40 Q&A
STRONGERTOGETHER
CLICK this icon for exhibitor profiles Taking a ‘holistic view’ of M&E industry challenges
What are the biggest challenges facing the media & entertainment (M&E) industry?
The industry has seen new competition come in to play over the past year as the popularity of online entertainment continues to grow. For traditional sports broadcasters, large social media and OTT video services are bidding and winning streaming rights to major league sports events, driving up the costs of securing rights. For non-sports OTT services, some of the film and TV show producers are starting their own OTT services and pulling back content that they have been licensing to other OTT services. This is presenting challenges in differentiating services by offering new, innovative viewing experiences to better engage and retain viewers, as well as grow their subscriber base.
How is Limelight helping customers to address these challenges? To support the continued growth of online sports and entertainment viewing,
Limelight will be focusing on expanding our CDN’s video delivery capacity and global reach with additional PoPs in strategic locations. This will provide the infrastructure to deliver high bitrate streams with broadcast quality. Specific to sports streaming, new low-latency streaming technology that delivers online video with the same latency as traditional broadcast will enable multi-screen viewing such as ‘watch together’ apps where all participants see on-field action at the same time. The low latency will also enable interactivity between stream providers and views such as live sports betting. These and other uses of this technology will enable new innovations in the viewing experience, helping to retain audiences and grow them as well.
What are the new technology trends or themes you see emerging at present? Top trends we see include more 4K viewing options with the addition of High Dynamic Range (HDR) for
improved picture quality; experimenting with augmented, virtual and mixed reality; multi-camera angle viewing options, including drone-cams; incorporation of live betting into online sports viewing; and adoption of low-latency streaming to support interactivity and multi-screen viewing.
What sets Limelight apart as a technology leader?
Limelight takes a holistic view of the challenges the [M&E] industry faces, going beyond a narrow focus on delivering video to audiences. An equally important part of the consumer experience is their interaction with the websites powering access to video content. The way to build better engagement with audiences is through better digital experiences. Fast web response times and sub-second page loads are the gold standard for performance. Limelight’s recent acquisition of Layer0 [announced in September] supplies the new
DATA-DRIVEN DASHBOARD OFFERS CLOUD CONTENT CONTROL PUBLISH
Easel TV BY ANNE MORRIS
Provider of OTT services Easel TV has rolled out its latest streaming platform, complete with an intuitive dashboard that the company claims delivers rich design editorial and data-driven control.
Available as an off-the-shelf, white-labelled, direct-to- consumer streaming service for TV, media and entertainment services, the platform provides apps on Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, Samsung, LG, web, iOS and Android. Joe Foster, CEO, Easel TV, said: “Our next-generation platform delivers strongly on all fronts, to provide the ultimate UX and customer journey. Built
Charlie Kraus, senior product marketing manager, Limelight Networks
technologies for predictive prefetch to provide highly engaging user experiences.
www.limelight.com
on data-driven architecture, it offers complete flexibility in terms of refreshing design and content in-life, without the need for continual manufacturer approval. Quick and responsive, this epitomises how we are streaming ahead by allowing our clients to drive offers, content, pricing, advertising, or any other aspect of their service, around user and service data.” With the streaming market
Easel TV’s next-generation streaming platform comes with an intuitive dashboard
turning towards more genre and thematic offerings, Easel TV claims its intuitive CMS dashboard provides a user- friendly cloud dashboard and
a comprehensive platform that helps content owners achieve “true differentiation” for consumers, rather than a one-size-fits-all solution.
2WCOM CREATES CLUSTER OF COST-EFFECTIVE CONTAINERS 2wcom Systems
BY DAVID FOX
The Multimedia over IP Network (MoIN) server software from 2wcom can be operated on hardware, virtual machine, or using a cost-effective containerised version on major cloud platforms. It has been upgraded to meet customer requests for virtualisation,
Codec moment: 2wcom’s MoIN web interface for controlling encodes and decodes
increased IT security and the need to connect remote and local sites. Now, the software can be
operated on Kubernetes cluster (a set of node machines running containerised applications) to ease the management and
monitoring of containers, services and workloads across multiple physical machines. Also new is its up2talk service, which connects external participants or remote productions directly into a studio network and provides audio in broadcast quality. Users can now feed a
streaming encoder or transcoding audio signals to adaptive bitrate protocols, such as HLS for further distribution via CDN.
MoIN supports a wide range
of protocols, standards and codecs, including offering compatibility to third-party products. It can make web streams available for distribution over cable or satellite, and transcode signals (such as AES67) from studio networks to a format that is suitable for wide area networks. Depending on the use-case up to 1000 on-demand transcoders can be used when needed.
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