OTT and the realities of FAST channels
The recent surge in FAST channels is having a significant impact on the OTT industry. Few predicted their sudden rise over the past 18 months, which has left many wondering what they’ve missed. In this blog, we explore what FAST channels are, why they are growing in popularity, and how they affect the OTT industry.
What are FAST Channels?
FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming TV) channels are a type of OTT content that allows users to stream high-quality linear content with no additional fees or subscriptions required. Simply put, FAST channels are an extended version of traditional TV streamed over internet-connected devices.
FAST vs AVOD
FAST channels operate in much the same way as traditional linear TV, with a programme schedule and ad breaks. AVOD (Advertising Video-On-Demand), on the other hand, is a streaming service business model that enables viewers to watch Video-On-Demand content in exchange for watching ads.
The positives and pitfalls for viewers
FAST channels replicate the traditional ‘free’ TV experience as they are supported by ads, which has led to significant gains in viewership over the last few months for these online-only services. While seemingly advantageous to viewers on the surface, there are drawbacks to consider, including:
- Due to their relatively new nature, some channels may have yet to be adequately tested or optimised for all types of devices, leading to viewers having potential issues with compatibility or performance.
- FAST channels may not be able to offer the same level of content selection as larger subscription services either. This could limit their appeal to viewers who are looking for a specific film, TV show, or other types of program.
- FAST channels can be resource-intensive, which may result in users experiencing buffering or other issues during peak viewing times.
What impact are FAST channels having on the OTT industry?
If you have attended a conference within the broadcast sector in the last two years, you will have heard all about FAST channels. The acronym has created a brand in itself and as ever, companies are jumping on the bandwagon for this ‘new’ business vertical. However, essentially this is merely the move from traditional linear TV via cable and satellite channels, to the future of OTT delivery. The good news is that it is now much easier to ‘spin up’ 24/7/365 linear channels through strong technology provisions, the bad news is that the fight for viewership remains exceptionally competitive, so as before the 80/20 rule will apply. If you are not in the top channels on Samsung, LG, or other, then the viewers will not find you, not watch your content and therefore your share of the advertising revenues will be significantly lower than those at the top.
However, the news isn’t all bad, all the data we see here at Magine Pro speaks to ‘lazy’ weekday viewing, that is to say after a hard day at work the average consumer will switch on linear channels and settle for something, rather than spending the time and effort to choose something from a vast array of VOD catalogues. (This behaviour switches entirely from Friday night to Sunday night). So if you have your own OTT platform, have plenty of content, and work with a good advertising platform, then it is definitely worth providing channels to enable an easier and quicker choice for your viewers.
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Want to discuss the pros and cons of FAST channels further? Get in touch with the Magine Pro team.
You can also head over to our homepage to find out more about our flexible OTT platform. Discover how we enable our partners to monetize their Live Events, Linear Channels, and VOD content with a customisable video streaming service.
Revolutionise your content delivery with AI-based recommendations
In this post, we discuss the advantages of a recommendation system for video streaming services and explore its positive impact on brand and content discoverability. Additionally, we gain insights into a new AI-powered recommendation engine by Magine Pro which will soon be released to our partners.
OTT streaming platforms offer an extensive range of content to their users. However, people often find it challenging to choose from numerous options, and may become quickly overwhelmed, resulting in poor choices or no decision at all.
According to consumer research at Netflix [1], a user typically loses interest in selecting content after browsing for just 60 to 90 seconds and reviewing 10 to 20 titles. If the user cannot find anything of interest, there is a substantial risk of them discontinuing the service.
Recommendation systems provide a solution by offering a personalised experience to users that make them feel as if the streaming service was created exclusively for them, which enhances organic engagement.
Where we started
During our last Hack Days at Magine Pro, we challenged ourselves to create a recommendation service for the platform. We brought together a cross-functional team of engineers from the Backend, Infrastructure, and Media teams to tackle this problem from different domain perspectives.
The aim was to create an end-to-end real-time recommendation system for a streaming service. Modern recommendation machine learning algorithms use datasets of users, items, and their interactions as inputs. This data has to be streamed, cleaned, transformed, and inserted into the model for the training.
