Watch the recording and discover the the latest insights on the state of cross-platform video playback

Pieter-Jan: Hello everyone, welcome to this webinar. I am PJ, I am the CTO at THEO. I'm joined here with Bart, our VP Product & Marketing.

Bart: Hello everyone, good to be here.

Pieter-Jan: And Bart, together of course with the rest of the team, been doing some very great work, collecting a lot of feedback within the industry, molding all of this into a comprehensive report on what we call 'the state of cross-platform video playback'. I know that people will still be coming in for the next few minutes, but let's already get started with some housekeeping that gives us some time. As with all of the webinars that we do, we actually love to interact with the audience to make sure that we are answering the questions that you have, that we focus on the topics that you really find the most interesting. And at the bottom of the screen, you will actually find a number of buttons to react, but you also find the results of any polls, and we will start with a poll in a little bit, but also the option to ask questions in the Q&A section. Feel free to ask questions at basically any point in time. If possible, we will pick up those questions during the webinar. If that's not possible, we will obviously come back to them in the Q&A session at the end. And as that is usually a question that we always get, yes, of course, we will be making this webinar available for those people who need to leave early so that they can rewatch it at a later point in time as well.

But let's maybe get started with the poll. So, we are actually already working on the next market research report, the one for 2020, well, four or five, however we need to call it. But there we're actually looking already at what the priorities are for the various companies in 2024. So, if you have some time to answer the poll, would be absolutely great to see some feedback and to see what the results are. And normally if all goes well, you can actually see the results in your bottom right corner as well. But I see that we're already getting quite some votes in, and it looks like extending platform coverage is very top of mind for everybody, together with, not really surprising for me, but - reducing the total cost of ownership for cross-platform video playback. I don't know Bart, what you think, but these results are not really surprising to me.

Bart: No, those really resonate with what we found through the interviews.

Pieter-Jan: Yes, and it's also interesting to see that low latency live streaming is an important one. It actually just took the second spot. So that's very good to see, because that's of course also something that is very close to my heart at least. Shall we kick off, Bart?

Bart: Yeah, let's go for it.

Pieter-Jan: Okay, then let's get started. We have some very interesting topics on the agenda. Without a doubt, everybody has already read at least a part of the report. And if not, we will be going through it now. But also, let's get started on just explaining why we actually wrote it. We saw some needs within the industry as well. But also, the three major trends that we identified, collapsing all of the knowledge that we gathered into a report. And then in the end, obviously I already mentioned it, there will be some Q&A. If there are any questions left, just let us know and we will be happy to share some of the insights that we collected from the interviews.

Pieter-Jan: But let's first look at why we actually saw the need for this report maybe. and how we've gone about collecting this information.

Bart: Yes, exactly. First, a short section on objectives and approach to market research. Why have we started this actually? Well, when talking to media and entertainment companies about cross-platform video playback, we often get the questions like - how are others doing this? What are their challenges? What are their priorities? What are the trends that you are seeing? Obviously, based on conversations that we already have, we can, and in form of feedback that we're getting, we can obviously share ideas and trends that we are aware of. But we also realized that it would be interesting if everyone has these questions, that we could do something more structural about this. And then really build a comprehensive overview of the current state of cross-platform video playback. That's obviously something that you cannot do in isolation. We have to talk to many people, video streaming experts, video playback experts, who all shared their insights with us and as part of the setup, we also agreed to share back those insights with you all. PJ mentioned the report already, that's something we launched and today we're also sharing as part of this webinar. That's the why.

How have we gone about it?

