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I recently got hands-on with AT&T’s new WatchTV live streaming service and overall, it works well. It’s simple to use, the quality of the video was good on all the devices I tested and the interface is easy to navigate. It’s basically a stripped down version of AT&T’s more expensive DirecTV Now live streaming service, with no live sports, no DVR, a limited selection of 31 channels and only one concurrent stream allowed at a time. WatchTV costs just $15 a month, or comes free with AT&T’s Wireless “Unlimited & More” or “Unlimited & More Premium” plans. Although WatchTV doesn’t carry 24-hour sports channels, it does carry channels (like TNT) that occasionally carry some sports. AT&T said that when live sports air on some of those stations, they will not blackout the sports content.

AT&T says that WatchTV was created as a no-frills, “skinnier” streaming option for customers who just want the basics, but it’s really a way for AT&T to try to drive more consumers to sign up for their wireless plans, giving them a upsell over the competition. I don’t expect many consumers to sign up for the WatchTV service as a stand-alone offering, due to the limitation of the content being offered and AT&T said they have no plans for additional content options or “bolt-ons” for WatchTV. This makes sense since customers wanting additional functionality and more content options can simply sign up for DirecTV Now, at $40 a month.

If you’re already an AT&T Wireless subscriber with one of the plans WatchTV comes with, you’re getting a limited amount of free, live content, at no additional cost. And if you don’t watch live sports and only watch content from stations like TBS, TNT, A&E, AMC, Food Network, BBC, CNN, IFC, TLC, History, HGTV, Discovery and a few others, then you are getting a great deal at only $15 a month.

Following the successful launch of my new Streaming Summit event at the April NAB Show in Las Vegas, I am excited to announce we are expanding the Streaming Summit (www.nabstreamingsumit.com) to two full days, at the NAB Show New York, taking place October 17-18th. This is the start of a new focus at the show, with dedicated tracks on how to package, monetize and distribute online video. A show for the streaming media industry that will cover the entire streaming stack and all the technologies and platforms that power today’s streaming services.

The Summit will be two full days with over 75 speakers covering monetization and technical topics, along with networking opportunities. The format will consist of fireside chats, technical best practices presentations, round-table panels and a demo track to showcase some of the newest technologies and opportunities in the market. From technical topics like CMAF, AV1, blockchain, SRT, transcoding and SSAI to business topics like direct to consumer (D2C), content bundling, OTT monetization and video advertising models, the Streaming Summit will give attendees a holistic view of the entire online video ecosystem.

The call for speakers is now open and you can find all the details on submitting on the website. Some of the topics that will be covered include:

• The Future of OTT and The Bundling of Content
• Best Practices for Deploying Server Side Ad Insertion
• HEVC, AV1 and The Future of Video Codecs
• How to Build A Robust and Nimble Video Stack
• Monetizing Video Content Direct-to-Consumer
• WebRTC and Low Latency Live Streaming Deployments
• Video Advertising: What’s Working and What Needs to Be Fixed
• Best Practices for Streaming Live to Millions
• SRT: Optimizing Streaming Performance Across the Internet
• Blockchain Based Video Platforms
• CMAF: Reducing Packaging, Storage and Delivery Costs
• QoE: Measuring Latency, Buffering and The User Experience
• The Challenge in Monetizing Live OTT Services
• Best Practices for Streaming Live on Social Platforms

This the start of a new, dedicated focus at the NAB Show New York and an opportunity for individuals and companies to get involved. If you want to be involved, have ideas, or give me feedback on topics you want to see covered, I want to hear from you! My cell number is 917-523-4562 and you can call it anytime. My goal is to help provide the industry with a place we can all come together to highlight, discuss and debate what is taking place in the streaming media industry. I am looking for moderators, pitches, ideas and we are also offering vendors the opportunity to get involved via extremely affordable sponsorships. Even ticket prices to attend the event are under $700 for both days and I am personally giving out a discount code to help showcase all the new content coming to the NAB Show New York.

With about 75 speaking spots, I won’t be able to fulfill everyone’s request to be involved. I can’t stress enough how important it is to get a speaking submission in quickly. Once spots are gone I can’t open up new ones or add more slots to the program. So please visit the speaking submission page or call me (917-523-4562) at any time.

In addition, in conjunction with the NAB Show New York, I will also be launching a new summit, taking place on October 15th, that will focus on content distribution at the edge. A focused one-day event that will explore all that is taking place with CDN, WAF, DDOS, DNS and other services that are disrupting the traditional cloud platforms. The show will highlight how companies continue to search for improvement of the end-user experience with new decentralized services that requires getting closer to the eyeballs. I’ll have more details on that shortly, but feel free to reach out to me in the meantime if you’d like more details.