Using modular programming, a technique of breaking down a product into smaller, self-contained units that can be developed and tested independently, we built separate components and went through all stages of the recommendation system creation process.
As a first proof of concept, we brought together the following services:
- Mux Analytics is used to examine clickstream data and get insights into video engagement and has an integration with AWS, our main cloud provider
- AWS Kinesis Data Streams provides the ability to stream large amounts of data in real-time
- AWS Lambda can be used to perform extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs on the protobuf-encoded data we get from Mux
- AWS Personalize is a self-contained AI service that takes input data according to the schema and generates various types of recommendations
That worked like a charm! As a next step, our team tried to reduce the costs since using MUX/AWS integration and AWS Personalize was expensive. We also wanted to experiment with different recommendation engines to find the best suitable for our needs.
Minimising the costs
The team started to think about how we can make this feature less expensive for Magine Pro and our partners.
Here are the steps we performed to decrease the costs:
- Replaced the Mux Analytics module with the Apache Kafka, a distributed streaming platform, running in our AWS infrastructure setup
- Created a separate backend service for the ETL jobs, which listened to the Kafka topics, modified and enriched them with additional information, and provided the resulting data further
- Integrated Gorse, another recommendation engine, into our system, utilising Redis as our in-memory data store and a fully managed Postgres relational database, both running on AWS
The modularity of the system gives us flexibility in many ways. For example, we can introduce yet another recommendation engine and compare them to decide which one provides the best results. No need to rebuild the entire setup; only one component has to be modified.
Key concepts
Under the hood, Magine Pro uses a recommendation engine that automatically chooses the best machine learning technique for the most accurate results. The model processes real-time clickstream data from the platform, capturing diverse user behaviours. The following recommendation types are supported:
- Most popular
- Latest releases
- Because you watched X
- More like X
- Top picks for you
Magine Pro’s recommendation system includes a vast selection of diverse recommendation types which can be customised to align with your business requirements.
Recommendation algorithms
There are many algorithms that can be used in recommendation engines, let’s look closer at the most popular ones. Recommendation algorithms are categorised into non-personalised algorithms that provide identical content to all users, and personalised ones that recommend unique content to each user based on their clickstream data.
Latest Items algorithm shows the latest items to users according to timestamps, which allows a new item to be exposed to users in time.
Popular Items algorithm counts positive feedback within the specified window interval and chooses the most liked.
Item-based and user-based collaborative filtering algorithm discovers the similarities in the user’s past behaviour and makes predictions for the user based on a similar preference with other users.
It uses a simple yet effective approach – people often get the most helpful recommendation from people with similar tastes.
Matrix factorization algorithm identifies the relationship between items and users and returns recommended results.
Recommendation system by Magine Pro offers all these options, utilising a hybrid approach that incorporates a diverse range of rating and sorting algorithms.
The Cold Start Problem
Cold start problem refers to a situation where recommendation engines cannot provide optimal results due to suboptimal conditions, similar to a car engine having difficulty starting in cold weather. The two categories of cold start are item cold start and user cold start.
Cold start problem:
What to recommend to a new user U4?
Who to show the new movie I4?
Collaborative filtering algorithms can find items to recommend when the number of user actions on an item increases. However, they fall short in case of new users or items since the model cannot predict anything for them.
Our recommendation service provides suggestions of the most popular and latest items to new users to solve the cold start problem.
Evaluation
Model evaluation is an essential part of the work on recommendation engines and refers to estimating the performance of a recommender system.
The system automatically reserves a small part of the feedback to make an evaluation of it. The aim is to maximise the probability that the user likes recommended items so the positive feedback rate can be used as a metric.
In the recommendation engine, we use standard ML evaluation metrics to evaluate ratings and predictions: precision, area under curve (AUC), and recall, where 0 means the worst and 1 means we have the best-performing ML model.
As you can see on a screenshot from the recommendation engine dashboard, our model demonstrates impressive performance.
What’s next?
Currently, our team is going through the final steps of feature development, evaluating results to ensure that the system we have built is resilient, highly available, and provides the best possible results.
We are also looking into the potential of integrating a content promotion feature for our partners.
Furthermore, we have long-term plans, such as integrating another recommendation engine into our modular system and creating a scalable testing solution to select the most appropriate model that meets our partners’ needs.
