Charlie Kraus (Limelight Networks)
Good day, everyone!
Introduction - Innovating in viewer engagement - improving monetization - increased competition Thank you so much for joining our webinar today. So, what we're going to talk about on this joint IDC Limelight webinar is presenting some information about the state of the online video market. Of course, many things have changed in the last year and a half or so, several significant things. That's going to have a lasting impact on the industry. And then, we're also going to talk about ways of innovating in customer experiences and how to engage customers better and improve monetization. All are going to be very important as competition scales up in this. Ghassan Abdo from IDC is a researcher in this area. He's going to be joining me. And he's going to present some market data that we'll go over.
Online video services - Low latency Streaming
I'm Charlie Kraus from Limelight. I manage from the product marketing perspective all our video online video services. So that's on-demand and live and low latency and video platform and all those types of things.
So just some housekeeping, you'll see a box called Q&A, so if you have questions during this, type them in, and either during the event, if, if a topical question comes up, we may address it live right on the spot or at the end, during the Q&A session. If you haven't been on a webinar with this ON24 platform, you have little hooks that you can change the view you're looking at, so you can shrink the different windows and so forth and play around with it. So just letting you know if you want to do that.
So let's get going. So for content, you'll also find that we have selected four pieces of what we think are pretty useful content and topical to what we're talking about today. You can download those during the event, as well as a PDF of these webinar slides. If you don't do that, we're going to send an email to everyone that attended with a link to the recorded, live webinar and links to all these pieces of content. So you can do that either way. Okay. So I'm going to turn it over to Ghassan to start us off, take it away.
Delivering a rich media experience
Ghassan Abdo (IDC)
Thanks, Charlie. I really appreciate you guys joining us today. This is going to be an exciting webinar. My research area looks at my program, which is called manage edge on content delivery services. It really looks at the intersection of agile networking, SDN, content delivery, and edge services. And the intersection of all of these technologies is what we think is a good basis for delivering a rich media experience, a comprehensive experience.
Market Survey and Predictions
So what I'm going to do today is share with you in terms of what our prediction is in this market, what some of the survey data that we serve to a customer is telling us about this market. So definitely, if you look at this slide, we can assess the fact that the demand for rich media content is really expanding. We have a prediction by 2023 that 65% of consumers will be using voice, images, AR, VR for interactions, especially as the physical and digital experiences are coming together nowadays.
Deploying leading edge technologies
And the other prediction, which extends to 2025, is that 60% of leading consumer brands will enhance customer engagements because of emotion detection and management to influence purchasing. The fact is that if you don't utilize those types of technologies, you fall behind from a competitive perspective. So actually having a rich online experience -especially in today's environment, is becoming even a lot more important.
Digital Transformation
If we look at the next slide, what is also interesting based on the latest surveys that we've done, which is what is the role of customer experience as it relates to digital transformation. We do a lot of research within IDC on digital transformation because digital transformation is becoming important in terms of improving processes. Improving competitive advantage is how you reach the customer and if you want to, competing as a digital-first enterprise is not easy until you do this digital transformation. Customer experience comes up as number one - one of the more critical elements of this digital transformation success, and partly to do with the fact that the channel or how to reach customers has to spend on physical and digital channels nowadays. This relies on the ability to deliver content, data processing online global, online e-commerce, and other things. These are important to have a common experience among physical delivery versus virtual delivery as well.
Omnichannel Customer Interaction
Charlie Kraus (Limelight Networks)
I see the word omnichannel there, and I've educated myself about what that's about, but I think it might be worth just expanding a little bit about what that means from the perspective of somebody that's shopping. What did they experience in an omnichannel environment?
Ghassan Abdo (IDC)
It's interesting. This term is becoming a lot more important, especially with COVID, as the ability to, for instance, to go to a restaurant becomes much more limited. So what businesses are able to do is use different mechanisms, whether it is online ordering or whether obviously physical channels of reaching out to the customer. But the combination of all ways you can reach out to the customer interacts for a customer. For instance, now pick-up is becoming more automated because you order, go to a place, and they bring and deliver something. For which is in the past, you had to walk in and get it. So omnichannel is the way you interact with the customer across the whole sales process and delivery as well, an important term nowadays.