Last week Instagram launched Instagram TV (IGTV), describing it as a “long form video app” that lets anyone upload videos up to 10 minutes in length, or up to 60 minutes if they are a verified account. The whole point of IGTV is to have longer-form content and yet, most of the content on IGTV so far, is very short. Scrolling through the top 142 most recommended videos “for me”, shows 70% of them are under 3 minutes in length and many are less than 60 seconds in length. But even worse is the content. There are lots of videos of people fighting in the street, someone taking a shower, a guy dressed as a woman dancing, a brawl inside Target, and a video of someone pulling out a real gun and shooting someone in the back. Is this the kind of content IGTV really wants to highlight?

These videos sit alongside content from Oprah, Selena Gomez and other stars and yet even their videos are super short. Oprah’s video is just over a minute long with other celebrities’ videos being well under a minute long. With so much content being under a minute in length one has to ask, what’s the point of IGTV when the regular Instagram app already allows videos of up to 60 seconds? It doesn’t appear Instagram has a real strategy with IGTV and I can’t find any content partners they worked with to provide high-quality, long-form content at launch.

From a user experience standpoint, I haven’t seen any way to customize the content and whatever algorithm Instagram is using to recommend videos, doesn’t work. The recommendations they are serving up to me have no resemblance to the genre of content I would watch. There are also a lot of videos on IGTV in Spanish, Russian, Arabic etc. yet I can’t find any place to filter out content based on the language a user speaks.

Content is king, but apparently not on IGTV where short-form, crappy content is the norm.

Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) is one of the hottest topics in the industry right now and I’m tracking over 30 vendors in the market that say they offer some type of SSAI technology. To see what’s really going on in the market I conducted two surveys with over 400 broadcasters and publishers on their use of SSAI from both a business and technical level. The survey collected data on how they do ad buys across digital/TV, what their DRM needs are, how their CPMs and fill rates in live compare to VOD, how important frame accuracy is, the metrics that matter most along with a host of technical questions.

The results of the survey shed light on just how far SSAI still has to go to be considered a technology that broadcasters can rely on with performance and proper ad triggering. Lots of technical problems exists, especially getting SSAI platforms to work at true scale. I’ve include one slide with results from the survey but all of the raw data is available for purchasing. Please contact me for details.

For the past 20+ years, CDNs have dominated the content delivery space when it comes to delivering video on the Internet. Third-party CDNs focus on layers 4-7 in the OSI stack which includes things like caching and TCP protocol optimization. But they still depend on the underlying routers of the providers they buy bandwidth from, and latency could still vary and be only as good as the underlying network. For ultra-low latency applications, layers 4-7 don’t help, which is why many CDNs are looking at other technologies to assist them with delivering video with only a few hundred milliseconds of delay. For the delivery of real-time applications, there is a debate currently taking place within the industry as to whether or not you need a private core with optimal routing on layers 2-3, to truly succeed with low-latency delivery.

Historically there have been two different ecosystems in networking: private networks and the public internet. Private networks were used by corporations and enterprises to connect their headquarters, branch offices, data centers and retail locations. The public internet was used to reach consumers and have them connect to websites. In the past, these two ecosystems lived separately, one behind the firewall and the other beyond it.

With the rise of the cloud, the world changed. While Amazon deserves much of the credit for ushering in the era of cloud computing (and the demise of physical server data centers), it may have been Microsoft who triggered the tipping point when they shifted from client-server based Exchange to cloud-based Office365. For all of the enterprises dependent on Microsoft software, the cloud was no longer something they could delay. Once they started to shift to the cloud, their entire architecture needed to change from hardware-based solutions to cloud-based solutions. The success of companies like ZScaler and Box shows this continuing trend.

Lately we’ve seen new vendors come to the market, taking products from the private networking space and using it to try and solve problems with the public internet. As an example, last week Mode launched in the market with $24M in funding with an MPLS Cloud, used in combination with SD-WAN and last-mile internet. MPLS is a 20-year-old technology used by enterprises to create private dedicated circuits between their branch offices (ex: Walmart connects all of their stores back to Headquarters using dedicated MPLS circuits). Enterprises buy these lines because they have guaranteed bandwidth and QoS. MPLS costs 10x-20x the price of Internet bandwidth, but you get guaranteed quality, which is why business still pay for this difference, because the latency variability on the internet is far higher.

