I had the pleasure of being a participant in two roundtables last month one, on production with Canon, and the other, on OTT with Brightcove. It was as much a pleasure to rub shoulders with celebrated Indian cinematographer Santhosh Sivan as it was to see how young enterprising Arab filmmakers have evolved from making […]
I had the pleasure of being a participant in two roundtables last month one, on production with Canon, and the other, on OTT with Brightcove.
It was as much a pleasure to rub shoulders with celebrated Indian cinematographer Santhosh Sivan as it was to see how young enterprising Arab filmmakers have evolved from making abstract movies that only they understand to producing films with finesse. I was impressed by the clever use of camera technology to produce a car chase, ads with impact and short films.
As a number of these panellists straddle the offline and online worlds with equal ease, it was interesting to hear their views on how posting their videos online brought them more business offline.
They echoed the views of some of the stakeholders at the Brightcove roundtable, which was held in a more intimate setting. Behind closed doors, players in the regional OTT space were more willing to open up and discuss the challenges of the business and solutions to overcome them.
Why, for instance, would you want to start creating OTT content on a video-sharing platform that charged you 40-45% of the profit for the privilege? What would you have left if a middleman like an MCN also stepped in and charged you another 30-35%? What options do you have to make serious money on a video-sharing platform like YouTube if you are producing good original content? Has anyone been able to nail down user behaviour on the internet? Who has had the most success profiling users to ensure targeted advertising? Is a flat subscription model sustainable or are transactional layers acceptable within an existing subscription model? There were many answers, some on the record and some off the record. What we agreed at the end is that, at the moment, OTT and linear TV are pretty much complementary rather than mutually exclusive. However, we expect linear TV to undergo a dramatic shift in the coming years. Smart businesses will look to create their content and distribution around mobile devices, as this is the future. Finally, OTT is here to stay. Time-shifted TV suits the needs of todays viewer, who wants to view content anytime, anywhere.
We believe OTT is becoming serious business in the Middle East, and what the stakeholders have to say is an eye opener. Im sure this will be a topic of discussion at NAB too albeit on a different level. I’m looking forward to hearing from industry figures in other markets. See you in Vegas!