Charlie Kraus (Limelight Networks)
Make sense.
What’s Driving CDN Utilization?
Ghassan Abdo (IDC)
Yeah. Now, if we look, and I said previously, I cover content delivery within my program. We just did some surveys during the COVID August of last year, and we have a new survey coming up this year that we will be sharing at a later stage. We looked at and asked enterprises what are the main use cases of CDN? It is no surprise that web, media delivery time, video and on-demand video, and file transfer tend to be the use case. But what's also interesting (because in the survey, we also look at different verticals and different company sizes, which I don't show here) is how the priority of some of these things changes. For instance, for on-demand video, the transport and utility market has the highest priority, where healthcare enjoys file transfer with 69% utilization.
Why Gaming is not a top CDN driver
But what's also interesting - and we know that for a fact, that gaming has been growing at a phenomenal rate, but we don't see it to be among the top four or top three, which would have been my expectations. So, Charlie, I'm going to get your guidance on it. Why did gaming kind of fall behind a little bit here?
Large Game file downloads is one use case where CDNs play
Charlie Kraus (Limelight Networks)
Yeah, sure! So there are two aspects to this with gaming. CDNs have a big role in gaming, but it tends to be on the file transfer or download. You think about the really big games that are played as team-play in big stadiums or online, and some of the bigger game sizes have gone past a hundred gigs. There's even a few, their downloads are 200 gigs, and the gamers that want these when the new game comes out can be in the hundreds of thousands or millions. So if you do the math there, that's quite a bit of content that has to be moved. The bigger role in gaming for CDNs at the moment is the download. When a new version of Call of Duty or something like that comes out, massive numbers of gamers right away want to download that.
Streaming game competitions to gamers to watch is another CDN use case
So that is where CDNs play at the moment. Now you would think, you'd think video. So the difference, the game video is driven more by the viewers that watch the game. People are watching people play games. So when you see these big stadium events with teams playing, you'll see gamers in attendance watching this on giant screens, but a lot of people will watch online as well. And that is where the video is catching on for gaming is just simply like, you'd watch any sports event. This is an esports event, and you're watching the video that way. But the video in-game is tricky because we think about these action games; everything happens so quickly that every millisecond counts in terms of latency between what a gamer sees on screen and what he wants to do, or some action wants to take.
Games are very dependent on very low latency between game servers and players
You can see that it wouldn't take much latency at all before you want to cause something to happen, but what you're, what you're seeing, isn't there anymore because of the latency. The other platforms have stepped in to handle; basically that part of it, such as Twitch, or people just download the whole game into their gaming machine so that they have all the videos produced locally. When you watch these big stadium events, those games are running basically up on that stage, those, all those massive servers that run the game, they're right up on the stage with those players. So the latency is pretty much not existing because it's all there together. So this could change over time. Some of the things that Google Stadia has as the same battle about trying to deal with latency, at some point in the future, there may be some innovation in that area that would allow a different way of getting those game videos in. We'll all see, but that's kind of explaining the way it is today.
CDN Edge Resources are becoming where applications run
Ghassan Abdo (IDC)
Great, Charlie. Well, thank you for this elaborate explanation. It's a little bit more complex than I thought, but that's good. So let's look at you know, IDC has been looking at the shift of compute from centralized resources to edge resources, and we have a lot of predictions in that space. Actually, we're bullish on the fact that 50% of new enterprises at the infrastructure will be deployed at the edge by 2023, not far out, and by 2024, there will be an 800% increase in the number of applications that day at the edge. So the edge is really key to enabling a compelling customer experience. He asked me, is customer experience here? The good news or CDN networks are already architected as edge networks, and the fact that they are an edge delivery network certainly can provide an enhanced digital experience. Here we're talking about interactivity, personalization of content. This is really what customers are demanding. It also provides lower latency, a big fact that it is closer to the end-user. You can then achieve latencies less than 40 milliseconds, and even much lower than in some cases. It also increases scale because the ability to respond to peak demand is so important. And we know that from April of last year, during COVID, some of the CDN networks had to double in almost instantaneously, their ability to handle the peak traffic measured in terabytes per second. Some of them just scaled up from 80 to 160 and whatever. And that's a testament to the fact that it's all about the edge delivery reliability; obviously, security goes with it because you can secure the parameter. The fact that enterprises are becoming a lot more distributed. We have hybrid environments nowadays, remote work, and global e-commerce where you can essentially have a business anywhere.I think having the edge delivery is also a key enabler in this space. So I just wanted to highlight that part.
