How many times have you sat with your family in front of the TV and said, “there’s nothing worth watching”? Over the past two years, over-the-top (OTT) video has exploded, and the demand for premium content and a personalized viewing experience has accelerated, and so has the associated investment by national and international players.
Why? To begin with, the system was all about attracting subscribers. However, more recently local players have been producing focused content, such as TennisTV, which led the market to place emphasis on retaining subscribers. We have seen this shift before with satellite and cable, but the speed at which the market transitioned from customer acquisition to acquisition and retention has been staggering.
Investment scales rising in a big way
Then, in late December, I saw this article in the Financial Times, and it confirmed to me that the stakes had been raised to a point where it could be considered a frenzy for grabbing market share. The media titans, such as Disney+ and Netflix, decided to make a big move by investing on a scale never seen before in the media world—more than $100B in content creation during 2022.
This news is undoubtedly good for the subscriber, but imagine what it means to other players across the media value chain. Media preparation, content discovery, and distribution companies must be asking themselves the following difficult questions right now:
- How do I store and manage all this new content?
- How can I rapidly increase my encoding and transcoding capability?
- How can I deal with the increased need for orchestration of media and metadata preparation?
- How do I maintain service levels and exceed customer experience expectations when distributing the content to end users?
The answers to all these questions are heavily biased toward how they can use the latest technology faster and more cheaply than competitors. All players are considering how to use the cloud to help them meet the demands of the media titans as this tsunami of content flows through media processes, which have already been stretched over the past two years of phenomenal growth.
Every player in the media value chain must get ready and prepare themselves to react with speed and agility by ensuring that their cloud strategies deliver extreme technological performance at a price point that allows the business to make a healthy margin.
The last point that I want to raise is that smaller competitors to Netflix, Disney+, and others won’t roll over and let the titans have free rein. Expect a fierce battle to produce the best content, premium or focused. So, this initial mega investment by the market’s biggest players will be increased further by smaller and more nimble players in 2022 and beyond.
I can honestly say that no one will be uttering the words, “there’s nothing worth watching.”
Conclusion
- If you want to learn more how Oracle Cloud is helping other business like yours, visit our media and streaming site.
- If you want a 1:1 session with our director of media and streaming at Oracle, email Ian Broughton for a quick 15-minute discussion.