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For many of the largest streaming media related companies, picking best-in-breed video components in different areas of the streaming stack and integrating them into a customized OTT streaming service has become the new norm. API based streaming services combine everything available to customers allowing them to pick the best components between vendors, open source, or completely building it from scratch in-house. A good example is Crunchyroll, which shares a lot on their blog about how they combine their own video development with the best commercial and open source components for their service. Many OTT platforms, broadcasters and publishers take their streaming infrastructure stack very seriously and have invested in engineering expertise, which is a key component in successfully offering a great quality of experience.

Vendors that offer flexible API based video solutions are seeing a lot of growth in the market, which is attracting the attention of investors. Bitmovin, which has been in the industry since 2013 and has raised $43M to date, is currently raising another round of funding, rumored to be in the $15M-$20M range. [Updated April 20: Bitmovin announced is has raised $25M in a C round]  (Mux is raising another round as well) Bitmovin has seen some good growth over the last few years, choosing not to focus on a complete end-to-end video stack, but rather specializing in API based encoding, packaging, player and analytics. By my estimate the company will do $35M-$45M in 2021 revenue.

Bitmovin has benefited from large media companies getting more mature in their streaming stack and expertise, and switching away from less flexible end-to-end platforms, to more highly configurable and modular best-in-breed components. While encoding, packaging and playback are not everything you need to build a video streaming service, Bitmovin and others are trying to be the best in what they do, with a focused core set of offerings. Engineers then choose these components, together with others that are best in their respective category of CMS, CDN, Storage, DRM, Ad-Insertion, etc., to put together a streaming system where they are in full control of every component and gain a large degree of control and flexibility.

When it comes to encoding, Bitmovin takes an interesting approach by not only providing hosted encoding solutions in the cloud, but also a software-only option where customers can deploy their encoding software within the customer’s cloud account. All cloud providers are being extremely aggressive right now to get media companies as clients and gain market share by offering interesting deals on compute and storage, with Oracle being the latest. Leveraging these cloud options together with a software-only approach like Bitmovin offers for encoding, is a great way for some customers to benefit when it comes to costs and choosing the best cloud vendor as part of their best-in-breed strategy. It also gives companies flexibility by not being locked into one cloud provider, as many hosted encoding providers only run on AWS.

For vendors offering API based video solutions, focus is important. You can’t be everything to everybody, trying to solve every problem within every vertical. The approach that Bitmovin and some other vendors take, creates focus by providing specialized and differentiated point solutions, for encoding, player and analytics. Bitmovin can go a mile deep in these services, rather than build an end-to-end service that needs to be a mile wide because of the diversity of customer use cases and needs. This is especially important as the complexity of online video gets higher, with new codecs coming to the market, competing HDR formats, more devices to support, more complex DRM and ad use cases, and low latency requirements. Vendors that try to do everything in the video stack have a good chance of doing nothing really well. Of course, a vendor like AWS does a good job across the entire video stack due to their size and some of the acquisitions they have made, but they are the exception.

Customers who revamped their encoding stack and bitrate ladder with Bitmovin have told me they saw great improvements in viewer experience, a decrease in customer support tickets around buffering and bad quality, and also reduced their CDN and storage costs significantly. Two customers in particular that I spoke to saw a reduction of 60% in terms of their CDN bits delivered, when compared to what they used before. While Bitmovin can’t disclose all of their customers by name, looking at video offerings across the web or via apps, it’s not too hard to see some of the brands that are relying on the company. I see organizations including Discovery, DAZN, Sling TV, fuboTV, BBC, Red Bull and The New York Times that all rely on Bitmovin for core pieces of their streaming video workflow.

In addition to encoding, another video component that’s getting more and more attention are video players. Streaming services need to be available on every platform, with the best user experience, which brings a lot of challenges. While it’s fairly easy to make video play in a web browser, playback on mobile devices, multiple generations and brands of Smart TVs, game consoles and casting devices adds a lot more complexity. Despite the availability of a range of open source players, i.e. dash.js, Shaka player, video.js, hls.js, Exoplayer etc., it starts to become one of the main pain points of media companies, making sure their video works properly across every platform.

