TVB Europe asked experts across the media tech industry to share their thoughts, with topics including the rise of sports streaming, FAST, low-latency, and the "greening of streaming" In the second of our features looking at possible highlights and challenges for the media tech industry over the next 12 months, we focus on streaming.
   

Samira Bakhtiar, director, Global Media & Entertainment, AWS

Media and Entertainment (M&E) professionals are in the midst of an industry-wide transformation, as many content providers are reinventing the way they create content and compete for audience attention across streaming and direct-to-consumer (D2C) platforms. Industry leaders such as Netflix, NBCUniversal, HBO, Sky and Disney are turning to the cloud to pioneer new ways to entertain, expand their content catalogs, and set new audience experience paradigms for viewers. Faced with unprecedented audience demand for new entertainment, content providers will continue to rely heavily on remote production in the future as it opens up creative collaboration across the globe. As more companies explore the possibilities of cloud-based streaming technologies in the next year, we only anticipate the audience experience to grow richer.

Robin Kirchhoffer, CMO at Dalet

The business has shifted. Previously, streaming was simply about the number of subscribers. Now, it has become a profits game. While subscription numbers will continue to be an essential metric, retaining subscribers and truly making money from each of them will prove to be the main competition of 2023. This means we are likely to see advertising on all major platforms, something already in motion at most high-profile OTT companies. With competition like never before, the amount of content produced will also be on the rise to increase subscriber retention. Streaming services are likely to see an explosion of sports content, with broadcasts accumulating an enormous volume of content before, during and after the game. The range of streaming scenarios and the massive amount of content flow is likely to result in companies needing to have advanced tech and automated workflows in place to manage it.

Liam Hayter, senior solutions architect, NewTek

We expect to see the trajectory of distributed live production continue to evolve and develop across all content creation, and the space between traditional AV experiences and broadcast technologies overlap even further as a result.

Software-defined production technologies for live production, distribution, control and transmission are crucial in this unified space enabling more sources, better graphics, social media integration, automation and dynamic extended reality to any size production team, even self-service spaces – all delivered on commoditised Ethernet networks.

The 2020s started as a forced shift to remote and distributed communication and production, but 2023 is the year of agility, maturity and raising the bar of quality and engagement.

Ciro Noronha, Ph.D., RIST Forum

Let us broadly define “streaming” as “transporting real-time content over the Internet”. “Real-time” does not necessarily mean “live”, it just means that it is something that gets played in real-time on the other side. With this definition of “streaming”, we can use it for contribution and for distribution. Contribution cases include studio to studio, sports venue to studio, and similar cases. Contribution over the Internet has been a reality for many years; 2023 will see a lot more of that. The other aspect, distribution, refers to using the Internet to deliver content to end-users.

The “last” challenge there is latency for live events – as in, it has to be a lot less than it is now. We believe that 2023 will be the year where low-latency distribution solutions will become mainstream. Higher latency allows for smooth operation on marginal networks; as consumer Internet service gets better, there is an opening for lower latency operation. Our forecast is that the adoption of open, interoperable, and technically robust solutions for live video contribution/distribution over unmanaged networks will continue to grow.