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Consolidation is a sure sign of a maturing market and this was in evidence for OTT delivery at IBC 2016. Many of the companies that first emerged as OTT specialists have been acquired, as well as those associated with cloud based delivery, software encoding and virtualization. Envivio is now part of Ericsson for example while Elemental has been acquired by Amazon Web Services, both primarily involved in software transcoding.
This year’s IBC in Amsterdam witnessed a spate of discussions and partnership announcements between providers of various components across the OTT ecosystem in a bid to assemble complete end-to-end packages. While a few players can offer all components, most of the rest cover just part of the spectrum, splitting loosely between the front end and back end. The front end embraces the UI (User Interface), playout, content curation and navigation, while the back end covers billing, subscriber management, monetization, content management, aggregation, encoding and encryption. Analytics spans both since it requires data from, and generates actions across, both domains, which is one reason why there is so much activity joining the two together.
ThinkAnalytics announced that its recommendations engine has been selected by Canadian SVOD provider, shomi, a joint venture between Rogers Communications and Shaw Media. shomi believes the combination of an elegant user interface and personalized recommendations will distance it from rivals in the fast-growing Canadian OTT sector.
W.B. Walton Enterprises makes “Walton De-Ice” satellite earth station antenna de-icing and weather protection solutions. The company will showcase its latest systems to help satellite earth stations maintain unmatched uptime in winter climates at IBC 2016 in Amsterdam.
I was all set to write my next chapter on standards and terminology when the The Broadcast Bridge published an article quoting the Olympic Broadcast Service (OBS) that said, 4K is just a Bus Stop to 8K (along with 22.2 audio channels).
Satellite Telecommunications Network (STN), a Slovenian teleport, has deployed video processing technology from AWS (Amazon Web Services) subsidiary Elemental in its unified headend for delivery of broadcast and OTT TV content in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265). This will distribute content spanning over 650 channels to subscribers worldwide.
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