Challenges facing CDN providers
Nonetheless, if we really look at what is happening today, there are still many challenges that face CDN providers. And I know Charlie is gonna tell us that there are a lot of new technologies coming on board that will help, but it's interesting that the top challenges mostly related to technology are network performance and high latency. These are cited. And then, from a commercial standpoint, pricing is too complex. Every time I talk to an enterprise, they want better visibility, a better understanding of pricing. And maybe Charlie, since you guys provide CDN services, can you talk a little bit about why pricing is so complex, and is there something we can do to simplify?
Complex CDN services pricing
Charlie Kraus (Limelight Networks)
Yeah, sure. So first, I'll go through sort of why it's complex, and I always joke about this, especially when I speak to analysts, they say, why is it like a state secret to know the pricing of CDN and the reason for the complexity? Let me explain the reason why the complexity then that goes to what the solution can be is not all types of traffic are equal in terms of the effort to do it. So delivering very high-quality video at low latency without rebuffering, just basically broadcast quality, is a high effort. It's long-tail content. The audience expectations have been set by decades of watching broadcast television. And this sort of attitude is it just works. It just should work. There are no excuses for that anymore.
Not all traffic is equal in terms of effort to deliver it
Years ago, they might say, well, it's online. A little rebuffering is okay, but not anymore. So different types of traffic take different amounts of effort. So when I talked about the previous thing with gaming, for example, file download, usually those things happen like off-hours. Video is always in prime time in any region, and it puts a big stress on networks because that's basically what most of the traffic's like, and it's all coming in a five or six-hour window in any region during the day. And then, the rest of the time, the networks are highly underutilized. So one of the things we do to try to attract people to use the network when it's not busy with video is to lower the pricing for, let's say, file download traffic. So you'd probably notice that when your devices are being updated, that's typically done at night now.
Off peak hours pricing models
At the end of the day, you'll get a notice that a new version of iOS or Android is going to be downloaded. Make sure your phones are plugged in. And then, during the night, it's done. And that's simply because you take all those millions of devices they're going to update, and the size of those updates files, which has several gigs, that's a lot of traffic. So to attract that, most CDNs discount that. Capacity in every region is a little different, and the demands are different. So when you're sending videos out, you're always aware of how big your audience is in different regions. And in some regions, you're going to need more capacity than others. So to be able to keep the networks flexible, that goes into the pricing as well. Depending on how much redundancy you want, cause during live events, nothing could possibly go wrong because anybody would see that that's on.
So usually, this extra effort goes into having redundant links that are active so that the cost for these different things that you're trying to do varies a lot. And that's why it's complex. So to solve that, one of the things we're working on is like some calculator tools that people can put their parameters and in terms of what they want to do, and sort of modeling it so they can see what making a few changes in how they want to do things could affect the pricing. So I think just some good pricing tools can help this out. And then I think just over time, there'll be a lot of pressure to just sort of simplify things and may not have so many variables.
The importance of viewer experience
Ghassan Abdo (IDC)
Now let me just leave you with a couple of thoughts. I think it's been shown that customer experience is so important to today's environment where the physical and the virtual worlds are coming together. You really get to deliver on that. And the good news, which Charlie was going to share with us, is that there are some cool technologies coming on board. That's going to make it more fulfilling, more rich media in nature. So I'm going to leave it to Charlie to tell us about all the good things that are happening.
