Mumbai: By combining TO THE NEW’s VideoReady OTT solution with Vionlabs’ Cognitive AI solutions, this partnership aims to enhance the digital and technical capabilities and innovation ecosystem in OTT services, providing personalised content discovery based on the emotions each content category invokes to subscribers.
Manish heads the OTT Solutions & Services business at TO THE NEW. With his deep understanding of the media value chain, Manish focuses on helping global media customers create better content, achieve higher monetisation & drive highly efficient media operations. Manish comes from a strong Strategy & Consulting background with deep media industry knowledge.
Indiantelevisoin.com caught up with the To The New vice president & business head - OTT solutions & services Manish Sinha.
Edited excerpts
On-demand for OTT solutions and services changed since the start of the pandemic
The pandemic restricted mobility and made people confined to their homes. As a result, the people had more free time at their disposal and they needed some entertainment to kill their time. This led to a sudden surge in demand and consumption for streaming services such as Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, and Hulu. This surge in demand intensified the race and competition for releasing new content and features on the OTT platforms which resulted in high demand for OTT solutions and services across engineering and content.
We were quick to notice and respond to the trend to be able to meet evolving and rapidly growing industry needs. We ramped up our OTT engineering team significantly by additional hiring and internal movements from teams serving other industries, such as travel and hospitality and retail, that were facing a slowdown due to the pandemic. We also ramped up our media services team to be able to support our large OTT clients with content operations that are required after any large content deals and there were during and post-pandemic period.
Additionally, due to rapid growth, competition and the need for speed in the industry, we significantly revamped our VideoReady OTT solution to be able to deliver our customers the speed and agility needed while having them meet their business needs of user experience and monetisation.
On the recent work that TO THE NEW has worked on in the OTT industry
These are interesting times in the OTT space. The OTT euphoria that we saw in the last few years has slowed down and OTT businesses are looking to find their niche to stand out and aim for profitability and long-term sustainability. Based on the market needs and priorities, TO THE NEW picked up three key areas over the past 12-18 months - Monetisation, Sports Streaming and FAST. Additionally, we have always focussed on delivering a fully integrated solution with full ownership to be able to deliver business value to our customers.
On monetisation, TO THE NEW launched a Monetisation-as-a-Service solution that enables new levers and multi-dimensional monetization for both subscription and advertising-based streaming services.
With a growing demand for sports streaming and innovations in the space, we launched VideoReady Sports with a reimagined sports experience and high fan engagement features.
We recently also launched the VideoReady FAST solution that provides content owners with tech for creating channels for FAST-based platforms such as Pluto TV, Roku Channel, Xumo etc.
The main challenge across all areas is the fact that the industry is used to OTT implementations with a mix of point solutions that don’t provide an integrated approach for achieving business objectives and there’s always resistance to disrupt such fragile implementations. The greenfield implementations done by us though have created success stories that help us convince our brownfield customers of the value and long-term benefit of an integrated solution approach.
On the biggest opportunities for growth in the OTT industry over the next few years
The biggest opportunity for OTT lies in the holistic use of data and analytics to create differentiation, unique user experience and multi-dimensional monetisation. TO THE NEW understands this imperative well and is building solutions and positioning itself in this direction to be more and more relevant to the industry.
The industry will start moving away from point solutions-based implementations to more integrated solutions that aggregate data from all parts of the OTT value chain and unleash insights and actionable that deliver the real business outcome. TO THE NEW has been enhancing and expanding its VideoReady OTT solution in that direction where it can be an end-to-end but bespoke solution for the customer as per their business shape and size.
On TO THE NEW USP and the key factors setting it apart in the cluttered market
Our USP is our deep understanding of the OTT domain and our speed of delivery. We have been working in the OTT space for over a decade now and we understand the whole OTT value chain including the involved technologies, the processes and business nuances. This knowledge helps us understand, consult, and design customer needs much faster with a first-time-right model and helps us deliver to them at speed.
On the UX and design applications for OTT by TO THE NEW
User Experience is one of the three key pillars of any OTT platform with the other two being Content and Monetisation. TO THE NEW has designed multiple OTT applications across small are large screen devices for its customers, across the globe, that includes GEC and Sports Broadcasters, Film and TV Production Studios, Sports Leagues, Publishers, Gaming companies and Fitness Studios.
On the importance of cloud infrastructure and technology in developing and managing OTT platforms
OTT is an infra and tech-heavy business and content and cloud are the two biggest cost components for any OTT platform. Within the cloud, streaming is the biggest cost component and requires high scalability and flexibility. The cloud provides this necessary scalability and flexibility in a business where the highs and lows, growth and concurrency of users can vary significantly. Similarly, the content processing-related infra requirement is high whenever there’s a new large content deal and hence this need for flexibility and consumption-based costing is there as well. The OTT businesses are difficult to imagine in a not-cloud setup.
TO THE NEW, a premium partner for all top public cloud providers brings deep cloud expertise and leverages it to design and deploy a solution that uses cloud in very robust and efficient ways. It also provides a multi-cloud strategy for large players where needed to be based on business needs.
