17 Oct
IBC 2019 is over. Approximately 56’000 visitors, over 1’700 exhibitors, full 5 days of exhibiting, networking, and meetings. Below is our overview of our partners’ activities at the IBC 2019.
Anevia stands out in our eyes with their storage solution, called EDS, which simplifies scaling, improves reliability, and cuts costs. We believe this is the right approach to the challenges mentioned above. Ultra-low latency and DAI are a must, and Anevia is a serious player in this field.
Android TV is here to stay. Google is strengthening their positioning in the operators’ world which they proved with novel products and many successful projects. They are focused on expanding their partnership universe with various relevant allies.
AWS Elemental demonstrated their End-to-End Cloud Workflows for content Creation through distribution, and Beenius is part of it. No need to look for rack space, power, cooling. Beenius is all cloud deployable, and interoperable with AWS Elemental components.
Bitmovin has always been developer-centric, providing a robust API framework. They started to provide web UI, which is an excellent tool for less-tech audience. Per-title encoding and the speed of the encoding is a strong argument to choose Bitmovin. And not to mention their Analytics and player.
BroadPeak – An innovative partner that provided solutions like IPTV-DASH even before its true value was recognized by the market. Imagine using Widevine on IPTV STB with multicast. And we’re not talking about CAS. Also, Ultra-low-latency and DAI is something the market is demanding, and Broadpeak is ready.
CastLabs – They demonstrated PRESTOplay, what we like to call “Exoplayer on steroids”. It gives us a chance to have unified workflows among different platforms and of course, works perfectly with Castlabs DRMToday. We’re happy to see regular features and bugfix releases.
Our partner Castoola presented the joint advertising solution with ThinkAnalytics. They have demonstrated how to build clusters and profiling viewers based on their behavior using content metadata. This allows advertisers to segment viewers based on various demographic, geographic, frequential, and timeframe factors and delivers personalized ads on top of linear TV. But it’s not just advertisers and agencies who can reap the benefits of Addressable TV. Broadcasters and TV operators can make use of the technology to improve the UX and unlock an entirely new revenue stream.
Edgeware proved once again its ability to react to market demands and included a software-based OTT solution last year already. Going a step further in providing a value-added service, OCR subtitling seems to be the right ingredient to add. Streampilot gives you a leverage to balance among multiple CDNs based on several types of rules, from business to technical. This is becoming a must in the continuous loop of cost optimization and service availability improvements.
Harmonic – A solid partner with a wide range of video processing and delivery products. Their most recent addition is the Dynamic Ad Insertion.
Many of our partnerships were project-initiated, and Irdeto is one of them. And then we realized they have much more to provide than what they are traditionally known for (on-prem DRM/CAS), like cloud-based multi-DRM solution. Or an exciting product for Android TV, called App Watch, which gives the operators control over what apps are installed on customer’s devices. We believe this is a great tool that will be requested by the operators who won’t take any chance of losing the user by letting the competitor’s apps run on their devices.
Time-to-market is the key, and Mediakind provided the door. We believe that on-prem encoding will remain the only option for some telcos, whereas many will adopt the SaaS models as offered now by MediaKind. The role of the SI slightly changes, but who should put the pieces together into a working workflow other than SI?
A few years ago, we decided to introduce a more extensive recommendation engine as an alternative to Beenius built-in engine. After several rounds of discussions, we decided to go with ThinkAnalytics, which proved to be the right approach, as the results already show in production. But the content recommendation is not where we stopped the dance with them. We went a few steps further to enable AI and machine learning-backed targeted advertising. This is our next bet we believe in.
Last but not least, Verimatrix, our long-term and proven partner, who went through some organizational changes recently. This gave them a comprehensive product portfolio, which will strengthen their position in the security market. A strong emphasis is on cloud offering, which we believe is a logical reaction to market demands.
We have already started preparing for IBC 2020 and we are excited to meet you there.