A new competitive environment
Charlie Kraus (Limelight Networks)
Okay. Thank you very much. This has been great data to share, so I'm going to go on. So, one of the things that changed to me the most dramatically, is the whole competitive environment. So it, you know, it's cliche to say that online video consumption has risen. Of course, it has. And you know, despite that, like you mentioned, some parts of networks had a double capacity in some regions, just in a short period of time during 2020, but viewers don't change their expectations. They say, yes, that's true. We're putting a huge demand on me, but we still expect broadcast quality. We don't want to have any rebuffering and so forth. And competition drives that as well. So let me talk about the sort of three major things that have changed in the competitive landscape. Very-very recently.
If we start with the sports world, starting sort of in 2019 and much more in 2020, competing for the rights to stream any kind of sports event from the major leagues, move beyond just the usual suspects in terms of the sports network. In the US, Fox Sports, NBC Sports, in EMEA, you'd have BBC sports sky sports everywhere around the world. And then, normally, those are the ones that are competing and bidding for the rights to stream.
Enter the large social media companies
But in the last year, we've seen the largest social media companies like Amazon and others bid for rights. So in the NFL, Amazon may have bid for Monday night football or Thursday night football. And so that's extra competition, and that caused the bidding prices to go up. So no matter what region you're in right now for a season of streaming, rights can be in the billions, whether it's billions of dollars, euros, pounds, or whatever. And with that happening, if you're paying the kind of money to have the streaming rights, you have to monetize that somehow. And with all that extra competition for ways to watch this content, the onus is on all the providers to come up with ways of engaging their viewers much better than they're doing right now to not only just keep them coming back for more but expanding their base. So what I'm going to spend time doing is consider some practical ideas that can be used to increase engagement, be more innovative, and what new technologies are going to allow this to happen.
Ghassan Abdo (IDC)
You mentioned the competitive landscape, and you do mention low latency in the slides. How important is low latency nowadays in this environment?
Low latency streaming comes to the forefront
Charlie Kraus (Limelight Networks)
That's been a hot topic over the last year about low latency, or everybody mentioning low latency, but I always wanted, what do they really mean? What's the expectation? And it comes down to something simple that in the early days of live streaming, generally, if you're watching an event online, the delay compared to broadcast would be in the 30 seconds to even sometimes a minute or more in latency. So if you were only watching online, maybe that's not a big problem, but some inconveniences came up like somebody may be watching the broadcast of a sports event, and I might be watching it online. And then they would see a really good play or a good score or something like that. And they text about it, and I haven't seen it yet. So a minute later, I saw it. So it turns out that what the law expects, the low-latency expectation is just to be in sync with the video with the broadcast.
Most broadcast latency is around five or six seconds anywhere in the globe. So we're finding that the real task here is just to have online streaming be in that range. I know there are technologies like web RTC that can do sub-second, but that's not really what's needed here in terms of just keeping up with the broadcast in terms of watching sports, watch together apps. Everybody's seeing the same thing at the same time. So that's really what's required. And we'll talk about the technology that will solve that problem and get you there.
Getting down to basics
So in terms of, you know, what, let's start with the basics. When people say, what can we do? I said, well, let's start with the basics since viewer expectations are for perfect quality and no broad and no, but rebuffering. What you have to do is look at what can I do to make things perfect.
So most people use a combination of CDNs. It's usually not just one, it's usually multiples you either because of capacity demands or just wanting redundancy and just making sure you can scale. So the first thing is understanding where your audiences are. It's not just the numbers of them, but where are they? Because each region is a little bit different. So if you have a huge following in one region and not so much another, it all goes to how you're going to plan for your capacity to individual regions by the audience size.
Streaming at scale
And it's not just the bandwidth to it. It's the ability to have enough capacity, not just the number of viewers, but what happens when they want to watch in 4k and the capacity goes up, think of a big sports event where in the final minutes of the event, the scores tied or really exciting, you get into penalty kicks to decide a football or soccer match ending.
So what happens is social media storms blow that up, and all of a sudden, people are getting these notifications of a certain match. It's in the final minutes, and it's tied, and they may want to join in. So usually, those notifications come with a link. So at the end of these events, you can have massive amounts of viewers trying to all along at the same time to watch the final minutes. So that's it along with where the audience is, the capacity of the audience, but it's also to be able to scale up quickly to these peaks that you can. You have to try to predict what might happen.