Well, we actually reached out to media and entertainment companies, and we asked them, do you want to participate? Do you want to be part of this market research? Little over 50 actually said yes, which was great. Each received a short survey. And then we set up an interview. First, actually the interview was the most important part. That's where we got really the insights and the qualitative feedback that we could use to complement the survey results. We've been trying to really go broad in different areas. For example, in terms of types of media and entertainment companies that we interviewed. See here the list in the second bullet: operators, broadcasters, streaming services, sports leagues and associations, even integrators, some B2B companies. Most of them participated anonymously, so we couldn't disclose their names. There's a couple who agreed that we could quote them in the market research and those names, those logos at least, you see on the right-hand side of this slide. You see it's a small sample, the population that we interviewed, it does give an overview of the diversity already. For those who do not recognize all the logos, ITV is a UK broadcaster, Bell is an operator in Canada, Accedo is a global provider of end-to-end OTT solutions, Velope is US based, they do smart TV apps for leading media and entertainment companies, and then DAZN is an international streaming service based in the UK. So quite a variety, same is true from regional perspective, so we include companies in the US, Europe, and the US Pacific. Also, in terms of approaches, I think we obviously have a lot of knowledge on the commercial video player approach, and we wanted to really extended it as well, talking to media and entertainment companies on the open-source native approaches that they have and even interviewed media and entertainment companies who built their own video players or have a mix of all of the above, because it also happened a lot. And in terms of roles, there's like a couple of titles which came back a lot, product managers, engineering, business development.

So yeah, quite an exciting process, a lot of work, but also some interesting insights. So that's the how. I think with that we build up some suspense already, PJ. So, I'll hand over to you to talk to the first trends that we identified.

Pieter-Jan: Yes, let's kick that off. Cannot stress enough how much work it indeed has been to really talk with all of these various companies. So, thank you also to all of the companies that participated. Was a lot of great input that we got. And of course, if you're interested to join already the next market report, let us know. And I'm pretty sure that we are you will spend another huge amount of time in talking with everybody, collecting new insights again. But we're very happy to do so. and share that knowledge again in hopefully the next report.

But let's kick off indeed with trend number one, which is - cross-platform is table stakes. And I don't think it is a surprise to anybody today who is in the video space that there are so many different platforms. I mean, on anything with a screen, basically you can start watching video today. And I still remember it very well when we actually started THEOplayer and THEO Technologies as a company, which is at this point in time, 12 years ago, and we started with just focusing to do video and to do it on web, on all the different web browsers and there was still Flash and Silverlight and all that kind of stuff. But it was already hard enough at that stage. After that, mobile platforms joined, also became a must have platform. And these days that set of platforms has just been expanding and expanding up until the point where we are today, where you are at more than 10 platforms being supported by most of these streaming platforms these days, with a lot of focus over the past few years on especially smart TVs and gaming consoles, which we'll get back on that later, but these are really, yeah, painful platforms to support sometimes.

And based on the input that we actually received, we still see that history as well of web and mobile being the first platforms that everybody wanted to support, which is actually quite interesting because when we look at the numbers of how much time is being spent by users viewing on those platforms, these are no longer the platforms that really hold the highest percentages of viewership. And it's actually moving towards the long tail where the smart TVs especially, and then all dongles that are available there, where those seem to be taking the biggest chunk of the viewing time these days. And obviously during COVID, people got used to having their smart TV close to them because in the end, also came back during the study, what do you think your viewer wants? Well, the viewer just wants to be able to watch on whatever device is the best, most convenient at whatever point in time that they want to watch something. Especially interesting was that most of the people actually stated that not having support on a certain platform can really be a significant handicap, resulting obviously in fewer churn or not signing up for the platform because they just cannot find the app on the device that they would want.

The other side, and I mentioned that just now as well, is that while everybody realizes that there is a big need of being available on these platforms, the other side of that coin is that the complexity that comes with it and the complexity of being available on all of these platforms, is really dreaded by most of the interviewees. And for us, it's no surprise that doing multi-platform especially on the smart device can be really, really hard. But still it's nice to see that confirmed when talking with a lot of people.

And all of that complexity that everybody is seeing, it's actually originating from a lot of different angles. Long list of platforms obviously gives you a hint, but there's also a lot of fragmentation. There's device fragmentation with all kinds of devices, different form factors, different screen sizes, different input methods. And it really makes it hard to do a lot of the things, development, testing, debugging, but also working with the video players on there. All of these devices, they have their quirks, but all of those devices, they also require different video players, they require different testing. And then on all of those devices, there's different development requirements. So, when you are integrating with third party services, you need to develop everything again and again.