Conclusion
This post has highlighted the significance of recommendation systems in OTT streaming services, explored various algorithms, and delved into the details of recommendation engines. Magine Pro is soon launching a new recommendation service that serves as an example to highlight common issues encountered in creating such services and to introduce frequently used performance metrics.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Magine Pro e-newsletter to stay up-to-date with our latest news, partners, and products, and to find out which industry events we’ll be attending next.
How to set up a streaming service for success before signing a service contract
You’ve heard the old adage about making sure you have a solid business plan before you start any big project, and that saying is truer than ever with streaming services. Create your brand from the ground up, outline your payment options, structure your content and create a marketing strategy.
GET A PROFESSIONAL TO CREATE YOUR BRANDING FOR YOU
You need a great brand, and you need it to be unique. You need a catchy name, one that people will remember. You also need a logo and colours that will make your brand stand out from the crowd. You can create your own branding or hire someone to do it for you. It’s better to have someone with experience and knowledge of how streaming services work.
This will cost money, but it’s an investment that will pay off in the long run. A professional will be able to create a logo and colour scheme that reflects the feel of your brand, and they’ll make sure everything is designed in a way that’s easy to read on different devices.
WRITE TERMS AND POLICIES FOR YOUR SERVICE
Yes, most of your customers will not read your terms and conditions or your privacy policy. You need to have them anyway for two reasons:
- Payment gateway and app store providers will request them before you can sign a contract or release apps.
- They define the relationship with your customers. They give you a framework of what you can and can’t do. And tell your customers what they can and can’t do.
Writing legal texts usually takes the longest so you best get to it as soon as possible. If you are wondering what should be included you can have a look at other streaming services.
SIGN UP FOR A PAYMENT GATEWAY
Earning money with your content is probably your most important goal. If you want to sell subscriptions or rental content you will need a payment provider that
- can handle transactions
- support your preferred payment methods
- allow you to handle refunds and payment disputes
- helps you to prevent fraud and manage risk
- gives you the necessary financial reports
Magine Pro is already integrated with Adyen and Stripe, two reliable and professional payment gateways with a wide range of supported payment methods. Signing up with them can take some time. If you have a business plan and at least an outline of your terms and conditions you can start the conversation with your preferred provider.
When the contract is done the technical integration takes only a few hours and you can test the full purchase flow the same day.
You can also sell subscriptions through apps. Besides an app store account you need a merchant
agreement with the store provider. Don’t let the revenue share discourage you from using this opportunity. Apple, Google and Amazon have launched Small Business Programs that reduce the revenue share from 30% to 15%.
STRUCTURE YOUR CONTENT
Content is king! That saying still rings true. Potential customers will choose a streaming service mainly because they are interested in the content.
It is one thing to transcode the content. The big organisational part is actually knowing how you want to sell it. You can plan ahead by structuring your content into bundles.
Want to give access to everything? – Create one bundle.
Want to sell theme packages? – Create a bundle per theme.
Want to combine subscriptions with rentals or Pay per views? – Create a bundle for the subscription and one bundle per rental or Pay per view.
Prepare your metadata:
- Get images: 16:9 and poster
- Have a title, short synopsis, cast, directors, genre and any other essential information you think is necessary to present your content
- Add labels. In the Magine platform labels are used to categorise content e.g. for collections without presenting the label to the customers.
Last but not least, think about translations. If you offer your service in multiple countries with different languages you will need translations of your metadata.
CREATE A MARKETING STRATEGY
For your streaming service to stick out from the crowd you need to know your target users very well. If you know where they are it will be easier to find channels to address them. Partnerships can help you to increase your reach and raise brand awareness.
At Magine Pro we can support your efforts with:
- Dynamic links
- Push notifications
- Integrations with content discovery services as Just Watch and PlayPilot
- Marketing integrations through Google Tag Manager e.g. Gift cards, referral and affiliate programs
And when you think about the price point for your content, don’t give everything away for free. Sure discounts help to increase the interest in your service. Giving away your content for free first in a trial and then with 100% discount will leave your customers wondering if your content is actually worth something. Be brave, charge something even if it’s nominal.
