Paul Boustead, VP of Product and Business Strategy at Dolby, introduces Dolby OptiView, a new brand aimed at optimizing live streaming experiences—particularly in the sports industry. Dolby OptiView combines a high-quality video player, flexible latency-controlled streaming, and a cutting-edge server-guided ad insertion product to help broadcasters deliver more engaging, monetizable content. Boustead highlights key industry shifts driving the need for such solutions, including declining watch times among younger audiences, the rise of in-play sports betting, and increasing demand for synchronized, social viewing experiences. Dolby’s approach to ad delivery stands out by combining server-side cross-platform support and client-side precision and scalability, and by enabling innovative ad formats like double box and L-shape. With support for Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision, OptiView is positioned to help streaming providers create high-quality, immersive, and revenue-driven live experiences across platforms.
Watch the full interview to learn how Dolby is shaping the future of live sports streaming.
Bevin Fletcher:
Hi, everyone. Welcome and thanks for joining us. I'm Bevin Fletcher, Senior Editor of StreamTV Insider. And I'm here today with Paul Boustead, VP of Product and Business Strategy at Dolby. We're going to talk about a couple of key topics in streaming, live sports and ads, and how Dolby has a new offering that can help with both. So, first off, welcome, Paul. Thanks for being here. I'm excited to talk with you.
Paul Boustead:
Hi, Bevin. I'm excited to speak as well.
Bevin Fletcher:
Okay. So, to get started, most people are likely familiar with Dolby Atmos and Vision, but you just launched a new brand, Dolby OptiView. So, can you tell us more about that and what makes it unique?
Paul Boustead:
So, Dolby OptiView is our new brand that covers our cloud services for building live online experiences. So, the brand stands for optimal viewing. And so, we're focusing on optimal viewing experiences for the sports industry. And so, by optimal viewing, I mean that we're helping them build high quality interactive experiences that they can also monetize. Monetization is really important to us here. And under this, we have three products. So, we have a player which helps our customers deploy high quality media services across a whole range of devices. So, in sports, you actually want your experience on mobile, web, and also smart and connected TVs. We also have a streaming product. We have one streaming product that can cater for a wide range of latency needs. We can do ultra low latency, below a second, even below half a second. We can also do low latency between zero and seven seconds.
And what we want here is to enable our customers to be able to watch together. So, essentially, our customers can pick a delay target, say two seconds, and then all of their viewers will be watching at that two second latency. We also support streaming seven plus seconds for the more lean back experiences. And our platform really chooses the right technology underlying to achieve those latency needs. And what I'm most excited about is also our ad product, which is relatively new in our group here. And so, we have a server-guarded ad insertion product that combines the advantage of server-side ad insertion and client-side ad insertion. And we've been working with a couple of really big names in the sports industry, which can't really talk about, to solve their ad problems, helping them personalize ads at scale and create better ad experiences.
Bevin Fletcher:
Very interesting. And so, to zoom out just for a minute, you highlighted sports as a key vertical here, live in particular. So, what are some of the kind of key industry trends that have been driving the need for these types of products and solutions?
Paul Boustead:
Sports industry is actually changing really quickly and it's kind of exciting. It's an exciting industry to be working in. So, there's a few trends that we're tracking. One of the most important is that watch times are decreasing, particularly for younger generations. So, there's a drive to create more engaging experiences, to keep the younger generations into the sport. So, we're working with a number of our customers, but also we have a large research group in Dolby, which is great. We're working on ways to better engage these audiences to increase watch time. So, we also see that in-play sports betting is growing and becoming mainstream. And the interesting thing about in-play betting is that it enables people to bet while the game is going. So, you can bet after the game has started, and this really increases user engagement. And what we're interested in here is that the industry is starting to create new experiences to engage the users during this experience.
A good example is Sportradar. They have new visualizations in the video streams that show the path of a basketball, possible outcomes in the game. And these are really interesting. And we think they're going to become available in mainstream sports experiences in the future, so that users can see more about what's happening in the game. And it also can help with new watchers of a sport, understand the sport, and help with on-ramp of new viewers in a sport. We're also seeing an increasing cost and fragmentation of sports rights. So, this concentration of ours on helping our customers monetize their streams is a really important part of the business. And the last one I want to mention is the drive to lower delay.