A very interesting metric, it's something that we were already wondering about a lot before we started doing these interviews, was like how many people are really building a video player for a lot of these companies. And the result was actually quite interesting because all of this complexity, well, it has to go somewhere, somebody has to pick it up. And for most of the companies that we actually spoke with, and as Bart mentioned, these were companies of all sizes, all over the world, they had more than five FTEs, which is quite a lot, active on one component of the streaming workflow being the video player. Because this was not the question, how many people do you have developing your apps? No, this was really how many people are working just on maintaining and setting up the video player. One of the interviewees actually had an interesting quote and he said - when you are building your own video player, think about it as a product instead of a project. And that for me at least, really rings home because it is a true investment that you are making here. It's not just making sure that it works, it is really the ongoing maintenance, ongoing support, evolving with the market, integrating all of the new capabilities. That is where the bulk of the complexity really is.

Pieter-Jan: Another very interesting story that we heard during these interviews was one company that said - we are going to move now and expand towards a new country. And as part of moving to that country, one of the things that they had to do was they had to deal with this relatively exotic set-up box provided by a regional telco. In order to do playback, obviously they had to work with the set-up box providers, engineering team, and they were trying to port over their existing video player to work on that set up box as well. And they were explaining that it just cost them so much time and resources. Resolving bugs, working with all the special quirks that this box was having, that they actually needed to get experts in place as well with the skill set that they just needed. Yeah, it is a special type of experience that you need to really get this low-level player stuff right, which is not something that everybody has. An interesting note for me always is also the cost of this. Because very often people ask like - yes, but what does it cost to really maintain such a video player or maintain a certain platform? And sometimes it's really clear. Recent conversation that I had with somebody as well was about smooth streaming. They are still using it to support a very specific platform, very old smart TV, very easy to get the cost associated with setting up that streaming protocol and that workflow. But also, and that was also interesting, it was very invisible to them to see what is now the cost of people that we are spending on also supporting this platform. Very interesting note.

Pieter-Jan: And I was talking already about device fragmentation, and I must say in the past we've talked about it a lot. We've done other webinars on issues with smart TVs, media source extensions, encrypted media extensions, especially on smart TVs, these things can really cause a big issue. And that's something that rings true for a lot of the interviewees, especially those working with their own video players. But interestingly, it's not just smart TVs that popped up. A lot of people also indicated that they were really struggling with Android and the device fragmentation there, that was especially true on the APEC market. One specific example - they had 11, 15, even more brands of mobile phones which were popular in their region. They were talking about up to 30 different brands of TVs and device types, all Android TVs. And what they actually mentioned was, for them, it's only possible to support top five because it was a massive problem for them, just testing all of it, developing all of it, checking the user experience. One of the problems was even for that top five, it was really hard for them to provide the user experience that they really wanted. And just for that reason, they went to top five smartphones, top five Android TVs, and that was it, just because that complexity became too big to handle in its full scope.

Similarly, another platform that nearly came back was Roku. Roku, of course, very popular platform, especially in the English speaking part of the world, but it has one big downside, and that downside is that it uses brightscript. And there again, we got some not really surprising feedback - there's just not that many good brightscript developers available. Somebody even mentioned like - becoming an expert at Brightscript, it's not really a good career path because it's just one platform, it's very niche, not the kind of thing that you can make your developers really excited for. That was one part. The other part about Roku was of course, that the Roku platform had the implication that ad revenue was being siphoned off with about 30%. I can get that that's a pretty big challenge as well for a lot of companies. But all of these platforms causes a lot of headaches, and every platform is individually very unique. Especially when you start looking at the smart TVs, there are so many brands out there, but also there are so many versions of smart TVs out there and so many old versions. Definitely something to really note. People are not burning rightfully so. They're not burning through smart TVs like they're burning through phones, swapping their phone every two or three years. A smart TV can easily become eight years old, or even more sitting in that living room for a very long time. Software not being updated, very big frustration that not just we have, but also very much strengthened by the feedback that we got.