PREPARE YOUR SERVICE FOR SUCCESS
Finding the right vendor for your streaming service can take time. There are plenty of details to discuss. Use the time to prepare yourself and your team. Planning out your streaming service before you agree to any contracts will make the process more manageable after the agreement is signed. It will help you to launch your streaming service on time and beat the competition. At Magine Pro our onboarding specialists will guide you through the setup process.
Magine Pro offer a flexible OTT platform that can be customised according to your needs. Create a video streaming service with us and monetise your live events, linear and VOD content seamlessly through subscription, advertising and/or transactional business models. What’s more, we have a team of experienced experts on hand who can help you launch and grow your OTT business successfully. And if you’re interested in learning more about how we can help you build and launch a successful OTT business, get in touch with us today.
Magine Pro powers FlixOlé’s OTT partnership with Telefonica’s Movistar Plus+
| Press release
Stockholm, December 14, 2022 Magine Pro powers FlixOlé’s OTT partnership with FlixOlé, a major Spanish streaming service recently announced an expansion to their direct to consumer offering in partnership with Telefonica’s pay TV Movistar Plus+. Magine Pro in collaboration with FlixOlé and Telefonica, developed a custom set-top-box application for use on Movistar’s 4 Million Households. Magine Pro has been the technology partner to Spanish movie streamer FlixOlé since its inception in 2018, delivering the end to end OTT platform & applications. Since the launch, the technical operation has involved other distribution and integration with partners such as CaixaBank, El Corte Inglés, Orange and Amazon Prime. This new integration with Movistar+ is by far the most advanced. In addition to the FlixOlé set-top-box application, the integration also involves metadata integration, providing a unified search experience through the Movistar Plus+ platforms, and direct billing through the Movistar Plus+ Service, allowing Movistar Plus+ users to pay for the FlixOlé service through their Movistar Account. “The main objective of the Magine Pro OTT platform is to be able to scale our partners’ services into successful growth. FlixOlé is a great example of this”, says Matthew Wilkinson, CEO of Magine. “The service has been very successful growing organically, taking the service step by step with additional distribution partners. The Movistar Plus+ integration is also an important step for us as a SaaS OTT platform, being able to take our partners into the most advanced integrations when they grow.” “Magine Pro has been our close partner since we started our service and cooperation has made it easier for us to focus on content, marketing and distribution” says Sophie de Mac Mahon, CEO of FlixOlé. “They are key to our success, and we look forward to presenting the FlixOlé service to the Movistar Plus+ subscribers in the coming months thanks to this integration.” About FlixOlé in Movistar Plus+ About Magine Pro
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| For more information please contact Håkan Tranvik, VP Communications, Magine +46709383293, hakan.tranvik@magine.com Matthew Wilkinson, CEO Magine matthew.wilkinson@magine.com Luke Boyle, CCO Magine luke.boyle@magine.com |
Rodieo Play TV joins Magine Pro platform for SVOD Rodeo and Equestrian Sports
R2P TV joins the Magine Pro OTT platform for Rodeo and Equestrian Sports SVOD
Rodeio Play, Ride2Play, and TV Vaquejada are the largest platforms in Brazil for live Rodeo and equestrian sporting events with a large, loyal, and passionate audience. The three services are now joining forces and entering an agreement with Magine Pro as the technology partner to launch a new OTT service, ‘R2P TV’. The joint venture focuses on integrating live equestrian sports content into a single platform available via multi-screen devices, including big-screen TVs and mobile devices.
Magine Pro’s CEO, Matthew Wilkinson says of the technology partnership, “We are very happy to be a part of this extraordinary service that will offer Rodeo and equestrian fans a completely unique offer on the TV screen to the Brazil audience. This partnership is also an example of Magine Pro’s new growing foot print in Latin America with other Latin American services being being launched on our platform in coming months”
The R2P TV service will be available in the coming months to audiences across Brazil via subscription on web, mobile devices that support iOS and Android platforms, and big-screen viewing via Apple TV and Samsung TV.
The service is set to feature quality rodeo and equestrian sports content from Rodeio Play, TV Vaquejada and Ride2Play. Directors Roberto Ugolini Neto, Rodrigo Morais, and Agripino Leal say, “We are extremely happy to develop this pioneering project in Brazil, integrating all three services.”
