In the crowded business of turnkey streaming platforms, differentiation is difficult to come across. Broadcasters and content owners of varying scale care less and less about core video technology choices, and that is reflected in the absence of innovation on show at IBC 2024.
By the same token, there is also clear evidence of market maturation, as technologies fundamental to processing and delivering video become better, faster, cheaper, and more scalable.
Conversations about video codecs, streaming protocols, and CDNs are fading from the show floor in place of content and advertising strategies, while familiar topics like churn reduction and analytics hang around like reassuring faces.
Companies like Enghouse, a beast with 2,500 employees, go toe-to-toe with minnows like Vodlix. A vendor like Setplex is nominated for more awards categories than you can shake a stick at, much to the envy of Zattoo, Endeavor Streaming, Bedrock Streaming, Magine Pro, Akta Tech, the list goes on.
“We do everything that Harmonic and Wowza can do, and more,” is the pitch we hear repeatedly in various iterations.
“We can get you up and running in 4 weeks instead of 6 months,” is another.
“We are the only true end-to-end TV platform,” is perhaps the most regurgitated statement of the lot.
There is plenty of business to go around, and the renewed optimism at IBC, compared to NAB, is palpable. Some target tier 1s, while others admit that tier 1s are tough nuts to crack, focused solely on tier 2 and 3 accounts.
Of course, some suppliers butt horns for the same accounts, while select video platform vendors prefer to be highly selective with customers. The rise of the multi-tenant SaaS model means that if one customer has an idea for a new feature, such as a small UI tweak or new dashboard KPI, then all customers get that feature – whether a direct competitor or not.
Suppliers push back against criticisms of creating walled gardens by highlighting that their TV clients can learn from one another, putting video brains together to flesh out new revenue streams and to keep fingers on the pulse of consumer viewing demands.
Multiview is one feature mentioned more often than not at IBC 2024, with a demonstration of the prototype mobile app from Tiledmedia easily the most impressive on that front. The Dutch firm’s approach takes all streams together using tiling technology, so only one decoder is needed to handle the different views.
This method is the most traffic-efficient, but requires a more sophisticated video player managing all feeds, which Tiledmedia argues is the best way to get a good user experience, as well as handling scalability and device diversity.
Looking geographically, some vendors confess at IBC 2024 that they have recently exited Latin America or are winding down investments in the region, due to unsustainable prices.
Others talk of a landgrab for accounts in Latin America with a new streaming service launching weekly, not to mention the emergence of SBTVD 3.0 in Brazil from Q1 2025.
Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is another hotbed of activity, we are told with more sustainable prices for vendors particularly in the oil rich countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.
Meanwhile, delusions of AI are force fed to attendees in every hall, on the premise that video customers cannot survive without superficial AI-based features.
As AI strategies mature and companies employ more specialists in machine learning and of course generative AI, it will make innovation easier to identify at future shows. The market is several years away from any sort of AI utopia, and another wave of consolidation will strike before then. More on AI in a separate story this week.
Over the coming weeks, Faultline will expand on the products and strategies of some of the technology companies mentioned above, starting this week with Enghouse.