Industry Insights: The changing sports production landscape and OTT

How is OTT changing your products or solutions?

“OTT has radically changed viewing habits. Traditional TV is no longer the standard, and audiences are looking for more and more content across a variety of platforms. This has increased the demand for new and fresh material, which in turn has opened the doors and created more opportunities for content producers everywhere,” explained May. “Blackmagic Design’s goal has always been to empower the end user with professional and affordable products, and our customers range from student and indie filmmakers to Hollywood film and television, all levels of broadcast, sports, A/V, live production, streaming and more. With the expanded demand for content and growing pool of new talent and opportunities to deliver it, it’s great to see our customers finding new platforms to share their content.”

“TVU Producer was designed to simplify productions with a cloud-based production solution. It enables users to easily produce live content for social media,” explained Shen.

“It’s all about delivery – OTT is forcing manufacturers to move faster toward IP and HEVC solutions,” said D’Amico.

“OTT is part of our entire portfolio of solutions, from ad management, playout, production, encoding/transcoding solutions, monitoring and infrastructure. The key driver for us is to provide solutions that deliver content whenever, wherever, and on whatever device consumers desire. We recently introduce a unified distribution architecture, which promotes the primacy of HTTP-based networks that utilize adaptive bitrate technology for the delivery of video signals and advertisements. By utilizing a fragment-based video delivery infrastructure, nearly all segments of the media industry ecosystem can make tremendous gains in efficiency and introduce new monetization models,” said McCoy.

“OTT services are changing the game both in terms of speed to screen and resolution. The deployment of mobile second screens experiences in stadiums means that new benchmarks need to be achieved with respect to instant and VR replays. On the fly creation and distribution workflows need to be streamlined to meet the near real-time expectations of sports fans.

“OTT services are leading the path when it comes to distributing content in increased color depth and higher resolutions. Think of it: Netflix has been streaming 4K content for the past three years now and launched HDR content 18 months ago. The combination of end-to-end IP distribution and HEVC software-based CODECs means that OTT players can easily meet the future resolutions that screen manufacturers will be promoting with the next generation displays that they’ll be introducing in the coming decade,” explained Nicolas Hans of Videlio.

“OTT enables more bite-sized personalized content which requires less complex production systems. Because of this, tools with a smaller footprint are needed, where you can combine automation with graphics and video playout. Moving production to a simpler state which can easily be multi-broadcast with a smaller crew but the same high-quality production graphics and effects,” Jorba said.

“AJA is committed to developing products that can feed a range of delivery outfits from Broadcast to OTT. For example, our HELO H.264 streaming and recording device was built with shortcuts to help YouTube and even Facebook Live streamers, and quickly feed into other major CDNs like Wowza,” said Button.

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“Fortunately for SAM, its playout solutions have been architected to be flexible and accommodate any type of 3rd party integration which includes OTT encoders. It allows our linear playout solution Morpheus to control the content being played out by any OTT encoder. That is in parallel to the control we have of our own integrated playout device – ICE. Depending on how the customer wants us to work we can either directly control the OTT encoder as we do with AWS Elemental Live, or use HTTP data feeds to drive other types of encoder. SAM sees the increase in OTT delivery as an opportunity to make use of our new Morpheus UX customisable web interface because this means we can make sure our customer’s 24/7 operations rooms can be just as focussed on the OTT events that playout under Morpheus control as any other type of primary event on the main channel,” said Ian Young of Snell Advanced Media.

Participants

Ofir Benovici – Avid
Bryce Button – AJA Video Systems
Joseph D’Amico – JVC Professional Video
Nicolas Hans – Videlio
David Jorba – Vizrt
Dan May – Blackmagic Design
Patrick McCoy – Imagine Communications
Paul Shen – TVU Networks
Ian Young – Snell Advanced Media
Matt Zajicek – Snell Advanced Media

[focus-on]This article is part of our Focus On Sports and Live Production. View more from the series here.[/focus-on]