The conference brought together a cross-section of vendors, solution providers, consultants and end-users to better understand their respective points of view, their challenges, new trends and what to expect in 2021.
The MENA OTT and Anti-Piracy conference, hosted by BroadcastPro Middle East magazine, concluded successfully on November 5.
With the global OTT devices and services market size expected to reach USD 220.54bn by 2027, and predicted to expand at a CAGR of 18.6% from 2020 to 2027, according to Grand View Research, streaming services remains at the top of every media house’s agenda.
The conference brought together a cross-section of vendors, solution providers, consultants and end-users to better understand their respective points of view, their challenges, new trends and what to expect in 2021.
Key to the OTT discussions were some of the presentations by John Illingworth, Sales Director MEA at Bitmovin; Rajesh Jagadish, Director Business Development & Pre-Sales MEA at ATEME; and Joyce Lin, Global Sales Management at castLabs. Illingworth spoke extensively about how per-title encoding and other solutions from Bitmovin could help reduce operational costs for a streaming service while Jagadish featured an international case study to showcase how an innovative business model potentially helped a Dutch telco operator up its game. Joyce Lin highlighted how castLabs could enable streamers to run their service efficiently. The conference showcased some excellent numbers from Danny Bates, CCO of UAE-based streaming service, StarzPlay that has given global streamers who have entered the region, a run for their money. StarzPlay’s exceptional growth during the lockdown in 2020 was highlighted at the event.
The panel discussions were the highlight of the event and brought together industry professionals to hold some interesting conversations around how AI, ML, hybrid technology models and private CDNs will help provide a better streaming experience to users. There were also some interesting discussions on how to personalise recommendations even further while also attempting in some way to justify the investment in content by helping to shape what the customer watches. It was unanimously agreed that whoever innovated the most on the personalisation front would perhaps succeed the most in the OTT race.
The third day of the conference focused on Anti-Piracy. Christopher Elkins, co-founder and CSO of MUSO, discussed some statistics within the anti-piracy space, especially for the EMEA region. The panel discussion on the day also brought some interesting facts to light on how pay-TV network OSN within the region and FACT in the UK counter piracy, while Synamedia highlighted a recent sports piracy report and spoke about the three pillars it employs to fight piracy aggressively. All agreed that collaboration and the relentless pursuit of pirates was the way forward to ensure that content assets remained protected always.
Videos of the presentations and the panel discussions will be up available on the website within a few days.
