world’s largest smart TV OTT software provider. Companies like Sony, Philips, Sagemcom, Swisscom, Verizon, Vestel and many more rely on us to make OTT and hybrid TV work on almost 50 million devices each year.

Our primary focus is to build the products and services that help smart TV manufacturers, Pay TV operators and content owners navigate the increasingly complex and fast-evolving TV landscape to produce successful and timely outcomes with their OTT offerings.

-When was the company founded and how has its strategy changed since then?

Vewd started as Opera TV, a division of Opera Software, back in 2002 when it delivered browser-based rendering technology to Canal Plus Technologies. This was used to enhance the world’s first interactive TV middleware. Soon after, the current core management team coalesced around developing software to render UIs and stream video on the Nintendo Wii, which was truly the world’s first streaming TV device. In 2007, the product portfolio expanded to help Philips launch the world’s first smart TV.

Since then, the smart TV industry has evolved rapidly, inspiring also the Pay TV industry, and Vewd quickly grew its blue-chip customer base to include major TV brands and leading Pay TV operators by focusing on a unique product development and partnership approach. At one end, Vewd pushed the boundaries to build the market’s most modern products that meet both consumer and customer demand. At the other end, Vewd partnered and invested heavily with silicon vendors to ensure its products were always ready on a range of silicon chipsets, thereby hitting critical market windows for customer product launches.

Today, as the industry’s only independent, white-labelled software provider that offers solutions for hybrid TV and OTT, Vewd has focused on widening the availability of its product offering to achieve massive scale. Vewd’s products are designed to be completely turn-key or modular and available across all key silicon vendors, across any OS, across any form factor, and from entry-level to high-end devices. Furthermore, Vewd allows its customers to lead with their brand and allows for truly differentiated offerings.

-Who do you see as your biggest competitors and how do differentiate yourself?

Depending on the Vewd product in question, key competitors could range from in-house solutions from large corporations (eg. Samsung Tizen, LG WebOS, Comcast Xfinity) for our modular software, and large Internet companies (eg. Google’s Android TV, Amazon’s Fire TV, Roku TV) for our turn-key software.

As an independent provider, Vewd differentiates itself by developing key software modules that can be deployed cross-platform: any silicon vendor, middleware, form factor or OS. For example, nearly 90% of Android TVs include Vewd’s software modules, enabling critical features such as hybrid TV that allow for these TVs to be sold. Furthermore, for our turn-key software, Vewd OS, we have highly optimised our software to enable smart TV features on entry-level TVs and selected a white-label approach to allow OEMs and operators to lead with their brand and differentiate their offerings. This helps our customers fulfil their product vision.

Finally, by ensuring our business model compliments rather than competes with our customers’ ambitions, we’re able to think long term and deliver to them high-quality software that secures their annual deployments.

-What do you see as the biggest opportunities in the video/technology space and what are the biggest challenges?

There are a number of vibrant opportunities in the video space right now. We see a bright future and considerable growth for live TV. This skews especially to sports content. According to eMarketer, sports digital media rights will have substantial growth over the next three to five years (11.5%). But traditional TV rights will see only slow growth (3.2%).

There’s also an opportunity for AVOD services as SVOD services become entrenched. We’ll see if there’s an upper bound with so many premium SVOD services demanding a share of the consumer’s wallet. With 42% of US households having three SVOD subscriptions, the coming launch of Disney+ will be a great litmus test. Will the number of households stacking four subscriptions increase? If it does top out, more viewing will take place on AVOD services. This also implies there is a coming boom in targeted advertising opportunities.

On the technology side, Hybrid TV standards like HbbTV and ATSC 3.0 provide tremendous opportunities and new business models for free-to-air operators, who are making a comeback in the US and expanding in the EU. HbbTV Operator Apps, which create a virtual set-top box in software, can help operators reduce capital expenditure and even do away with set-top boxes altogether. We expect more of the free-to-air operators, in particular, to embrace Operator Apps this year.

5G will have a tremendous impact, although the current US-China trade war and sanctions against Huawei may slow the rollout somewhat. 5G can expand the reach of long-form 4K and HD content, solve last mile connectivity into more homes. We should expect 5G-connected HDMI dongles to bring streaming video into more homes.