And yeah, also a thing that really came back, one person even telling us - this nightmare is so big that whenever they are activating new capabilities, they have recently launched Dolby audio and HDR capabilities, for them, it was just impossible to test this, impossible to test all of the setups that were available in the field, completely impossible to really get that done and tested before moving it into production.

That's just the device fragmentation part. Of course, there's also the video player fragmentation. We interviewed, as Bart mentioned, all kinds of companies, some doing commercial video players, some building themselves, and a lot of them were actually doing mixes of them. Using, for example, a Shaka Player on one platform, Exoplayer on another, AV on yet another, commercial players on, again, other platforms. And this is really a challenge because all of these different video players, they all behave in different ways. Usually, every video player is kind of okay when you start feeding it default feeds. A lot of the especially open-source players, they really made a big step forward. But the feedback there is that once you start going into something which is going off the standard or some metadata here or a way how you've been provisioning or building your segments or your codecs or your bitrate ladders or especially SSAI that came back very often, all of these things can influence it so hard that it can work on one player, but completely breaks on the other. Other things, different APIs, different ways to debug, different ways to build for all of these players. And one of the interviewees actually mentioned something very interesting - they really see having multiple players it as a business. In the past, what they had was they had about two or three engineers who understood how Shaka Player worked, which was their main video player, but only one of them really understood the inner workings. To be honest, I'm not really surprised by that because it's really complex stuff. And internally, we actually refer to this as the bus factor. It's a bit macabre, but it's basically how many people of your team have to get hit by a bus? And we always hope that never happens, of course. But how many people have to get hit by a bus before you're unable to work on something? And obviously, if that number is one, yes, that is a huge business risk. And that is clearly not something which is good.

Pieter-Jan: Third party integrations, another one that came up, quickly want to touch on that as well. Getting a single platform, getting an integration done there is not that hard. But getting it right can be very hard. And getting it consistent with all of the different solutions, that was clearly something that there was a lot of frustration about with the companies that we interviewed. One company, just as an example, they mentioned that they have four different analytic solutions, Conviva, Nielsen, I think Adobe Experience was the other one. And I mean, when I look at our customers, it's very, very common to have this. But if all of these start reporting different things, well, that's a problem because all of these tools, while they have the same basis of data, are used by different teams, different requirements, different budgets. But also, if they start drawing different conclusions, that can cause a lot of frustration within the companies themselves. You think the problem is X, but that's what tool one says. But in reality, the problem might be something completely different shown by another tool. But how do you know what's what?

Another big thing that really came up was everything related to ads. One case - a company outlined, for example, that they had a challenge related to ad ingest. They were doing all of the ad playback through their own platform, normalizing all of the content, making sure the encoding was consistent so that they could do server-side ad insertion well. But on the other hand, I mean, they still faced a lot of challenges: stutters, a lot of multi period Dash issues, especially on Android, which although probably very well thought through within the industry, if I look at all of the responses, clearly there is still a lot of work that we can do to really harmonize this and make this a little bit easier.

Pieter-Jan: Other thing, which is very relevant, and with that, I promise I will conclude on the first part. But it really came back across the board is that testing is super complex, especially if you want to test the full scope of things. I even spoke about this during my Demux talk. And I mentioned, testing in production, it is absolutely the greatest thing you can do with the side note that you should do it in a very controlled manner, and on top of all of the other testing that you are doing, for example, through like a gradual rollout. Because it is really practically impossible to get all of the devices, all of the setups, test them in a lab. I mean, you can start scouting secondhand websites like we've done, collecting a lot of test devices, but for most companies, based on the interviews, this is actually something that they are still doing manually on a subset of devices. Very often it's being outsourced to external companies to make it a little bit easier to handle. I mean, one company actually mentioned that they chose to do it really internally, but for every two developers, they had one QA person, and they literally invested hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get all of the devices in their lab. And they only went three versions back on most devices because otherwise, it would be even more expensive. So, this is absolutely a really challenging thing.