Every time I do an industry survey on QoE, problems with the video player or app is the number one complaint that OTT providers say they hear about from users. Dealing with DRM and video advertising on a 2016 Samsung Tizen or 2016 LG WebOS are among the common challenges, same as playback on PlayStation and Xbox, platforms that companies like Brightcove, JW Player or THEOplayer do not support for playback. Thus, going deep on players became important over the past years for Bitmovin and something the company has focused heavily on. From what I hear, they have aggregated hundreds of large customers in the player space and I noticed during March Madness that WarnerMedia was using Bitmovin’s player as well.

With the additional funding Bitmovin is securing, they will be an interesting company to watch as they have a deep understanding of the video stack and the way engineering teams build streaming services. They aren’t the only vendor offering some of these services in the market, but many of the other names people know have less than $10M in total revenue and are much, much smaller. Scale matters in the market and I expect we will see more video developers and engineering teams deploying Bitmovin’s APIs across their video offerings.

[Updated April 9: I like seeing this, V-Nova has replied to my post with their thoughts here: https://lnkd.in/d46pQSB]

For companies that supported the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) over the past few years, a lot is at stake to be able to deploy AV1 as soon as possible. There are signs that things are starting to move and the biggest ones are probably the upcoming WebRTC support, AV1 support in Chrome, and Android 10 support. Notably these are all Google projects.

That is great, but while marketing is giving visibility to what has obviously been a breakthrough project, broadcasters and operators alike are still shying away from the AOM technology. More than half of those surveyed in one of my recent industry surveys would like to deploy AV1 in their video services within the next two years but are concerned about hardware support. And, in fairness, reception has been mixed. Broadcom recently announced support for the codec, while Qualcomm support still seems far off.

As of now, it seems as if it will take a while to get the critical mass of device hardware support to make AV1 a success. Many encoding experts who track the topic in greater detail than I do suggest a timeline for adoption of at least another 5 years. In the meantime, AV1 may be confined to niche services and trials delivering low resolution video such as Google Duo in Indonesia. But I’d argue it doesn’t have to be this way, since we live in a world where the processing power in our hands offers up a lot of opportunities for better video experiences. Software decoding is possible and there are solutions out there that can enhance the potential of AV1 to the point of making it viable by serving high-quality premium services this year, not years down the road. AV1 with LCEVC is the solution that has been staring us in the face all along and is starting to get some adoption.

One thought that intrigues me is that there is an MPEG standard, the very organization that AOM tried to disassociate from, that could form an amazing technical combination. MPEG-5 LCEVC is the first enhancement standard that can improve the computational and compression performance of any “base” compression technology. That “any” is the radical part. This new standard could actually accelerate AOM and push AV1 out faster and more efficiently, by making it run on mobile handsets at full HD resolutions.

As both AV1 (from whichever source you choose) is mostly a software encoding and decoding option and LCEVC (from V-Nova) is a software encoding and decoding option, why doesn’t Google and V-Nova combine the two together? In a single software upgrade swoop, we could have full HD WebRTC, web conferencing, and entertainment of all kinds play back on our phones.

We have plenty of new compression technologies in HEVC, VP9, AV1, VVC and one enhancement standard in LCEVC. Yet, most of us are still consuming H.264/AVC video every day, missing out on the better experiences that the new formats could deliver. Let software be king, collaboration prevail, and have “MPEG-5 LCEVC enhanced AV1” deliver better, higher-quality services, sooner.

Last week Kaltura amended their Form S-1 filing, detailing how many shares they were offering to the market and their expected IPO price of $14-$16, in an effort to raise about $275M this month. But like some other tech companies, Kaltura has now postponed their IPO. The market for tech IPOs isn’t great right now and other companies like Intermedia, have also announced they are putting their IPO on hold while they wait for “favorable IPO conditions”. In the last few months, tech stocks have taken a beating on Wall Street and while we don’t know how long it will last, a perfect storm took place preventing some IPOs from going forward.

Some have asked what this all means for Vimeo’s upcoming IPO and if they are at jeopardy of postponing as well. As of the writing of this post I don’t have any other details on Vimeo’s IPO except that they were originally targeting an April time frame, which I’m hearing has now been updated to May. Vimeo has not yet filed an amended Form S-1 for the pricing of their shares, so that’s the next step we would expect to see in the process and keep an eye out for. [Updated April 1: Vimeo has announced their Board of Directors as they prepare to spin-off from IAC and said their IPO is scheduled for the end of Q2.]