A world of viewer devices
So what else? So they watch on different types of devices. It's Android, and it's big streaming devices, iOS devices, screen sizes, the world differently.
So that means you have to have an encoding and a video flow workflow that can detect the device user has what's the screen size, what's the format of video they want. So you have to have that encoding into HLS and DASH, and what's the screen size and the bit rate and do all that automatically on the fly. That's pretty complex. So one of the reasons that most content providers don't necessarily want to do themselves is their business. The content business, not in all the intricacies of distributing it to all kinds of devices, CDNs by nature, the video delivery services, has to be up on this. We have to be ahead of the game. We have to understand what the new formats and new technologies and encoding technologies are so that we can deliver the best picture. And that's our business. So using these services that are very robust, tried and true, use them every day, when you watch movies online or stream of a sports event, that's something that CDNs are completely well equipped to handle. So that's one thought, just getting those basics out of the way.
Personalization in subscription bundles
Personalization is the next field. So one of the things that frustrate consumers a lot is the inflexibility of subscription models. And it's usually about these packages containing so many channels. Most of which they don't watch in some of the surveys I do every year online. I asked those two questions, how many subscription services do you have, and how many different channels do you watch? And the number of channels that most people it's maximum 17, meaning there's, maybe there's one show on one channel that you watch and maybe two shows on this, but this is not a huge number of them that they really need to supply their requirements in terms of the number of subscriptions that they pay on and on and on like the average household only has two or three paid subscriptions.
So when you think about competition, and you think about all the new OTT channels that you see coming online, you have to wonder about monetization. If the average household has two or three subscriptions, and there are hundreds of channels out there, how are all of them going to monetize? So that just that competitive pressure is immense. So, some of the things that we can see pressure building on is for consumers to be able to have a little more personalization in defining these packages. So if there are certain channels, they want to watch, or maybe just one show on another channel, they're going to have pressure on. I want to kind of make a little custom bundle and pay for it, what I really want. And just for the shows I really want, sports packages fall into that as well. You may be forced to buy a whole season in a league, but maybe you only watch a few games. So you know, do you really want to pay for all that, maybe that has to be more flexible, more relevant challenges.
Ghassan Abdo (IDC)
Charlie, how soon do you think this will happen because we're all frustrated with this issue, and it seems like the pricing models still tend to support this bundling. Do you think it's going to happen anytime soon, or?
Streaming rights complexity contributes to piracy
Charlie Kraus (Limelight Networks)
I don't, because when you look at the complexity of bidding for streaming rights, it's extremely complex. And it's not only the cost of it but the place limitations on what you can do with those streams. So I'll take an example from the Middle East. Cricket is really popular there, something you don't really see much in North America, but Cricket's really popular. And in some countries, I learned that because of the complexity of the streaming rights, they're only allowed to show Cricket on mobile, they can't send a stream that you could watch on a large TV, and for cricket fans, this is not what they want. I really want to watch Cricket. Why can't I watch it on a large screen?
And what that leads to is this issue of pirated streams. If content owners don't let viewers watch the way they want to watch, they will tend to find alternative ways of doing that. So this is one of the things that drive some of the piracy. I mean, one of the questions I ask is, piracy is as simple as gee, I want to watch it for free, and it turns out it's not that, viewers are willing to pay if you let them watch it the way they want. So the best way to protect from piracy issues, it turns out, is to just be more flexible in how you let your audience watch what they want to watch. If they want to watch on a large screen, let them. I know the problem is that the rights holders, when they bid for it, a lot of times their hands are tied and they can't. I think this will, over time, shake out. I certainly don't expect it to magically get fixed during 2022. But you know, that it's sort of, that's the problem.
Personalization can lead to improved monetization
In terms of other personalization, things that could help more relevant ads. So one advantage online has over broadcast is you have a better handle on who your audiences are, what regions they're in because you have the right IP addresses. And that can help in terms of delivering more relevant ads than just something general micro-transactions is something that's being tried a lot by some sports leagues and some networks. So what this is involving is, let's say you have a premium subscription. And what that allows you to do is put in some requests, like I'm following certain football clubs. And I don't always have time to watch all the matches, but if there's something interesting, like a key play, or as I talked about earlier minutes left in the game, that you would get a link, like a key event, a link, there was this unbelievable play, and you'd get this link, alerting you to it with a link that you can click on your mobile device and see a replay of the play.