But on the other hand, this is for a lot of companies, and we actually got that feedback as well, especially for the bigger companies, this is the first-place production being the first place where everything of all the different teams really comes together. One company that was, let's say more of an event-based sports type company, they indicated that really testing at scale in like a real environment, simulating all of the unknowns, that really was the biggest challenge for them. And they actually mentioned that they had realized that it is impossible to really test at full scale. So, they actually started adding layers upon layers upon layers of redundancy. But that again, that was hurting them on the other side because the complexity was just becoming so large that it was really cumbersome to work with, slowing them down, not the thing you would want in a fast-paced industry, like streaming industry.

I promised that was going to be about the last thing of trend number one. So, Bart, trend number two?

Bart: Yeah, absolutely. Before I jump into that, maybe also saying again that we're happy to take your questions. So, if you would have any questions, feel free to ask them. We try to answer them throughout the webinar. Also, some time at the end, but do not hesitate, we're more than happy to take those questions.

With that said, let's look at the second trend, which is around fewer quality of experience. And starting that, maybe it's good to look at the diagram here on this slide on the left-hand side. This is actually the results of the initial survey that we had done, offering a question where we asked people about what are the most important viewer quality of experience complaints that you're getting. You can see stream buffering is definitely the number one. We also see latency, that’s of course, not always relevant for everyone only for specific use cases. Although for everyone on the call, seems also as an important topic as you saw, that's a second priority for next year. There's video quality, which is like bitrates, resolutions. Other, which for example, is feature sets, platform supports, PJ covered in quite some detail already in the previous section. 

I think even, so that's a survey, and I mentioned already what was really interesting for us doing the interviews. And doing the interviews and talking through these things, one item actually was a recurring theme. Names of larger streaming services, like Netflix, like a Disney, like an HBO, they always came back. And feedback we got is - viewers are really expecting the quality of experience that those large streaming services are providing. They expect similar experiences as they're used to from watching those large streaming services. What viewers don't always realize is that those large streaming services they obviously invest a lot in R&D. Netflix for example on annual basis they spent like two billion on R&D and not all that money is going to quality of experience but at least some of it is. And if you then look at the budgets and the FTE or the headcount which is available for smaller services, that's the first good area that's clear that sometimes difficult to keep up with that to really provide that same quality of experience. So that’s a first trend and it's also in the title there that large streaming providers are setting the standard, but not everyone has that same R&D budget.

Second thing on quality of experience that came back a lot was that high standard, that high expectation for quality of experience was definitely true for regions like the US, Europe, also APEC countries like Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, for example, but not necessarily for all APEC countries. Countries like Indonesia, India, for example, there the quality of experience expectations were actually lower. And the reasons we got for that is actually two-two:

First of all, it's internet connectivity. The last mile delivery in countries like India is challenging. There's only a small percentage of people who have good internet connection there. So, I think there's a one-to-one there with quality of experience if you don't have good internet connection.

And the second trend, that's related to the third bullet here - it's the transition to smart TVs. And feedback also felt is that - viewers  expect really better quality on the bigger screen than on smaller screens. You'll see some history related to that. With IPTV broadcast qualities, which have always been very high. So the viewers really, really still associate that and they expect higher quality of experience on those bigger screens.

Bart: Then another topic on quality of experience is 4K. That's actually a topic which came back a lot. Where people said, yes, quality of experience is important, but not necessarily 4K. On the contrary, when talking, it's been quite a buzz, many people talking about it. But most of the media and entertainment companies that we interviewed actually said that 4K has been de-prioritized for them. Some were looking at it for bigger events, more one-offs, but many were not necessarily adopting more structurally. For a couple of reasons, I think. The viewers seemed less focused on 4K. That's the feedback we got that full HD or 1080p that was actually good enough. Someone even mentioned that 4k is also a label which was pushed a bit by the TV manufacturers and things are settling down a little bit. And then I think even more importantly, there was a second reason, and that was cost. Obviously, why would you substantially increase your bitrates, increase your CDN cost if it doesn't bring extra revenue? I think that's the main thing. Obviously, if you do these types of things and you make improvements, that you do want to see it ultimately in your portfolio.