Even without some IPOs not taking place right now and the potential for others to be impacted, it’s important to take a look at the differences between all the different video companies in the space, especially around the term of “enterprise video platform”. The goal of this post to lay out some of the numbers and differences between vendors, but it is not a complete product review comparison for all vendors side-by-side, with regards to functionality. As always, customers have to look at the strengths and weakness of vendors based on what they are trying to accomplish for their specific needs. All that aside, there are a lot of differences form a numbers standpoint when it comes to vendors in the market, with some overlap of services.

Kaltura had $120M in 2020 revenue, with year-over-year revenue growth of 17%, 21%, 27% and 30%, for each quarter last year. 2019 total revenue was $97.3M. Year-over-year revenue growth was 12% in 2018, 18% in 2019 and 24% in 2020. The company had net losses of $15.6M in 2019 and $58.8M in 2020. Kaltura’s top ten customers accounted for approximately 29% of their revenue in 2020, with Vodafone accounting for approximately 12% of that. The company grew revenue by 24% in 2020, while only increasing sales and marketing costs by $3.9M, compared to 2019.

While I hear Kaltura get compared to a lot of “enterprise” video platforms in the market, many vendors mentioned are not truly comparable from a revenue, scale or product functionality standpoint. Qumu and MediaPlatform are mentioned most often and do have some crossover into a few of the same vertical markets as Kaltura’s, but they are much smaller companies. MediaPlatform (private) had sub $10M in revenue for 2020 and not a lot of cash. Qumu (public) did $29.1M in total 2020 revenue and projects revenue to grow to about $35M in 2021. Qumu was running low on capital ending 2020 with $11.9M in cash and cash equivalents. The company did a raise of approximately $23.1M in January of this year to get more operating capital. While Qumu grew revenue 15% from 2019 to 2020, it’s off of a very small base and the company disclosed that the increase in revenue was “primarily due to a large customer order received at the end of Q1 2020.” If you strip out that single customer, Qumu’s year-over-year revenue would have been pretty flat. In comparison, Kaltura had $27.7M in cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2020 and had revenue grow 5X larger than Qumu.

Some are comparing Vimeo to Kaltura because Vimeo is using the term “enterprise” very heavily, but don’t believe the hype. Vimeo isn’t really an “enterprise” grade video platform from a product functionality standpoint. Vimeo’s “enterprise” offering is almost entirely Vimeo’s core product, simply with different levels of usage-based pricing and is not tied into other pieces of the enterprise video stack. Vimeo doesn’t have deep integration with vendors that enterprise organizations use for ingestion, LMS, CMS, analytics or a large number of third-party on-prem encoders. Kaltura is the opposite with integrations into just about every aspect of the enterprise video workflow, from ingestion to delivery. Companies like Ramp, SharePoint, Google Analytics, Blackboard, Matrix, dotsub and others are all in the Kaltura video ecosystem.

Vimeo has the largest percentage of their customer base paying an average of $17.83 a month in revenue, which isn’t the business Kaltura is going after. Vimeo said that at the end of 2020, the company had 3,300 hundred “enterprise” customers paying an ARPU of $1,833 a month, but the majority of that revenue is from their OTT related product, not “enterprise”, when defined by use case and application. Vimeo’s definition of an enterprise customer is simply the requirement that the customer purchase their plan through direct contact with their sales force. That’s it. This might be why Vimeo doesn’t break out verticals or use cases in their S-4 filing when it comes to what their “enterprise” revenue really consists of. I also expect a large portion of Vimeo’s revenue specifically tied to their OTT product to not renew throughout 2021. At the end of 2020, less than 1% of Vimeo’s subscribers paid more than $10,000 per year. By comparison, almost all of Kaltura’s customers paid at least $10,000 PER MONTH, over the same time.

If you look at Vimeo’s ARPU growth, the largest portion of it has come from their top ten customers. ARPU amongst their 1.5M+ paying customers grew only $24 a month, over 5 quarters from Q3 of 2019 to Q4 of 2020. That’s an average increase of only $4.80 per quarter. Vimeo’s “enterprise” customers saw over 100% growth, from their top ten customers that I estimate to be in the $100k-$250k a year contract size. So a small segment of Vimeo’s customers is making up the largest percentage of their highest ARPU growth. On the marketing front, Vimeo calls themselves the “world’s leading all-in-one video solution”, amongst many other high-level and generic marketing terms they use, which means nothing. Kaltura on the other hand is very clear about what they do in the market, with lots of details around product support for solving specific problems based on use case, vertical and size of customer.

