August 2014
www.tvbeurope.com
Vogt warms to any mention of the internet or broadband, and the fact that 70 per cent of internet bandwidth is consumed by video is one of his key reference stats.
future
“And we get some really smart people that have been working on this technology for years.”
Going to hit a wall Vogt believes that companies are still lining up on two sides of a pendulum.
“On one side, people are beginning to recognise that technology needs to be software oriented, and then you have a set of companies that are still in the age of proprietary technology. At some point, they are going to hit a wall,” he said. Aligning with big customer roadmaps means taking a view on many areas. For example, looking at the Channel-in-a-Box (CiaB) market, Vogt expounds a clear ambition. “We have a strategy to leapfrog the CiaB market. Playout from the cloud and automation from the cloud is really the future of how content is going to be played out and moved throughout the consumer marketplace,” he said. Imagine has got a second- generation CiaB platform and there certainly will be a market for this for a few years, surely. “Yes. But I believe the future of playout and automation is going to be done in a new way — that is taking advantage of the virtualised network data centre world that we are moving into, and leveraging the cloud,” said Vogt. “I am convinced that’s the future for playout, and I think we are in a unique place because we have really shifted our roadmap to be one that is software focused versus one that is hardware dependent. It gives our customers a lot more fl exibility: think how many people would love to turn up certain channels across many different languages for 30 days
and then tear it back down and do something else.”
Vogt warms to any mention of the internet or broadband, and the fact that 70 per cent of internet bandwidth is consumed by video is one of his key reference stats. “Video is going to dominate our market, and because so much time and energy is being spent on ‘how do I move this content more effi ciently and more cost effectively’ you are seeing the scarcity around spectrum,” he said. “There is a correlation between the TIA (Telecommunications Industry Association) and the IABM. Those two organisations need to be collaborating because they are supplier organisations.” Spectrum has been a prickly subject for many years, so what is Vogt’s take on the American situation? “The FCC is struggling a bit with how it balances what seems to be obvious needs versus an even playing fi eld. This is why there have been no decisions made for such a long time,” he said. “Even if the spectrum re-pack happens, it remains a super-heated topic and there are so many lobbyists promoting their own agenda. If it happens it will be great for the wireless players, and it could be very good for many of the broadcasters because most of that spectrum that broadcasters own today is not used in the same way that an AT&T, Verizon or Sprint might use it, especially in the major metropolitan areas. If you just did the forecast — video consumption tapping into the wireless world is massive. It is a real problem.”
More pressure on bandwidth Vogt acknowledges that 4K for the movies is successful, and he fi ngers the electronics industry
for creating a consumer drive for 4K sets. What people do not see is what’s happening in the middle of the market, he says. “A lot of the large broadcasters and networks have only just got through a major phase from SD to HD, which was expensive and it really didn’t net them a whole lot of incremental revenue,” he said. “They are still struggling with how they make money with 4K, and anything more than HD over the mobile network is going to put more pressure on bandwidth.”
Imagine is not back at base one, wondering if 4K is going to happen or not. It is looking at technology requirements, the technology capability gap between consumer consumption, and the desire to build the network amongst TV networks and broadcasters. “4K to a mobile device means you are going to need some pretty sophisticated encoding and transcoding technology, which is why we continue to invest in that part of the market,” said Vogt. “We think that is a key area that companies like us are going to be big winners in, as the industry moves more and more of the high quality video content to end devices over the mobile network.” If traditional content providers can build a strong subscriber base and develop a stronger relationship with the mobile operators, this allows them to create their own destiny to a certain degree. “They are not just dependent on their own broadcasting capabilities in their own traditional manner, and I certainly believe that this is spurring on a whole new thinking about how you monetise content,” he added. “With the subscriber-based model, everybody understands how they get compensated, but in a true advertising supported business model as you shift from the linear model to online, one that is OTT, it creates a highly
entrepreneurial opportunity. You have to fi gure out how to better monetise advertising content away from the traditional linear model.” Imagine is not the only company spending a lot of development time in the various areas of content exploitation, and Vogt has no illusions when it comes to the challenges. “If we can continue to stay in that food chain, to where we are providing the management tools and the campaign tools that allow users to better manage and monetise content, we are going to be in a pretty good place regardless of how the bits and streams get divided for the various delivery mechanisms,” he said. With Netfl ix and Amazon creating their own high quality dramatic content, does it mean the entry level for new players is becoming too costly in terms of content production?
“You are going to see very expensive content used to get into the market, but you can create TV series and movies much more cost effectively. And they can certainly be distributed much more cost effectively than we
TVBEurope 31 Feature
ever did before,” said Vogt. “There are lots of different business models by which you can monetise content. The ‘re-trans’ opportunity in this new world is huge. It is what created Netfl ix and HULU up until House of Cards and some of the other new content they are developing themselves. Google is creating its own content, and so is Yahoo. Broadband internet has created an opportunity, and anybody that can leverage this means to a consumer end anywhere in the world, just has limitless opportunity. This is what gets us excited.”
Vogt is talking about
“We have a very bold vision around software-defi ned networks, IP, the cloud and virtualisation — the networking technologies that are going to be required to participate in the multi-screen TV Everywhere market” Charlie Vogt, Imagine Communications
managing the whole advertising sales model and incremental monetisation, sophisticated CRM tools, playout and the way playlists are automated, and the archiving and storage of content. He concludes, “It is going to become a bigger part of the overall workfl ow, and we are going to revolutionise how that whole element gets managed in the future by leveraging virtualisation in the cloud, and IP, in a software- oriented work- fl ow.”
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