Smarter Streaming Starts With Personalization

Hi everyone. Welcome and thank you for joining us. I'm Bevin Fletcher, senior editor of StreamTV Insider, and I'm here with Jim Owens of Aurora Networks. Jim is senior director of product management for video solutions at Aurora Networks. He has more than 20 years of experience in technology, product management, and marketing, and has worked on a wide variety of video products, including ad insertion, multi-view, network DVR, and video on demand. Hey, Jim, how are you? Thanks for being here with us.

I'm doing well, thank you. How are you?

I'm good, thanks. All right, so to start us off, can you tell us a little bit about Aurora Networks? Because it's a new name, but the company's been long-established in the space. So how are you leaning on those roots and then what's new and key about who you are today?

Yeah, it's interesting. It is a new name and we're out trying to help people understand who we are in our history. Actually, Aurora's parent company is called Vistance Networks, and up until recently that was actually known as CommScope. So some of your audience may know that company. But what Aurora does is we're really focused on two main areas. One is broadband networking and access technology for service providers. And then the business I'm in, which is video solutions for service providers, content owners, and streamers. And the origins of the business goes way back all the way to General Instrument and Motorola. So really decades of experience in the industry.

So although it's a new name, people may not recognize that the teams and the technology go way back. It was later acquired by ARRIS and they had their own video team as well. And along the way, we purchased a couple dozen companies in various areas, including one SeaWell Networks, for example, which was a leader in the ad and search space. So in fact, today we are a leader in advertising and deliver more than 60 billion ads a year. We have a programmer business, which works on content distribution from the content owners to the TV providers. And then the business I'm in, which is all about IP video solutions and advertising.

Okay. And so as you're thinking about IP video solutions and advertising, what are some of the main streaming related challenges that you're focused on helping solve or ease?

Yeah, it's a very competitive environment. So where we're focused, I mean, we can help our customers with anything. We have a solutions team, we have a good services team, and we have partners, and we can pull together pretty much any solution they need. But our emphasis really on our product is around what we call monetization, which for us really means advertising and personalization. So how do you make your video service more profitable? So on the advertising side, it's all about how do you build a scalable, reliable advertising ecosystem? How do you reduce the complexity so that you can get started faster and make changes more easily and reduce the cost of providing advertising?

And then how do you generate new inventory so that you can find ways for our customers to make additional revenue off of new ad inventory that they don't have today? When we talk about personalization, it's really about how do you customize the user experience so that you can generate new revenue generating services to generate new revenue for our customers? And then how do you reduce churn? So how do you create a better experience for the customer so that it reduces their churn, which obviously helps their business?

Now, I don't know if I touched on, but I believe you do something with stream personalization versus video personalization. Could you talk to me a little bit about what stream personalization is and what that does?

Yeah. Yeah. So we break that into those two areas, as you mentioned. So stream personalization is really about how do you customize the user experience by changing the stream, meaning the video segments that are delivered. You don't have to touch the video, but how do you change what's delivered in that stream to the customer? So this uses usually a technology called manifest manipulation or sometimes referred to as server-side ad insertion. And so that's all about customizing that session that the user experiences. So advertising is the big one. Obviously that's the hot topic, and that's what most of our customers are focused on today. So as I mentioned, we deliver billions of ads a month to millions of subscribers. And again, their challenges are how do you scale efficiently? How do you grow to millions of subscribers and millions of concurrent sessions efficiently without spending too much money?

So we have unique solutions around hybrid cloud, on-premise solutions. And then how do you reduce complexity? So we have very flexible solutions that are easy to implement, easy to customize, and a very experienced team around that. So it's try and make advertising as effective as possible. Some of our customers are very focused on emergency alerts because they want their video service to look exactly like the traditional TV service everyone is used to. And then some are more technical. So CDN steering or CDN redirect, we can direct that stream to a different CDN if a CDN goes down, and we can also manage the bandwidth. So personalizing the stream can also mean adjusting the bit rates. So we can manage the amount of bandwidth that's being used while ensuring that, say, a large screen TV gets a 4K feed. Well, maybe a mobile device gets a lower feed and you save bandwidth there. So stream personalization, it really runs the gamut from a set of technologies that enable a lot of personalization without really touching the video.

So it's not just about what the viewer sees, but also how they're delivering it. It's personalized to the specific device and things like that.

Exactly.

And so how is that different from video, you said you're not touching actual video, how does video personalization differ? And are those two, can you combine them? Are they complimentary? How does that work?

Yeah. So when we say video personalization, we're referring to just that, changing the video itself, and that involves some level of transcoding. So one of the hot examples today is multi-view. And we've actually had a product in this area for years. And what that means is you want to be able to watch multiple channels on the screen at one time. And so one of the ways to do that is to do it in the network, in the server. And what we do is we take these multiple channels and create one video stream from that. And you can also create new ad inventory. So while you're watching, say, a multi-view, you could get a banner ad or a squeezeback where the screen gets smaller and you could put ads around the side of the screen. So it opens up a lot of opportunity for not just new services, but new ad inventory as well.

So also on the monetization front, and also I'm sure multi-view is popular with sports happening and a lot of action.

Well, that's right. And with sports becoming even more important every day, multi-view is a really critical service for that. And that's where it gets really interesting when you combine these two technologies, because now you can do things like you create a multi-view of four sporting events, let's say someone's watching. But then using the stream personalization on the other side, you can create either targeted ads into each one of those video streams, or you could create maybe an ad window where that generates a pop-up window that has targeted ads for that user. It could be for a region, it could be for a profile or an individual. So you can combine those two technologies to create a really customized experience that has a lot of new revenue. The other example is personal fast channels. So free ad supported TV, fast is a very hot topic.

By taking the video personalization to generate a number of small graphics, video segments, maybe animations, weather animations, things like that, along with video and ads, you can then use stream personalization to deliver a dynamic ad-supported TV stream that's generated on the fly. And so it's targeted towards either a region, towards a profile, or towards an individual even, where you're creating a personal channel just for them. And it's combining those two technologies to create targeted ads and targeted content for them. And we actually do that today with the Weather Channel. Their Local Now service is actually delivered to more than a hundred cities, and each city gets its own personalized channel that's generated on the fly using those two technologies that we provide.

With weather and things that are relevant to them. Very interesting. Awesome. Well, I hate to say that's all the time we have, but super interesting. Thank you so much for sharing, and thank you everyone for watching.

Thanks very much.