Or you can just join the video stream late. So you can watch those final five minutes of a match that's in the final time. And they charge a micro - they're called micro-transactions because it's a relatively low fee compared to the whole subscription. But it's significant in terms of the number of people that will win and try these micro fees out and try just watching these certain minutes. So several sports leagues are experimenting with this right now, and one is, does the technology work? In other words, what I send to the notice and they send the link, does it work? Do they immediately get the link and get the picture they want, that sort of stuff. And just finding out what the tolerances for the micro fee transaction, in terms of how much money is it worth and so forth.
And they're trying to model this now. I suspect you're going to see this a lot coming in 2022.
Watch Together apps
Another one is watched together apps partly pandemic driven from last year where people used to get together, maybe at a sports bar to watch a football match or at somebody's house and watch together, or even for entertainment, like watching a film together, and they watched on this app, and it could be on a laptop, it could be on a mobile device, but then you see each other, and they're tuned to have like about less than a dozen people in the group. They all see the video at the same time because they put a slight delay in the live video so that it reaches the watch together app at the same time for all the viewers. And they also have a live chat on there, so they can talk to each other watch together, second best to physically being together. But you see many sports leagues try this out right now. And again, it would be a premium subscriber option.
Arriving at the right pricing models
Ghassan Abdo (IDC)
It sounds to me, Charlie, these are extremely interesting opportunities for monetization. The commercialization aspect of it probably is not an easy one in terms of how you price it. How do you make it frictionless? Who do you charge? How do you charge that? I don't know if you have a perspective on it.
Charlie Kraus (Limelight Networks)
I don't have enough data, but right now, the pricing is sort of all over the place in terms of what they're experimenting with. Depending on how long the video is, they've been trying to keep it simple. So it's not just, we're having somebody worry about, well, how many minutes am I going to watch at the end of a match. I thought it was five minutes. Now they're on extra time, et cetera. You don't want to have him thinking about or worried about what that's going to cost. So they're trying to get some model that just keeps it simple. So it's sort of not a thought, oh, it's only a small amount, but the times a lot of viewers. So something like that.
Artificial intelligence offers new capabilities
Another one here I noticed, and this is a screenshot I got from an actual event, is using artificial intelligence for people that want to watch certain players, so that you can put a little information up on the screen.
If you want to follow them, like on an offensive charge, in a match, you can put like the speed of the different players. You could put stats about different age groups that are more sensitive about this than others. Like millennials tend to like this more than boomers, who just want to watch the match. Don't bother me with all this other stuff on the screen, but it's another thing that's being looked at with trying to use artificial intelligence to pick out the player you want on the screen, find data to present. It's a pretty complex workflow to do it, but it's being experimented with right now.
Choose your camera view
Another one's camera angles. When you're out in the stadium, you notice these cameras all around the stadium. But when you watch the broadcast, they're deciding what to show you, what camera angle, and so forth. So online, you can offer different camera angles, streams to them and let them pick; they could split-screen, watch from two different angles, again, all premium services that they could bring in extra revenue that are being tested right now.
So a Q&A and final words here.
I think you know, the competition thing it's real. One of the things I thought of it as I was actually focused a lot on the competition thing on sports and the sports rights and the social media companies. But if you think about the entertainment side of this in the early days of online video, film studios, TV studios, they would license their content to Netflix and the nets where Netflix got their content and many of these other providers, but we saw over time that Netflix and Amazon started to produce their own content. So they built their own film studios. And you see that manifest during like the Academy Award shows where they're winning awards for movie and TV content, and film content, along with the traditional studios.