So, what has been prioritized then, so not 4K, there's clearly been more focus on other quality of experience items. It's more focused on reducing the number of stalls, reducing buffering, faster startup time. We asked about startup time, people said that they wanted to be one second toward below that. Then there's focus on 'premium features'. So here, people typically refer to some of the larger streaming services, like Netflix. Someone literally said - Netflix has thumbnail scrubbing, we also need to have it. So that's some roadmap practically working on that.

And then another one, which is important - is editing related to smooth ad transitions going from the stream to the ad, and back to the stream. Making sure that happens without black screens, without stalls, and that also heavily impacts the quality of experience. And even not necessarily the quality of experience can also even have an impact on the revenue side, something we'll cover later on.

One other observation, which is maybe interesting to mention, is that not everyone valued quality of experience equally. We clearly saw differences between verticals that we interviewed, where operators and broadcasters seam to value quality of experience more than others. And the reason for that is obviously that they have quite a history already, even in IPTV or broadcast quality. For them, that's really the standard they want to live up to. And they don't want to provide for subpar experiences. One of the persons we've interviewed from operators literally mentioned that if it's not up to the standard that they expected to be for them, that would be a deal breaker moving into certain platforms or moving into certain regions. So, there was quite strong wording and just give a bit of a sentiment of how they think about it.

And then the last slide on the quality of experience, trying to keep it shorter than you, PJ. It's about latency. And it is also something that people talk about a lot, quite a buzzword. So, an important thing maybe to clarify - it's not for every use case. If you're doing VOD, (video on demand) then low latency is obviously not important. Even for some of the live streaming use cases, they can get away with a higher latency. Based on the interviews, actually, there's two use cases which came back a lot when we talked about low latency. First one is live sports, and the second one is everything around interactive use cases. It's a bit of a bucket. But within that bucket, I think, live sports betting also came back a lot. Maybe it's worthwhile to zoom into those two use cases.

For live sports, there's a varying degree of adoption of low latency. I think there's definitely still live sports, which is 3 to 20 seconds latency or more. When looking at priorities though, a lot of people are looking into adopting low latency technologies or have already done it. The target is typically in between 5 and 10 seconds to be on par with broadcast latency to avoid spoiler effects. Then we asked about - would it make sense to go lower? The answer was very often no, not necessarily. We actually value quality of experience in general, also very highly. And lowering latency can definitely mean that we would increase the number of buffering events or have more stalls. So, they wanted to give sufficient time to the encoder, to the player buffer, to make sure that they had a smooth and really a positive experience for their viewers. We didn't want to compromise on that. And the 5 to 10 second benchmark, typically at the end to end, it's important of course if you pick up from broadcast latency, you might get more than 10 seconds, so that's something to consider as well, I guess when you compare with the peers, where do you pick up the stream, what's your total end to end latency.

And then a second thing which came back a lot, as I mentioned, is live sports betting. Obviously with all the betting bills which have been approved in the US, a really hot topic. There the latency targets are actually sharper. That makes sense, I guess, for sports betting. The more you reduce the latency, you actually maximize the betting window. And if you maximize the betting window, more bets can be placed, you actually make more revenue. So, there's a clear ROI for reducing the latency further, and really going to lower latencies. Today, you see variations in degree of adoption of those low latency technologies. So, when I said live sports, they can sometimes be 20 seconds or more. When we interviewed live sports betting, it's at more like seven seconds sometimes, some are also lower already, more at the two second benchmark. In this graph is actually says sub-second, reason for that is like the video streaming today, I think it can definitely happen, high quality at sub-second latency. Synchronization is also seen as quite important. And data latency is also there. And you obviously want your odds and your player statistics. You want them to show the same moment the action happens. You don't want to have lag compared to the video stream. So, they would typically be synchronized to end up with two seconds of latency like this.

So that's quality of experience. Heading over to PJ again, we'll talk about the third trend, which is focused on profitability.