R2P TV subscribers will be able to watch classic equestrian, barrel races, team penning, ranch sorting, reins (dressage), and Vaquejada – a popular sport from the northern region of Brazil that has garnered more than 42 million online views in the last six months.
About R2P TV
The partnership between Rodeio Play, Ride2Play, and TV Vaquejada hails the launch of R2P TV. R2P TV is a new digital streaming service hosted on Magine Pro’s OTT platform and will offer subscribers exclusive access to full-length live equestrian sports broadcasts.
The founding concept of the R2P TV service is to bring passionate fans of equestrian sports together on a single platform that guarantees quality live content to audiences across Brazil.
About Magine Pro (www.maginepro.com/about)
Magine Pro is the platform for b2b managed services for OTT, which enables global and local content owners, broadcasters and telcos to build thriving OTT businesses with live, linear TV and Video-On-Demand streaming services that are proven, cost-efficient and scalable.
Magine Pro’s customers are located in Europe and the United States, as well as in emerging markets.
For more information please contact
Håkan Tranvik, VP Communications, Magine hakan.tranvik@magine.com +46709383293 (will attend MIpcom for meetings and interviews)
Matthew Wilkinson, CEO Magine matthew.wilkinson@magine.com
Luke Boyle, CCO Magine luke.boyle@magine.com
Guillermo Magana, Sales Director Latin America guillermo.magana@magine.com +1 818 253 9906
CTV: How Connected TV can drive engagement & lifetime value for OTT
CTV (connected TV) has the capability to change viewer behaviour, drive engagement and increase lifetime value for OTT operators. In this blog, we explore how.
Online video streaming services have revolutionised how we all watch TV and movies. In the early days, marketing around these services focused heavily on the idea of cord-cutting, the freedom to watch what you want, when you want and wherever you are. You were no longer tied to the TV or house; you could catch up and stream your TV shows and movies on mobile devices anywhere. And although we all can watch ‘on the go’ (and most do), it hasn’t changed the fact we still enjoy the traditional TV experience.
Consuming streaming video via TV was limited early on. As such, secondary streaming devices (gaming console, Chromecast, set-top boxes) were an easy add-on to access the latest apps without upgrading your TV. But, the user experience had friction and made the TV the secondary interface to content discovery; the TV was there purely to display the streaming video.
We’re now seeing major TV manufacturers take back ownership to remain the centre of home entertainment and content discovery. Samsung and LG are leading the market share with the next generation of connected TVs (48% in 2021 by revenue). In fact, according to Conviva’s state of streaming Q4 report 2021, big-screen viewing on smart TVs was up 37% from Q4 2020. And the report also highlighted a noticeable decrease in viewing from secondary streaming devices (games consoles, for example, saw a -16% reduction in viewing), confirming a change in behaviour as viewers opt for built-in capabilities.
How do Connected TV Applications change consumer behaviour?
Expanding the availability of streaming services to connected TV devices impacts how users engage with a streaming service and content. At Magine Pro, we enable our partners to expand to the big screen with streaming applications for LG & Samsung devices. Based on an analysis of our partner data, here are some insights into the impact connected tv applications have on user behaviour.
- Increasing viewing time & engagement – Analysis of a Magine Pro’s partner 2021 data shows that users with an LG/Samsung TV watched on average between 19% and 54% more hours of video, compared to users that didn’t watch on those devices (this range is likely due to type of service, some seasonality impacts and other factors).
- Therefore it’s not surprising that with an increase in user engagement and viewed hours per user, we’re also seeing a 12%-14% increase in the customer lifetime of the same user cohort that views content on LG & Samsung devices.
- The overall data also shows that total viewed hours across all users on LG & Samsung also increased by +7%.
- Increase Audience Reach – With LG and Samsung taking 48% revenue market share of TV devices in 2021, it’s no surprise that adding Apps to these TV devices will give you a much larger audience reach as they become de-facto TV’s in the home.
Magine Pro’s premium Applications for Samsung & LG Smart TV Devices
Magine Pro’s premium Applications for Samsung & LG Smart TV DevicesMagine Pro has developed premium streaming applications for Samsung & LG Smart TV Devices for the last six years, allowing our video streaming services to reach audiences globally through custom applications.
