MediaPower Newsletter

PricewaterhouseCoopers recently published a report indicating that OTT leaders like Netflix face growing pressure as the playing field becomes more and more crowded, with other media companies like Disney looking for a piece of the streaming pie. According to PWC, this overcrowding and the wealth of options may inhibit growth for any single player. They may even turn consumers back to pay-TV, which can provide a mix of content in one user-friendly, convenient place.

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For the past decade, telecommunications companies around the globe have been grappling with falling average revenues per user equaling stagnant growth rates. New technologies might cause disruption in this industry and could potentially marginalize today’s prevailing telco business models globally. Telcos should drive disruptive change of their own by deploying technologies that smaller companies are innovating across their infrastructure.

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Right before NAB Show in April, we announced a new partnership with GBLabs. On the heels of NAB, we followed through by adding Aveco to our technology offerings and also expanded our resellership agreement with Provys. Check out the announcements below:

MediaPower partners with GB Labs
MediaPower Brings Provys Home to Italy
MediaPower Delivers Powerful TV Automation to Italy with Aveco

Epiphan's AV.io capture cards are widely known for their pro quality, premium construction and reliability. But just how rugged are they? Epiphan Video recently conducted a live extreme testing of these cards. Check out the video to see just how rugged these cards are!

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F1 has embraced and committed to OTT. They finally launched their F1 TV OTT service earlier in May but not without hiccups. Problems aside, we still think F1 is in the right direction.

Other than F1's OTT service, they are also bringing F1 to Netflix. It may not be what you expect though. It's actually going to be a docu-series of the 2018 FIA Formula 1 World Championship, to be screened in early 2019.

Here's an example of where AI can go wrong. A family from Portland, Oregon claimed that their Amazon Echo recorded a conversation and then sent it to a random person on their contact list, who sent them the audio files of their chats that he received from their Echo. Amazon has acknowledged the problem and said that the Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation that sounded like "Alexa", and then a subsequent conversation was heard as a "send message" request. Talk about luck, right?

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This is our issue right before IBC in September. So as we anticipate the coming IBC Show, we pooled together some recent articles that caught our attention from IBC's online editorial platform.

The crown jewels of live broadcast
Compression enters the high-performance era
Virtual reality and augmented reality in broadcasting
Lessons from the frontline: How broadcast adopts battlefield tech

At the 2018 Google I/O developer conference, Google gave a demo of the upcoming Duplex feature on its Google Assistant. It was well received at first, then later followed by some raising ethics concerns.

As AI development progresses, ethics come into play a lot more. So much so that some tech firms initiate some moves to put ethical guard rails around AI. In relation to ethical concerns, usability is also put into focus and IBM has outlined 5 attributes of useful AI.

Research by media agency MediaCom and technology company ViewersLogic shows that viewers are much more likely to follow up on a TV advert when simultaneously using their phone or tablet – dispelling one of advertising’s biggest myths that using another device would detract attention away from an advert.

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Broadcast TV viewing has never been the same. Ratings are on the decline, especially among young people, some of whom don’t even own televisions. It’s hard to keep up with the many devices and apps people now use to watch shows. And there is a host of material from Silicon Valley that is competing for viewers’ attention, including Google’s YouTube, Facebook and Netflix. It all adds up to a precarious situation for broadcast TV.

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In the competitive world of sport, it’s the consistency, reliability and quality of data that counts. Yet how that data is gathered, both the means and methods, is the critical question.

This new white paper looks at understanding three distinct sports tracking technology platforms – optical, local positioning, and satellite.

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The growth of Netflix is gaining momentum. They are predicted to grow their subscribers to 201M by 2023, they hit their record high last May and even surpassed Disney for a short while, and they hit more growth strides in Spain and France.

While Netflix seems unstoppable, some European public broadcasters (France Télévisions, RAI, and ZDF) join forces to take them on.

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The United States and China currently dominate the world of artificial intelligence. But they are far from the only ones pushing the development of AI. Here's a refresher of what the US and China are doing, and what other countries, including Canada and the UK, are doing.

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Extending its leadership in the broadcast and media market, DataDirect Networks (DDN®) announced that it has certified its MEDIAScaler® and WOS® storage solutions with Dalet, the foremost provider of media asset management and workflow orchestration, to simplify management of Ultra HD broadcast workflows at scale.

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