Pieter-Jan: Yes, and it was definitely a massive topic. I mean, if we're honest, and the way how we spoke with the interviewees as well, was clear that actually the last two trends already were very important for this as well. Clearly the goal for those two trends is making sure the hygiene factors are there, make sure the platforms are supportive, user experience is good, make sure the viewers are happy, make sure that churn is of course low. Today, of course, being profitable, it is a lot higher on the radar than it used to be a year or two years ago, but it's of course also a lot more than just keeping churn low. Interestingly, most people were not talking about growing subscribers massively. I think that was a story that we could have expected like four or five years ago, but now there were actually two parts:

One part which was very big was cost optimization. Making sure that all of the expenses that the services were having, that those were as low as possible. And one thing that really came back a lot, when talking about optimizing costs. And it wasn't really a surprise. But what really came back was CDN costs and egress costs were a massive chunk out of the budget for delivering content. And every time again and again, it came back like, oh, should we start moving into new codecs? Because this could really be a potential to solve this problem. A surprising high number of companies were actually actively looking into this. Some others were saying like - nope, not the thing for us. You would increase the complexity. One company, one interviewee actually mentioned exactly that like - okay, it is great that we can reduce some egress costs, but a cost that will increase is the cost of managing it because of all the complexity by adding multi coding. Big argument of course in favor of moving to codecs and different codecs is that with the recent evolutions, there's a large enough body or at least the body of users that are able to view these codecs is now perceived as being big enough to really get the benefit. And if you just purely run the math, very simple, look at the average bandwidth saving, multiply it by egress costs, look at that versus encoding costs. Well, of course, egress cost usually is pretty big. So, if you can save 40% or if you could even save a higher number, that's a massive improvement that we can get there. So that was definitely something that came back.

On the other hand, next to costs, it was very clear that a lot of people were also looking at the profit side of things. Not about increasing the number of viewers per se, but especially how to just get more revenue as a whole. And with the big brands, Netflix, Disney, Peacock, I think we all know at this point in time that they all have ad-supported tiers these days. So, it wasn't really a surprise that during these interviews, this was really highlighted, or at least advertisements were really highlighted as a potential solution for a lot of companies to get additional revenue in either as a supplement on top of an existing subscription-based model, or really as a baseline in like a fast setup or like an asphalt style setup. The thing that really came back was actually that doing ads right. That obviously is not a simple thing. A lot of the interviewees have faced challenges doing ad insertion around presuming content after an ad break, having like timestamp issues, a lot of struggles, especially on keeping different players in sync, especially across the big device split that we mentioned earlier, streams which were restarting, all the kinds of issues which were actually impacting the user experience. Of course, if you have to watch an ad, for most people, that's not perceived as the most fun thing. But if you then return to the content, you have to watch a black screen and then you get a big lip sync issue, that was definitely a problem that was high on the radar.

A big question that also popped up was not just, how do we add ads to a content? But also how do we make sure that we get high CPMs? I found this really interesting as a discussion because of course, the problem is if your user experience is bad, you are really tanking your CPM rates. Advertisers obviously want their brand to be represented in the best possible way. They want to avoid the spinner bonanza that could be going on. And one interviewee really mentioned this as a critical part for them. For them, really, the advertisement team was focused initially on getting the number of impressions up, but they noticed that because of that, their CPM was really having a bigger impact. They literally mentioned, like, from an advertisement perspective, that the focus on increasing the CPM, that the factors like buffering, all of those things were way more important than getting a higher number of impressions. Because it was really mentioned that fixing the issues with stalls and spinners and just getting the viewer experience up to the right level, it actually allowed them to charge a premium to a lot of the advertisers. And for them, it had meant that the growth in CPM had resulted in a bigger increase in revenue than the growth of viewers over the past year. But for me personally, I really found that an eye-opening experience where even the revenue or the amount of money that you can make through ads where it is so closely coupled to a viewer experience, because I would have perceived originally that it was just nicer for the viewer, less churned. But even on a revenue generating side, this had a very positive impact.

Bart: Yes, and we very quickly summarize again, not do it very quickly because I think we've covered the main points. Key takeaways, I think, is the quotes that also PJ mentioned from one of our interviewees. If you build a cross-platform video player, it's a product, not a project. It's something that you build once and then it's done. It's actually something that you continue to develop and continue working on it over time.