Our partners that operate Magine Pro built video streaming services, including big-screen applications, benefit from:
- Access to Magine Pro’s CMS Console, enabling partners to independently curate and publish content, make application configuration changes, apply branding and design to their service and more.
- Support for movies, series and episodes, and live events with ‘Continue Watching’ and ‘My Watchlist’ across user accounts.
- Custom menus & setup per TV Manufacturer.
- Support for multiple stereo, 5.1 & subtitling tracks allowing for language localisation.
- Geo-targeting of content, enabling our partners to determine releases in each country.
- Complete language localisation allows viewers to consume the service in their local language.
- Analytics, allowing for insights on service consumption on all applications.
Get in touch if you want to find out more about our connected TV portfolio, which is fast to release, and where Magine Pro takes care of all of the software updates, bug fixes and new product features.
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To learn more about Magine Pro’s video streaming services that are accessible via the web, mobile devices and Connected TVs get in touch. You can also head over to our experience page to find out more about our partners. And sign up for our newsletter to get updates on our latest news, partners and blog post.
Seasons Greetings from our CEO, Matthew Wilkinson
A year ago, we were all hoping that the new decade would bring us new opportunities and challenges. Still, none of us could have foreseen how extreme & personal those challenges would be. Each one of us, every industry, every geography, culture has been impacted.
The media sector has seen the impact at both ends of the spectrum (production slow down, cinema distribution stopping etc.) and the opportunities (digital distribution, engaging audiences directly etc.). However, we have yet to see the longer-term trends play out. People are hungry for social interaction & real-world experiences. Ultimately, in the short term, we’ve been forced into and taken advantage of accelerated digitisation and disruption of traditional business models.
Magine Pro has seen a 50% growth in new partners joining the digital journey via the Magine Pro platform in 2020 and accelerated growth relating to existing partners (347% increase year on year with average monthly active users). These increases have been driven by new partners, the COVID 19 pandemic, and new exclusive content on our partners’ services. We are enabling our partners to capitalise on the opportunities with direct-to-consumer products, and strengthening Magine Pro’s position in the market as we continue to grow and build on our world-class platform, which in turn will help our partners succeed – full circle.
We anticipate that in 2021, new opportunities will arise, different challenges will come to bear, and that Magine Pro is well-positioned to continue to support our partners, meet accelerated transformation & growth objectives.
Luke Boyle on OTT & the future of sports broadcasting
Magine Pro’s CCO, Luke Boyle shares his thoughts on the current climate and what he thinks the future has in store for sports OTT.
Magine Pro’s CCO, Luke Boyle shares his thoughts on the current climate and what he thinks the future has in store for sports OTT. Usually, at this time of year, we would be heading back from several international trips to glorious places such as Monaco and Madrid, having attended some of the biggest sports broadcast and OTT conventions in the region. This has not happened. It isn’t that type of year…
Sport stopped. It stopped. This has never happened in my lifetime. But then it came back. The players and athletes, when allowed out of their bubbles, continue to enthral and entertain us. Though this is in very few cases (well done New Zealand!) in front of full or even partial crowds. So how do we, the fans, get to view the trials and tribulations of our favourite icons and teams? The obvious answer is of course via broadcasts, live and on-demand, and more commonly via a subscription or transactional OTT service (I say subscription, as unfortunately, though it is coming, I am yet to see a profitable pure sports AVOD service).
One of the big discussion points of late has been how COVID has disrupted businesses. For the digital media industry, the reality is that it has expedited development. Within the space of six months, we’ve seen perhaps three years of user behaviour and technological innovation. At Magine Pro we’re now seeing a 40% average consumption increase across all our clients over this time, which was forecast over a much longer period.
Viewing habits have also been evolving. The younger generation doesn’t know what an EPG is. Outside of live events (which maintain their value) sport is no longer about sitting down on a Wednesday evening or Saturday afternoon and seeing what is on the sports channels. It is now about cleverly curated content, be it highlights, lifestyle content, archive footage, best-ofs etc allowing the fan to fully immerse and lose themselves building extreme fan affinity to players and teams alike. None so passionate as sports fans – let’s give them what they want!
