An Industry In Transition

In a rapidly evolving industry, we find out whether a holy grail of technologies exists that companies need to keep pace with, in order to lead the M&E bandwagon

- Anisha Gakhar

The media and entertainment industry is living by a zealous attitude of invent-or-go home, and rightly so. This is evident with the constant innovations that can be witnessed in OTT as well as media intelligence. However, how are these technological innovations affecting business models – that was one of the topics that was discussed at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit held at Mumbai in May, 2018.

ADAPTING TO CHANGING CONSUMER PATTERNS

Business models are maturing rapidly, which makes it imperative for media organisations to deliver more, seamlessly. Three attributes that help propel the goodwill of a media company are, speed, automation and efficiency. According to ABI research, OTT makes up 15% of the industry revenues, and is growing at almost ten times the pace of pay TV. Also, five years down the line, it could comprise one third of the market. In a couple of years, half the content on the web is expected to be devoted to streaming media. According to a report by The Guardian, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) hustled with 1000 extra hours of live sports coverage in November, 2017. Given this fact, it is important for media businesses to enter the world of streaming media as it is more convenient than reading walls of text.

At the Summit, Anil Nair, AWS, iterated the innovations for content distribution using the Edge. The diversity in viewership can be demonstrated by the fact that some viewers watch content at their convenience from the comfort of their homes or whilst commuting, and some, without electricity in remote locations. A part of the audience has Internet connectivity at their disposal and binge watch sitcoms over weekends. Some, like those in hostels, have limited access over the local WiFi. The array of viewership patterns is large and media houses need to be adept with these diversities, in order to satiate all viewership patterns.

CLOUD-BASED OTT - THE GAMECHANGER