By Bart Spriester, VP & GM, Content and Streaming Provider Services, Comcast Technology Solutions
Has streaming come of age?
After a decade of development, streaming services have moved into the mainstream and are widely expected to continue their rapid growth during the 2020s.
In fact, major media and entertainment companies are increasingly confident they have developed stable, effective delivery models to support their streaming services.
In our recent research paper Streaming in the 2020s – an industry comes of age: Industry perspectives on the transformation of TV and the future of streaming services at the dawn of the new decade, MTM and Comcast Technology Solutions highlights how industry leaders belive the 2020s will be “The streaming decade, marked by a steady shift towards on-demand, app-based multiscreen viewing — with profound implications for the future of the industry.”
However, not too long ago, this wasn’t the case.
Streaming 10 years ago matched the investment into the streaming infrastructure and monetization models. The monetization models weren’t sophisticated and the investments were commensurately quite low. It was kind of the wild, wild west.
The approaches adopted by media and entertainment companies to create, manage, and operate their streaming services have evolved with the market. But how do executives believe the streaming market will develop over the coming years?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new report found there are widespread expectations a decade of further change and disruption lies ahead. The ongoing growth of streaming continues to drive changes to TV consumption and business models. The industry’s leading companies predict a growing need for business transformation across the media and entertainment industries.
“When consumers are paying for something or receiving video from a big-brand media company, they expect a premium high-quality experience. It has to be as good as TV, on every platform and device – and that’s our main priority in the years ahead,” another executive said in the report.
Looking forward, many respondents said they believe the digital transformation of their broadcasting operations remains incomplete – and see this as a critical priority for the 2020s.
“Like our peers, we established our digital teams in the 2010s and have gradually merged our broadcasting and streaming services at the back-end. However, we’ve not yet established a fully converged operation – that’s the next step,” one executive explains in the report. “The business case for greater integration and transformation is going to get more and more compelling, as streaming grows and becomes a more important part of the portfolio.”
Priorities vary, but you need a platform that can gather together all of the trends of the different, AVOD, VOD, TVOD, and be flexible.
For tier one providers, the major commercial networks and MVPDs, priorities for digital transformation included building delivery models to reliably support high-quality streaming experiences and rapid growth, amongst other high-priority concerns.
For some smaller providers, transformation from current approaches can pose challenges.
“We’ve got a stable model, that works well – but we don’t have an ability to radically transform our current approach,” another executive reported. “We’re very reliant on third-party tech providers and the big platforms who provide the infrastructure and systems we use for our streaming services.”
So, how will leading media and entertainment companies be running their streaming services in the years ahead?