These opportunities are balanced by several thorny challenges. First, content production, discovery, and personalisation. The current discovery model is biased towards the large players because they have enough user data to make good recommendations. But as programming options expand and as more heavyweights enter the game, the sheer vastness of the content available becomes a problem. Is all of this production viable? Can the amount of production be sustained to keep undiscovered creators motivated? These are questions we’ll know the answer to in several years.

The slow pace of linear TV advertising budgets moving to fund free OTT services. Corresponding to the growth of AVOD, we see a tremendous opportunity in the space, but the shift of budgets from linear TV to OTT is quite slow at the moment. The pace needs to improve to support continued growth.

Lastly, the economics of 4K and 8K content delivery are a major challenge. Transport costs are still high and create OPEX disadvantages. This acts as a brake on adoption and deployment even though consumer uptake of 4K TVs is better than anyone expected.

-What innovation or development do you think has had the biggest impact on the video market as it stands today?

If I had to pick just one of the recent shifts we’ve witnessed, I would pick the advent of IP-delivered video and the opportunity it provides for consumption on any screen, at any location. This has led to increased viewership and engagement on all forms of content from live to on-demand. We’re still in the early days of this massive opportunity.

-How do you think the video market and viewing habits will look five years from now?

First, OTT share of total video, in hours per day, will outpace linear TV but not replace it. We’ll see Gen X and Gen Y drive this shift, consuming more on-demand IP-delivered video across screens. Gen Z will enjoy the same video within a more engaging lean-forward experience, much like we see with Twitch. Hence, we can anticipate new technology providing the tools and distribution paths for content creators to bring these Gen Z experiences also onto the big screen.

In the on-demand video market, major OTT players will be well established and we will see clear global and regional winners. While not all SVOD services will survive, some will continue through consolidation or acquisition.

5G will begin to make its mark and make OTT access truly ubiquitous and available on a multitude of devices. Additionally, codecs and standards will evolve to support wider OTT availability, lowering the economic barriers that exist today.

-Describe Simplestream and the company’s core focus?

As a software company at heart, we continue to evolve our product set to enable broadcasters, telcos and content owners to stay ahead of the curve and embrace new ways to increase their reach, understand their audience and most importantly make revenue beyond traditional ways of TV distribution.

The way we consume entertainment has changed forever and with the likes of Netflix and Prime Video setting the bar high in terms of features and functionality, for many broadcasters it is an unfamiliar and complex area to manage.  That’s why we offer the simplest way for operators to create next generation TV services for broadcast, sport and media brands.

We saw early on how cloud technology would play a big role in future service provision and we’ve gone a long way down the track to ensure that our cloud-based solutions for content acquisition, encoding, packaging, distribution and management make our customers more efficient, cost-effective and profitable.

-When was the company founded and how has its strategy changed since then?

The company was founded in 2010. In one sense our strategy has remained the same – produce end-to-end solutions, combining systems we build with best-of-breed third party solutions, that cost-effectively provide the power and flexibility that enables operators of any size to match the service offerings of the media giants.

We regularly run our own RFP (request for proposal) process so that we are always innovating and staying ahead of competition – we continue to explore new verticals that we belive we can make a difference in. One of the biggest changes is that we now increasingly work with larger broadcasters, such as Channel4, UKTV, AMC, Sony and A+E Networks as well as leading European telcos such as Nova in Iceland.

-Who do you see as your biggest competitors and how do differentiate yourself?

We don’t have many direct competitors that can combine the end-to-end nature of our solutions with the scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness we offer – that is our USP.

–What do you see as the biggest opportunities in the video / technology space and what are the biggest challenges?

The market for OTT platforms has traditionally been skewed in favour of large, global players like Netflix and Amazon who have the capital and infrastructure to manage and deploy them. These OTT video giants have dominated the market by investing in orginal content while the smaller players find it difficult to gain audience share. However, we are starting to see customers that can compete through specialisation, either through language and localisation or through the niche nature of their content.

The demand for additional content services beyond broadcast continues to grow and remains the most crucial element that helps channels and networks of all sizes to meet this growing demand. Smaller players are finding success through spcialisation and they can operate profitably through the cost-effectiveness, flexibility and low-CAPEX nature of cloud-based technology. 

