By Manish Sinha, Vice President & Business Head, Media & Entertainment, TO THE NEW

How has the demand for OTT solutions and services changed since the start of the pandemic, and how has TO THE NEW responded to these changes?

The pandemic restricted mobility and made people confined to their homes. As a result, the people had more free time at their disposal and they needed some entertainment to kill their time. This led to a sudden surge in demand and consumption for streaming services such as Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, and Hulu.

We were quick to notice and respond to the trend to be able to meet evolving and rapidly growing industry needs. We ramped up our OTT engineering team significantly by additional hiring and internal movements from teams serving other industries, such as travel and hospitality and retail, that were facing a slowdown due to pandemic. We also ramped up our media services team to be able to support our large OTT clients with content operations that are required after any large content deals and there were during and post pandemic period.

Additionally, due to rapid growth, competition and need for speed in the industry, we significantly revamped our VideoReady OTT solution to be able to deliver our customer the speed and agility needed while having them meet their business needs of user experience and monetization.

Can you share some of your recent work that TO THE NEW has worked on in the OTT industry, and what kind of challenges did they present?

Based on the market needs and priorities, TO THE NEW picked up three key areas over the past 12-18 months - Monetization, Sports Streaming and FAST. Additionally, we have always focussed on delivering a fully integrated solution with full ownership to deliver business value to our customers.

On monetization, TO THE NEW launched a Monetization-as-a-Service solution that enables new levers and multi-dimensional monetization for both subscription and advertising-based streaming services.

With growing demand for sports streaming and innovations in the space, we launched VideoReady Sports with a reimagined sports experience and high fan engagement features.

We recently also launched the VideoReady FAST solution that provides content owners with tech for creating channels for FAST based platforms such as Pluto TV, Roku Channel, Xumo etc.

What do you see as the biggest opportunities for growth in the OTT industry over the next few years, and how is TO THE NEW positioning itself to take advantage of these opportunities?

TO THE NEW understands this imperative well and is building solutions and positioning itself along this direction to be more and more relevant to the industry.

The industry will start moving away from point solutions-based implementations to more integrated solutions that aggregate data from all parts of the OTT value chain and unleash insights and actionable that delivers real business outcome. TO THE NEW has been enhancing and expanding its VideoReady OTT solution in that direction where it can be an end-to-end but bespoke solution for the customer as per their business shape and size.

What is the USP of TO THE NEW, and the key factors that set it apart in this cluttered market?

Our USP is our deep understanding fo the OTT domain and our speed of delivery. We have been working in the OTT space for over a decade now and we understand the whole OTT value chain, including the involved technologies, the processes and business nuances. This knowledge helps us understand, consult, and design customer needs much faster with a first time right model and helps us deliver to them at speed.

What are the UX and design applications for OTT by TO THE NEW, and how does it create engaging, intuitive experiences for the viewers?

User Experience, Content and Monetization are the three key pillars of any OTT platform.TO THE NEW has designed multiple OTT applications across small are large screen devices for its customers, across the globe, that includes GEC and Sports Broadcasters, Film and TV Production Studios, Sports Leagues, Publishers, Gaming companies, and Fitness Studios.

How important are cloud infrastructure and technology in developing and managing OTT platforms, and how does TO THE NEW approach these aspects of the process?

OTT is an infra and tech-heavy business, and the content & cloud are the two biggest cost components for any OTT platform. Within the cloud, streaming is the biggest cost component and requires high scalability and flexibility. Similarly, the content processing-related infra requirement is high whenever there’s a new large content deal and hence this need of flexibility and consumption-based costing is there as well.

TO THE NEW, a premium partner for all top public cloud providers, brings deep cloud expertise and leverages it to design and deploy a solution that uses cloud in a very robust and efficient ways. It also provides multi-cloud strategy for large players where needed based on business needs.

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