One other thing that many people ask me, is sports OTT going to aggregate again? The simple answer is, yes. But it won’t be on a domestic basis. What I think will emerge, as DAZN, Eleven, Amazon, Facebook and of course Google is showing, is the international aggregation of sports content. Viewers anywhere in the world will be able to subscribe or purchase on-demand any sports event, series, league of their choosing. But we are a long way from there yet, although niche sports OTT services continue to thrive.
On a personal note, at Magine Pro we were delighted to announce our new agreement with Endorphin and the Croatian Football Federation a few months ago. Magine Pro will be providing the exclusive end-to-end OTT solution, enabling fans both domestically and internationally to view one of the fastest-growing leagues on the planet, live and on-demand. Read more about the agreement here.
You can also check out some insightful thoughts from our VP of Engineering, Robert Olsson on the technical challenges of surfacing live sports content, and how we have solved them here. Our Director of Marketing also highlights the key features of a successful sports OTT service here.
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To find out more about our OTT platform and how we enable our partners to deliver live sporting events, linear and VOD content to audiences around the world head here. On our experience page, you can find out more about our partners and the OTT services they operate.
Get in touch with us if you would like to discuss how we can help you launch a successful sports OTT service or to demo our services.
You can also subscribe to the Magine Pro e-newsletter and/or follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with our latest news, partners and products.
Sports OTT: Live Sports Streaming & Video Delivery
You just won the exclusive rights for a highly in-demand football league and are looking to stream the games live for your fan base. Question is, do you have the technology platform for sports OTT to make it a success as your fan base starts to grow and incoming demands increases?
In this blog post we look in detail at the technical requirements you need to consider for sports OTT, and share how at Magine Pro we enable our partners to deliver high quality, low latency streams to audiences around the world.
Media quality & low latency
There are many technical aspects to consider when providing a premium OTT service for sports, and in particular live sports where quality is of the utmost importance. With fast-moving objects, a high bit rate for High Definition from 720p and more is essential with 60 frames per second. This is preferable for big-screen viewing as with 60 frames per second, the transition between each frame is much smoother, which makes fast-moving sports content look frictionless as a result. As it stands today, anything over 60 frames per second will not make the viewing experience any better.
Predictable low latency end-to-end is also crucial. Your choice of technology, protocols and architecture will ultimately affect the end-user’s overall experience. Each part of the workflow should, therefore, be measured to monitor latency. Latency below 10 seconds (preferably closer to 6 seconds) is a good standard to aim for, although to reach this may require improvement of the entire workflow, as latency is affected by the number of steps end-to-end.
Key areas to consider & address include:
- Assess what effect media ingestion (encrypted transfer), encoding and packaging, and the network have on latency overall
- The choice of media segment lengths
- Using HTML5-friendly streaming technologies such as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) or Mpeg-Dash to give cacheable delivery
- Content delivery networks (CDNs) that can deliver higher volumes with more efficiency
- How the player handles buffering
Content Security
Content SecurityContent owners will invest a lot of resources in acquiring media so that they can offer their users the latest live events and an attractive VOD catalogue. Most right holders today also require a certain level of security protection in an OTT platform to be able to acquire content from them. Protecting media from being accessed by unauthorised users involves utilising different tech and methods.
One method is Digital Rights Management (DRM), which can control the distribution of copyrighted works. Before content is streamed it must be encrypted and packaged with a DRM schema so that only authorized users and devices can play it back. At Magine Pro we use Microsoft PlayReady, Google Widevine and Apple Fairplay to do this. We can also enforce DRM key rotation in a given interval to take down any ongoing streams that might have been set up in an untrustworthy way.
The content license agreement you have with the right holder may also specify locations that are unauthorised to access content. Because of this, in addition to DRM protection, right holders also request that OTT platforms deny users access when connecting through banned VPN or Proxy services. At Magine Pro we provide all of the mentioned security techniques above to our partners.
You may also need to look at reducing the number of ongoing streams and devices per user account to maximise revenue intake and eliminate account sharing. This is particularly important when hosting exclusive live events in your service.
Scaling for demand
As your OTT service expands over time you will need to scale to avoid certain drawbacks, including loss of video quality, poor user experiences and increased costs affecting you and your customers. This can be challenging if you haven’t done the engineering work or built in the relevant monitoring.