-What innovation or development do you think has had the biggest impact on the video market as it stands today?

Multi-platform consumption enabled by streaming is now the norm for viewers of live and on demand content for all age groups. The box set bingers continue to erode the broadcast schedule model. As a result, broadcast platforms such as Sky, Virgin and BT have all opened their platforms to the services such as Netflix to stay relevant.

-How do you think the video market and viewing habits will look five years from now?

I think set top boxes will be a minority interest and broadcast hardware companies will transition towards being 100% software businesses.

We’ll see some giants such as Amazon and Apple selling TV’s with their own software such as Alexa, Fire TV and Apple TV built in.

The biggest change will be that the linear TV schedule will no longer be relavant to the vast majority of viewers. There will no longer be one EPG for everyone and instead each TV user will have a totally personalised viewing experience accessed through AI-based automated scheduling.

I think the inevitable consequence of all these developments is that there will be fewer broadcasters around in 5 years than there are today, but conversely there will be a 100 times more niche streaming SVOD services.

-Describe JW Player and the company’s core focus.

JW Player started as one of the first open source video players, and over the last decade has developed into a leading video technology company.

We are focused on creating the future of video for media companies and brands around the world. We do this by creating all of the products and features that these companies need to be successful in video – from the player to the platform / CMS to analysing the data to monetisation and generating revenue from those views. 

-When was the company founded and how has its strategy changed since then?

JW Player was founded in 2008 and as the video industry has evolved so have we. We initially were focused on providing a player for that developers and publishers could use to distribute video content.

Over time, we found that larger publishers and broadcasters were interested in using our video platform. So while we’ve kept the open, flexible approach that was core to our early days, we’ve also focused on building the most robust online video platform in the market.

With that in mind, we have pioneered a number of innovations that enable enterprise publishers and broadcasters to drive more revenue with video and data. This includes driving ad yield and monetisation opportunities with solutions like Video Player Bidding, as well as building OTT apps that enable our customers to engage their audiences wherever they are.

-Who do you see as your biggest competitors and how do differentiate yourself?

Our biggest competitors are media companies who try and build their own video technology, and YouTube.

When media companies and brands turn to JW Player it’s for two main reasons – first, they know they can drive higher CPMs and fill rates using our bufferless player because it delivers high-quality and fast playback that keeps viewers engaged with the best video experience on the web.

Or second, they turn to JW Player for video products and solutions they can’t find anywhere else, such as Article Matching and Video Player Bidding. Article Matching is a proprietary tool that automatically inserts relevant videos into posts based on the context of the article, increasing views. While Video Player Bidding is a unique solution that brings the power of header bidding to video.

-What do you see as the biggest opportunities in the video / technology space and what are the biggest challenges?

As new generations are growing up without cable TV, there’s a tremendous opportunity for our customers to entertain and inform them with digital video. We are already seeing entire new classes of publishers that offer sports, shows, or educational content that would never have made its way onto linear TV but still drive large, loyal audiences.

The biggest risk is that most of this digital growth is going to the big platforms — FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google). That’s why we see it as our mission to enable independent publishers to compete with these platforms by offering an equally impressive user experience and monetisation engine on their owned and operated properties.

-What innovation or development do you think has had the biggest impact on the video market as it stands today?

Obviously, the smartphone has changed the world, including video consumption. We continue to see pretty astounding growth in mobile video, especially as many populations around the world effectively leapfrog computers and televisions to go mobile-only for their information and entertainment.

I also believe mobile devices will in the longer term be powering TV experiences, at the expense of smart TVs or set-top boxes. Technologies like Airplay and Chromecast remove barriers to entry for smaller brands in a similar way to how HTML5 and Flash have enabled them to effectively start publishing video 10 years ago.

-How do you think the video market and viewing habits will look five years from now?

In five years the terms “digital” and “OTT” will be obsolete. Low Latency streaming and 5G connectivity will take full hold and while linear television will still exist the vast majority of content will be viewed on connected devices. And linear TV itself will mostly be powered by IP based technologies.

“Bundles” as we think of them now will now be a combination of streaming services and cable channels will be the “added value” given to consumers.