The challenges for OTT in 2019

A piece for InBroadcast that does pretty much what it say on the tin, looks at the main challenges facing OTT in 2019.

Every year starts with a set of technologies that look set to change the game, shift the paradigm, or complete any other action from a marketing-friendly range of buzzphrases. Not all of them deliver. Blockchain, for example, was driven by the explosion of interest in cryptocurrency to be a revolution in waiting and was a victim of its own hype. It may yet deliver on its promise, but not in the short term. Likewise 5G, which will be one of the main tech stories of 2019 but has a realistic inflection point set closer to 2020, or even beyond.

Both are further enablers of OTT, but in many senses the feeling is that OTT doesn’t actually need enablers any more. It almost feels like another century ago that Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, pushed the button on a sudden and dramatic global expansion; the company leveraging the power of the cloud to add 150 countries to its roster in one fell swoop. In fact it was just 2016.

Amazon Prime Video followed and the growth of the OTT market has only accelerated since. The worldwide market for SVOD services alone has grown 2.8x in three years and continues to expand, with 2018’s 474 million subscribers expected to grow to 777 million by 2023. That’s not to say that the industry doesn’t face challenges though. Here are the Top 8 of them.

Read the full article here.