Since day one, Kaltura has been in the live streaming space with deep knowledge and experience in what it takes to be successful with live, which requires solving a very different set of problems. As an example, Kaltura was the platform that powered Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference last year and virtual trade shows are a use case Kaltura has been successfully selling into. In 2016, Vimeo tried to get into the live business by building the functionality in-house and then realized how hard it really was. They had to acquire Livestream in 2017 to get into the live business, but live streaming has never been in the DNA of Vimeo as a company. Now, four years after Vimeo acquired Livestream, customers are telling me Vimeo is shutting down the Livestream platform and trying to transition them over to the Vimeo live platform, at a much higher cost, with less functionality.

Vimeo’s live platform does not support streams longer than 12 hours, which is a problem for many current Livestream enterprise clients who have 24/7 linear channels. With Vimeo live, you also can’t restart a live stream without creating a new event as you could previously do with the Livestream platform. Most importantly, the functionality around APIs is essential when it comes to the enterprise video stack and is one of the major deciding factors on which vendors customers use. The Vimeo live API functionality is much weaker compared to the Livestream API. Many of Vimeo’s biggest Livestream customers were deeply using the Livestream API, so that’s a problem for some customers they want to move off the Livestream platform. Customers I have spoken to haven’t seen the value in paying the additional multiple so it puts into question what percentage of Livestream customers Vimeo will be able to retain with the change. By comparison, Kaltura has no limit on the length of a live stream and their platform is open-source, with one of the deepest set of video API functionality in the industry.

In addition to the vendors already mentioned, Kaltura more closely competes with Panopto, especially when it comes to the education vertical and use cases around corporate communications. While Panopto is private and doesn’t disclose numbers, I put their revenue to be around $50M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) last year, with about 40% year-over-year growth. Panopto is well funded, have a very solid platform with scale, and lots of product flexibility targeting specific use cases and verticals. Panopto doesn’t cross over into all the verticals Kaltura sells into as they don’t sell their platform into telecom companies for any cloud TV services. This is a common theme amongst all the vendors, they don’t all compete in the exact same verticals for 100% of their revenue.

Brightcove is another vendor that has overlap into some of Kaltura’s verticals and competes mostly around media and entertainment customers looking for an end-to-end video stack for publishing, broadcast and ad supported business models. Brightcove had $197.4M $194.7M (thank you Brightcove for noticing my wrong number) in 2020 revenue, growing 7% year-over-over, with a net loss of $5.7M, down from the net loss of $21.9M in 2019. The company has projected 2021 revenue to be in the range of $211M-$217.0M, which at the midpoint would be 8% revenue growth. Over the past four years, Brightcove average year-over-year revenue growth was 7.7%. What these numbers show is that the market for certain types of video services and the rate at which they are growing is not as big or as fast as some want to suggest.

Brightcove ended 2020 with $37.5M in cash and cash equivalents. At the end of Q4 2020, Brightcove had 1,051 customers paying an average of $4,400 a year, ($366 monthly) and 2,279 “premium” customers spending an average of $97,200 a year ($8,100 monthly). Brightcove defines a premium customer based on their revenue spend and refers to the non-premium customers as those who use “our volume offerings”, saying it’s “designed for customers who have lower usage requirements and do not typically require advanced features or functionality”. You can read Brightcove’s recent 10-K from February 24 if you want to see all the detailed language on how they bucket their customers based on various products. Like Kaltura, when it comes to the media and publishing space, Brightcove is very deep with their product functionality and API support for use cases around marketing, events and corporate communications.

There are so many high-level umbrella terms used to describe video platforms that it can be confusing when it comes to what vendors really do and who they are targeting with their services. With terms like “enterprise video platform”, “video as a service”, “online video platform”, “business broadcasting platform”, “video cloud platform” etc. many companies may or may not be competitive to one another, depending on what is being compared and your definition of these terms. Amongst all the generic terms I mentioned, you would also hear vendor names including Microsoft (Stream), Zype, Wowza, ON24, Hive Streaming, Frame.io, Zoom, Cisco (Webex), Hopin and many others in the discussion.

