AVIA OTT summit 2021 – The future of video streaming is here!

The Asia Video Industry Association’s (AVIA) OTT Summit – The Future of Video Streaming welcomed 900 delegates and featured over 80 industry experts and leaders across the four-day conference this year.

Opening the OTT Summit was the streaming analyst Matthew Ball, Managing Partner of Epyllion Industries, who presented a deep dive into the OTT industry in the United states, being the most mature, most competitive, and most valuable video market with the most consumptive media consumers in the world.

In his session he highlighted that new subscriptions continued to dramatically outpace churn and content was clearly the key differentiator. And while content was king when it came to subscriber acquisitions, as a market matures it exhibits an unmistakeable preference for local content, as seen across the likes of China, India, Russia and France. “The OTT video industry is ultimately about content and the ability to create hit content is not equal,” added Ball. Another key point was the fact that aggregation was already here with services such as Apple and Amazon TV.

This aggregation has led to a change in the way platforms operate today. For Euan Smith, Group COO and CEO, TV, Astro, their role as a platform was finding the best content and packaging it up into attractive bundles for the consumers in the most simplistic and attractive ways. Emily Wee, VP of Content & Operations at TM Net, also shared platforms were no longer the gatekeepers, as there were many ways for the consumers to subscribe now. “For the consumer… there has to be real value that we as the middleman put into the equation.”

Putting the consumer at the heart of everything remained a key theme throughout the Summit, especially when it came to content strategy. For Kranti Gada, COO of Shemaroo Entertainment, their strategy was two-fold, with differing content to acquire consumers, and to keep them on the platform, as content challenges to fulfil consumer needs remained. As Lynn Ng, VP and Head of Content, APAC at Discovery Inc. summed up, “Ultimately, it comes down to consumer love.”

However, addressing and monetizing these consumers remains the big question for premium video advertising. While OTT and Connected TV have grown exponentially both in volume and share, there is still a lot of education to be done as there is a lot more diverse ecosystem in TV now. Shared Anita Munro, Chief Investment Officer at Mindshare APAC, understanding consumption, understanding audiences and knowing where viewing is moving to is key to creating more seamless consumer journeys and more immersive content experiences.

Rounding up the Summit, the technology panels also shared customer experience as the next frontier for innovation. For Raul Aldrey, Chief Product Officer at MediaKind, live sports presented the opportunity for hyper personalized experiences where fans could dictate how they wanted to interact with the content. Pankaj Kedia, MD, Emerging Markets, Dolby Laboratories, also saw a lot of opportunity for both content creators and service providers to uplevel their game, for higher engagement, consumption and monetisation. As Sunita Kaur, SVP, APAC, Twitch concluded, “Customer experience… is what is going to drive our future.”

The OTT Summit is generously supported by Gold Sponsors Brightcove, Google, Irdeto, TV5MONDE, Xandr and Silver Sponsors Alibaba Cloud, Encoding.com, iWedia, Kaltura, Lionsgate, Mediacorp, MediaKind, NETFLIX, PubMatic, SmartLabs, Synamedia, Vindicia, WarnerMedia, Zixi. Scoop