So, we see this being driven by people wanting to watch together while communicating over social media. So, the last thing people want to do when they're watching a support is to hear about it from their neighbors, cheering, or hear about it on social media, or a notification from an app before they sit in the screen. They really want to experience the sport while it's happening. They're the main trends, Bevin, that we're seeing at the moment.
Bevin Fletcher:
Makes sense. So, deepening engagement, enriching that fan experience. And then I want to double click on that latency aspect, that reduction time. So, latency is obviously key to live sports streaming. So, just how low does it need to be and is it necessary for everyone, all applications?
Paul Boustead:
So, it's not necessary for everyone, but we're focusing on live events here. And we're seeing it becoming increasingly important for sports, eSports, sports betting and gaming. And so, we generally break it down into three groups. So, sub-second is important for say auctions, for gaming. And we see it increasingly important for sports with in-play betting. The biggest category we see though is between one and seven seconds latency, which is good for social viewing of live sports. Where you don't want to get spoilers. Now, in this area, it's not just the latency that's important, it's actually the consistency of latency. So, if you've got your user base watching at say a two or three-second latency, you want them all watching at that latency.
So, what we've been doing is spending a lot of time on innovating so that a bad network doesn't cause you to blow out to a massive delay and watch it way behind others. Greater than seven seconds is great when you're not worried about learning about the result through other means, and it's a lean-back sort of experience. But one thing we're also seeing is that customers wanting their viewers to watch at different levels of latency. So, if someone's really engaged, providing them with a low-latency stream while others are higher latency.
Bevin Fletcher:
Interesting.
Paul Boustead:
One last thing I think that's important is low latency isn't really sufficient. You have to combine it with all of the features you just need for general streaming, like DRM, captioning, ads, and also things like Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision, which we're obviously passionate about in our organization.
Bevin Fletcher:
Awesome. Okay. Well, could you elaborate a little bit more on the advertising product? I mean, a lot of streaming services are already incorporating ads in products, so how does the Dolby OptiView ads stand out in that realm?
Paul Boustead:
I'm quite excited about this product, as I mentioned before. So, essentially, it's a server-guided ad insertion product, which means that we keep and enhance the markers in the content that you use for server-side ad insertion. These markers help you understand... they indicate where the ad should be inserted. It's really important to insert the ad frame accurate. So, with a server-guided ad insertion, the player takes these markers and introduces the ad at the player itself. So, the advantage here is that you can move a lot of the complexity from a server infrastructure into the player, which really helps with scale. But to answer your question about where we differentiate, in particular, we are pioneering this approach with some really large customers in sport. So, server-guided ad insertion is a new approach. So, we're actually in there with some large customers solving their problems, to help them increase their revenue, plus also add new experiences like L-bar and double-box.
Double-box is cool because you can watch the action and an ad at the same time, side-by-side in windows. And we're also working closely with the Google Ad Manager team to make all of this work with their service and their programmatic ad inventory. But in addition, we're thinking wider than ads. And we're working with customers on something that we're calling server-guided ad insertion. The idea here is that the production team could decide to put in markers in the content for things other than ads. For example, you could have a case where the game is getting less interesting, not much is happening in the game and the producers go, "Well, this is a great time to feed our viewers other content." And so, they could put a marker in the content which gets received by the players. And what we could do is introduce new content that's really personalized to the player.
So, we could play them a clip side-by-side in this double-boxing, which I mentioned before, of something that's exciting happening in another game that that viewer follows. They could be following a game because they like the team or related to their fantasy picks. But it could also be a clip from an archive or even a social media post from one of the teams they follow or brought to you by a sponsor. The kind of thing we're going for here is trying to keep users engaged by feeding them content and then monetizing it as we go forward. So, we see this server-guided experience as a way for us to really engage users and keep them in the game longer.
Bevin Fletcher:
Okay. Awesome. Well, a lot changing in the industry, but clearly a ton of benefits to take advantage of. So, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us, Paul. And look forward to hearing more.
Paul Boustead:
Thank you. It's great to share this. Thanks, Bevin.