In most instances, the vendors I mentioned specialize in other core aspects of the video stack like building video apps, offering API tools for video developers, or focusing on players, video analytics and content management systems. These vendors wouldn’t truly be competitive with one another in an apples-to-apples product showdown. That said, Microsoft, with their Microsoft Stream product, Wowza and ON24 would have some competitive crossover to Kaltura based on product functionality in similar vertical markets. Hopin would compete when it comes to live trade shows and multi-day conferences and Zoom and Cisco with Vbrick compete in the town hall meetings market. If you add up all the use cases for video, verticals, size of customers, region(s) and product functionality needs, there are close to 50 vendors in the “video platforms” market. Many of the vendors names being thrown into the same bucket when it comes to “enterprise video platforms” would simply not be accurate, based on real methodology.

Note: I am an actual user of a lot of these platforms mentioned. I currently have account access to platforms at Brightcove, Kaltura, Wowza, Vimeo, Panopto and others.

Looking for help getting a job in the streaming media industry? Thursday at 6pm ET I’ll be hosting a live Q&A chat, taking your questions and giving out some best practices on job search and placement. You can join the Zoom meeting as anonymous if you like and I’ll be taking questions via chat only and answering them live on video. Below is the Zoom link and the password is: streaming. This is free and open to everyone, so you are welcome to invite others.

Time: Mar 25, 2021 06:00 PM Eastern Time
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/78435691044?pwd=TXBBVkE3YTMwRXJoRlVQQ1lLQlFKZz09
Meeting ID: 784 3569 1044

This week, Limelight Networks announced it was laying off 16% of their workforce, or approximately 100 people. While it’s never good to see people lose their jobs, Limelight’s new management team needed to make drastic changes to the business to re-focus the company. New management typically takes the blame for layoffs but it’s simply because prior management didn’t take the necessary steps needed to put the company on a path to the proper growth and profitability.

Purely from a numbers standpoint, Limelight didn’t have the revenue to support such a large headcount. The company ended 2021 with $230.2M in revenue and had 618 employees. Two customers, Amazon and Sony, account for 48% of their revenue. The company missed both their Q3 and Q4 guidance and ended the year with 527 customers, down from 599 the year before. Also, when compared to other similar vendors in the market, Limelight’s sales team was nearly two times larger, but didn’t have the revenue growth to support it. Over the past four years, Limelight’s average revenue growth was just $11.5M per year, going from $184M in total revenue in 2017 to $232M in total revenue in 2020. The company’s gross profit percentage fell from 43.7% in 2019 to 30.4% in 2020. Simply put, new management needs to make some drastic changes and it starts with headcount.

Outside of the numbers, Limelight also had operational issues from a sales, product and technical standpoint that prior management never addressed. Limelight hasn’t had a full-time CTO in more then five years, which is unheard of for a CDN vendor selling a technical service. The company also has no dedicated Chief Product Officer, which is negatively impacting Limelight’s product road map and ultimately what sales could sell into the market. Limelight also needs to improve their cost structure, which is something the new management team is laser focused on and once done, should save them a lot of money. I won’t go into specific details, but the way Limelight deploys capacity in certain regions is simply not efficient from a dollars standpoint when compared to other CDNs.

Based on some of the changes new management has already made, Limelight is expected to benefit from an annual cash cost savings of approximately $15M. Limelight ended 2020 with nearly $47M in cash and cash equivalents, so the company has capital. The focus for new management will be around guaranteeing better performance at scale (with the right cost structure), offering a new products and a clear product road map, diversifying revenue so they aren’t dependent on two customers for half their revenue, and becoming profitable. In 2020, Limelight’s GAAP net loss was $19.3M, so that’s something they need to improve on so they can get to cash flow break-even or better.

Changes are never enjoyable when it involves layoffs, but in this case it was a necessary task Limelight’s new management team had to accomplish, so they can put the company on a path to faster growth and profitability.

Thanks to John Clifton and Tim Meredith for having me on “The Tech That Connects U‪s‬” podcast, where we discuss some of the latest OTT business models; subscriber projections; what the future of the conference business looks like in a post-Covid-19 world; and how I got started in the industry. Great chat talking real-world happenings in the streaming media industry. Listen to it below or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

On Monday March 22nd at 1pm ET, I’m moderating a session as part of BitmovinLive on, “Encoding Workflows Best Practices: How to Scale for Quality and Cost.” Come join this unique conversation with no pitches or demos, just real-world information on the best practices you can apply to improve your OTT video offering. With speakers from Blizzard and Sinclair Digital, we’ll discuss how broadcasters and OTT streaming services are prioritizing optimizing their encoding stack to improve their Quality of Service (QoS) while keeping costs in check. Bring those burning questions to our panel and be part of the discussion. You can register for the event here.