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Unleash OTT: SeaChange Advocates For Open, Multi-Vendor Solutions

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Today’s OTT content delivery ecosystem has changed the industry drastically, perhaps most significantly by presenting broader opportunities to build powerful and lasting relationships with viewers. The technological underpinnings for offering finely-tuned content recommendations, individually-relevant advertising, and the ability to deliver this content to the viewer, regardless of device or location, are now available to video providers of all types.

As an industry, we’ve been so focused on the technology of streaming that, in many cases, the actual experience has taken a back seat. The technology lets us insert ads into OTT streams, but we show the same ad 3 times in 6 ad slots. The perfect video for the viewer is in the library, but it lacks sufficient metadata for the viewer to find it. These are business challenges, not technology ones.

Our industry today exhibits parallels to the nascent PC market. Many video platforms used by today’s service providers, such as Netflix, are purpose-built from the ground up – proprietary and closed. They reflect the days before modern operating systems, when hobbyists and experts wrote software programs for each machine – Apple II, Amiga, Commodore, Radio Shack, etc. With the emergence of the Windows PC, application portability and hardware flexibility became the norm, innovation flourished, and economies of scale drove down costs. The PC’s relatively open framework allowed it to compete effectively against the closed Apple MacIntosh system.

If our industry is to optimize innovation and growth, and provide the experience that viewers demand, we must push toward more open systems and APIs that support rapid integration and feature portability across a wide swath of systems and viewers – helping video providers migrate from their legacy set top box solutions to a fully IP-enabled future, either gradually through incremental hybrid STB deployments, or in one bold “Bring Your Own Device” leap.

Competition is fierce, demand is increasing, and consumer expectations continue to rise. The days of developing purpose-built, closed systems are behind us. Our PanoramiC video management and delivery platform and cFlow portfolio of video management solutions is the real world expression of SeaChange’s advocacy for open, multi-vendor solutions that can unleash OTT video’s potential.

SeaChange International

50 Nagog Park

Acton, MA 01720

USA

seachange.com

@SeaChangeNews

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