New competition from traditional film and television show creators
Now flipping that around, the studios have said: "Hey, you know, we've been licensing our content to you, now we're going to have our own OTT service, and we're going to pull our content back." So you've seen Disney has done this. They used to license a lot of their content out to Netflix. Now they have their own Disney channels, and you have Peacock. So those are two more aspects of the competition on the entertainment side. That, again, really weren't there about a year ago. So that's two new, new things putting pressure on everybody for competing in this developing new and more diverse revenue streams is absolutely critical. The best way to have a differentiation is exclusive content where you can. Everything we showed you today is not something where you'd have to wait a year or two for some technology to do that. It's all available.
Getting to the right low latency solution
Now we mentioned low latency, and it's a little bit beyond this webinar to go into details of how you get this low five-second latency, but sort of a high-level view. If you've heard of the term CMAF, - Common Media Application Format, this is a technology that was originally developed to try to simplify online video by not having so many different chunks streaming protocols that were 90% the same but a hundred percent incompatible with each other. And it's down to pretty much too, and it's mutually HLS and DASH deliver most of the traffic. The other thing you can do with CMAF besides playing this in code once and deliver by either HLS or DASH to simplify your encoding is also a low latency mode where you are using micro chunks. So instead of ten-second chunks, you're doing 100-millisecond chunks or 200-millisecond chunks and using something called trunk transfer and coding. What this means is rather than having to build an entire packet frame and send it before the player can do it. As the encoder is putting out these microchunks, the player can begin playing immediately. And so when you put this together in a workflow, that means right now, instead of waiting 10 seconds for a whole big chunk to be developed as these micro-chunks go in, you wait for a few of these hundred-millisecond chunks, and you start playing it. And that's where you can tune this and get this, this five, second latency to match broadcast. So that's pretty pervasive now, and almost all the top-tier CDNs are now offering a CMAF with this low latency mode that I was talking about. Again, that's a deep technical topic for another time.
So generally, the bottom line is to offer your viewers the best possible viewing experience, and they'll keep coming back for more.
So housekeeping at the end, I mentioned at the beginning that you're going to receive an email with a link to the recorded version and links to those contents that we provided at the beginning.
So do we have any questions? Let's look in the Q&A box here.
Consumers are frustrated by content search
So here's one. What about content search that you didn't talk about that? So one of the frustrations I have is that if I go to one of my subscriber panels and go to one of their search boxes, they usually show a box with all the letters of the alphabet. You have to laboriously navigate around, type out of something and try to find, but after some time, you're trying to find a movie or something you watch, you don't find something you might go to another service. And what people are saying, it's like these wall gardens you're in the Netflix world garden, or the Hulu or the Amazon walled garden. And what they really would like is something that we used to have taken for granted back when it was simple, that there were only a handful of TV channels.
You had a TV guide, and you could look, and you could see the programs everybody had. And I think consumers would love to see some really good services when you put in types of content you watch that can sort of peeking over those walled gardens and display that type of movie or something from any of the providers you have subscriptions from, to make that easier. So I haven't seen any efforts to do this. I don't know off the top of my head that one that's like really pervasive has caught on, but I think that's something that we might see.
Can all OTT services successfully monetize?
What's another one here? So you talked about these OTT services and how the numbers are increasing, raising competitive things. And then you said, wow, but the average per household has two or three.
So if there are more than a hundred of these, how are they all going to monetize that? I think that's a real challenge. That's why a lot of them started their own studios to develop their own exclusive content to do that, and they all have big budgets to do it. Especially when you look at the big top guys, they have billions that they're spending a year on their own content. It makes it very challenging for smaller players.
Are niche content OTT services a way to differentiate?
I think you're going to see a lot of niche content. That's very focused on certain types of sporting activities, like you see hunting, fishing, all these little niche services that are coming up as a way to differentiate, just showing the same catch-up TV and films as everybody else is not going to be a competitive advantage.
So this is going to be an onus on services to really explore niches that they can cover really well and do well at that gets them away from a lot of this competition.
I don't see any more questions right now. So I would say I thank everyone for watching. I hope you found this useful and many opportunities for us to engage with you and your journey to deliver better online experiences. We would welcome that. And we look forward to having you in hosting you on another future webinar. Bye-Bye.
Ghassan Abdo (IDC)
Great. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Bye.