At Magine Pro we run our OTT platform on AWS, which enables us to scale up and down as we require and pay only for what we use. Working with AWS also means during peaks we don’t need to set an upper user limit or traffic limit because of hardware constraints. This is a big advantage for us and our partners that we build OTT services for.
In an ideal world, you would be able to scale up when demand increases and scale back down when traffic decreases. Sounds easy, but services often require a warm-up before they’re ready to accept incoming requests and traffic. Autoscaling is good, but not great at this.
For live events, especially for pay-per-view, you should pre-provision your infrastructure to manage the exponential rise in traffic when the event starts. Autoscaling often takes many minutes to kick in, however, so it’s better to provision more and scale down, than not scale up quickly enough.
With pay-per-view events, typically you know how many people have pre-purchased before the event, this early indicator lets you know how much you need to scale. However, you could also see an increase in purchases up to 10-15 minutes before the event starts, so you need to build in some headroom to handle that. It can be a good idea to run a pre-event (especially if you haven’t delivered live before) to ensure payment flows are provisioned to handle a potential increase in traffic right before the event begins.
Your service operations team also plays an important role when hosting live events. It’s essential to have clear roles and responsibilities in place and also defined escalation paths, communication & troubleshooting routines between the event distributor and your platform provider.
Service testing & reliability
As an OTT platform service provider, we strive to be highly reliable. To achieve this, we need to consider the architecture for high availability, what infrastructure and how we utilize AWS’s cloud infrastructure.
High availability requires more resources, which can compete with our aim for low latency (affected by the number of steps in the end-to-end flow). At Magine Pro, we provide flexibility here for our partners. They can select resiliency levels depending on the value of their content, audience size, live vs Video-On-Demand or accepted downtime.
The starting point is to look at multiple incoming signal paths; from the signal distribution (even down to power suppliers), all the way through to acquisition, transcoders, automatic failover and monitoring tools. Doing this enables us to achieve resiliency and to withstand certain types of failure, yet remain functional from the customer’s perspective.
Understanding our platform and our partner’s availability needs enables us to design and continuously test our platform using injection patterns. We can take down services to learn how the platform reacts and remains functional from the customer’s perspective. In this case, we also have simulated end-users or real users in a production environment.
You might think you have high reliability and resilience to handle services going down, but without really testing it you don’t build up a confidence level. We do this testing continuously and monitor the outcome to improve our engineering capabilities, to better handle failures, start-up new services, and to re-balance traffic over to healthy endpoints.
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To find out more about our OTT platform and how we enable our partners to deliver live events, linear and VOD content to audiences around the world head here. On our experience page, you can find out more about our partners and the OTT services they operate.
Get in touch with us if you would like to discuss how we can help you launch a successful sports OTT service or to demo our services.
You can also subscribe to the Magine Pro e-newsletter and/or follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with our latest news, partners and products.
Luke Boyle talks about the future with DTVE.
Our CCO, Luke Boyle sits down with Stuart Thomson, editor at Digital TV Europe, to discuss the market opportunity for sports streaming, Magine Pro’s offering and ability to serve second tier sports federations in particular through its technology, speed of service and direct to consumer background.
Luke Boyle joined Magine Pro as CCO in August this year. Ex-Neulion SVP, Boyle, brings with him broad experience from the OTT and sports media sectors, and will be responsible for all commercial activities for Magine Pro’s OTT solutions and managed services. Prior to joining Magine, Boyle led successful business development activities across EMEA and APAC at Neulion, now Endeavor Streaming, and has held senior positions in many sports, media and tech companies over his 25 year career.
“I couldn’t be more delighted to join at this exciting stage in Magine’s development. With the team, technology and operational capabilities at our disposal I am confident that we will achieve great success with our partners, both current and future.” says Boyle.
Boyle’s experience and deep market expertise fit perfectly into Magine’s new b2b strategy. “His experience of OTT and the sports market, combined with great executive skills, bring a great deal of value to our partners” says Magine’s newly appointed CEO Matthew Wilkinson who will take over the position from previous incumbent, Ambuj Goyal. Wilkinson has a background in Ericsson where he held different management positions in Europe and Australia.
Watch the interview below and get in touch today to book your own meeting with Luke or the rest of the team at Magine Pro.