Cross-platform is table stakes. That was the first trend. You see there all different complexities that come with it, and which actually made that player development teams are relatively big in size.

Third takeaway is that from a quality of experience perspective, 4k has been de-prioritized. It's really about making sure that stream buffering reduces as fast startup times and there're premium features available.

And then there's the focus on profitability, which I think has been over the last months, a year already, a big shift - doing more with less. And it's focusing on reducing costs to codecs and really boosting the CPM for head-on search instructions. That's the key takeaways. I was rushing this a little bit so that we could actually still have five minutes left for questions and answers.

Pieter-Jan: Yes, let's pick them off. I see there's a few in the lift.

Bart: Yes, I see there's one here. Obviously, we've been talking about quality of experience and smaller media entertainment companies might have challenges for keeping up with the large streaming services like Netflix and HBO. There's a question here:

'What could smaller media and entertainment companies do, how do they best handle it to still make sure that they provide for the quality of experience that viewers expect?'

So, good question, and not an easy one. What I've seen happening is actually that they have different scenarios. I think one scenario is that they do gradually roll out, so that they make sure that they have good presence on the key platforms that they know that most of their viewers are and gradually expand. Others, they try to be present on a number of platforms already but with reduced feature sets, still safeguarding the quality of experience from a buffering and stalls perspective but not necessarily having the nail scrubbing and some premium features. I think those are the things I've seen really coming back for small media entertainment companies.

Pieter-Jan: Yeah, and even the bigger ones. I mean, we spoke a little bit on the smart TVs as well. I know a lot of bigger media and entertainment companies even disable features on older smart TVs. So, I don't think that there's any shame in that. And obviously, I mean, it's a completely different thing and I see that there's actually another question on that as well. But, like, using development frameworks, using the tools that are out there, React Native, Flutter, all the others. I mean, yes, there is a lot of potential there, I think, to optimize your development and maintenance flow. You still need to test it; you still need to roll it out. It's still a lot of work. It's not a magical bullet, I think, not by a long shot, but I mean, all of the small things can help as well.

Bart: And development frameworks, we haven't really covered, I guess, during this webinar, but it is a topic which came back during the interviews. And I think it's regular apps you can just port from one platform to the other, if you are using a React Native or a filter. I think that with video, it's more complex and that you still cannot necessarily do without iOS and Android developers for React Native, for example. You still need to feed your playback experts if you need to implement certain features that are not available out of the box, if you do integrations, those type of things. So, it's definitely one on the list, I think, which can be added to the complexities, but it's not something which we've covered here. It's very relevant. It's good bringing it up.

Pieter-Jan: Yes, I think that actually answers the second question that was in there as well.

Bart: Yes, exactly. 

Pieter-Jan:

'Can you really work without, or could you work without Android and iOS developers if you would use React Native?'

I think indeed your answer is fair there. Can you really work without Android and iOS developers? We have a few customers who do. I know that for other companies, they are struggling with it, because if you need to build your own bridges, working with a lot of different players, or if you end up in the scenario, that you are still doing a mix of, for example, React Native, but also web and also some other things. Yeah, then it is probably a good thing to have some in-depth experience on some of those platforms in the skillset in your teams. But that again, inflates your team size, which inflates your hidden costs. So that's an important thing to keep in mind.

Bart: Good, we're perfectly on time, PJ. Those were the questions for the moment. So that does leave me with one more message that I wanted to bring. I don't know if you highlighted it already in the beginning. It's the first time we're doing this market research. And there's two calls to actions here. Maybe it's like, one, if you'd like to participate in the next one, please let us know, because we've been more than happy to take your feedback and to incorporate it. Secondly, as well, if there're things that you see that you think would be valuable to include in the market research going forward, you have some ideas around that, please definitely also let us know whatever we can do to make this more useful for you. Obviously, we'll take that.

Good. So, I think that brings us to the end of the webinar and we're right on time. So just want to thank you all. So again that you'll get the recording and the slides of the webinars if you want to rewatch or for those who haven't been able to join and have to leave early, you still can take it offline and watch it at your convenience. Thanks everyone. See you next time.

Pieter-Jan: Bye.