However the problem with MPLS is that it was built for the enterprise market. It is very rigid and inflexible and often takes months to provision. It was designed for a hardware-centric world, where you have fixed offices and you buy multi-year contracts to connect offices together using fixed circuits. But what if you could make MPLS an elastic cloud-like solution, and bring the great qualities of MPLS over to the public internet.

While many vendors in the public internet space continue to evangelize that the public internet is great at everything, the reality is that it is not. If you are thinking in terms of “seconds” like 2-6 seconds, then the public Internet + CDNs solve this problem. However, when you think in “milliseconds” – like 30 milliseconds being the maximum allowed jitter for real-time voice calls – the public internet is not nearly good enough. If it were, enterprises wouldn’t pay billions of dollars a year and growing at rates 20x more than regular internet prices for private networks. Instead of rewriting all of the issues, read the awesome blog post by the team over at Riot Games entitled “Fixing The Internet For Real Time Applications”.

As many have pointed out, the current public internet has been tuned for a TCP/HTTPS world were web pages are the common payload. However, as we transition into an ultra low latency world where the internet is being used for WebRTC, sockets, APIs, live video and voice, the public internet is definitely not a “good enough” solution. If you’ve ever complained about a terrible video call experience, you know this to be true. Sectors like gaming, financial trading, video conferencing, and live video will continue to leverage the public internet for transport. The growth in ultra low latency applications (IoT, AR, VR, real-time machine learning, rapid blockchain etc.) will continue to make this problem worse.

When I talk to CIOs in charge of both sides of the house: consumer/end-user facing, as well as in-house employee facing, they have said they are interested in a way to utilize MPLS level QoS and reliability for millions of their end-users back to their applications (gaming, financial trading, voice calls, video calls). But is has to be super flexible just like the cloud, so they have total control over the network – create it, manage it, get QoS, define policy –  and have it be way more flexible than traditional hardware-defined networks. It can’t be a black box. The customer has to be able to see everything that’s happening, so they have real transparency for traffic and flow and have it be elastic, growing or shrinking depending on their needs. This is the service Mode has just launched with in the market, which you can read more about here. I’d be interested to hear from those who knows a lot more about this stuff than I do, what they think of the idea.

All of the videos from the NAB Streaming Summit in Vegas are now online for viewing. Just scroll through the program to watch the sessions and presentations you like. We are working on a new video portal to host all the videos from future shows as well, so a better user experience is being developed. www.nabshow.com/education/conference/streaming-summit.

Within the industry, many content distributors have switched from purchasing end-to-end systems to buying best-of-breed technologies, and creating unique tech stack mash-ups that work best given the restraints of their teams, time and budgets. Even if you look to some of the top revenue generators in the streaming media industry (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) who have endless resources to build everything in-house, they still use a fair amount of outside technologies. However, what these companies have done differently is developed great “glue” for how all the pieces, built in-house or not, work together.

Based on that idea, I am excited to announce that last year I made a personal investment in a new company called Datazoom. While I was the first investor in Datazoom, the company has now raised $700,000 in total, led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. The premise of Datazoom is very simple. With a single SDK, Datazoom allows video distributors to collect any data they want from the video player and send it to any supported tool, in under one second.

Datazoom allows content owners to make on-the-fly changes to the data they are collecting and the frequency at which they collect it. And with a set of pre-built SDKs that can capture data from an ecosystem of players, devices and platforms (iOS, Android, Brightcove, JW Player, Anvato, THEOPlayer, and others), customers can make changes to their data collection footprint or integrate new tools at any time, without touching a line of code. The tools integrated into the Datazoom ecosystem (which they call Connectors) include Video Analytics, Data Warehouses and other Data Process and Visualization. Their Connector ecosystem today includes:  Google Analytics, Amazon Redshift, NPAW’s YOUBORA, Datadog, Amplitude, Heap Analytics, Adobe, Keen and Google’s BigQuery.

Pricing for using Datazoom’s platform is done on a SaaS model, a monthly license and usage based fee. By not pricing based on the number of video views or sessions, customers will have a much more predictable cost and flexibility. Datazoom’s platform is currently hosted on AWS and Google Cloud, with Azure POPs coming soon.

So, what does Datazoom really solve? Today’s methods of integration often involve using hard-coded and static logic, which restricts against any ability to make adhoc refinement and adjustment to maximize potential. Think about it: A single video stream often requires the workflow across 20-30 different systems, each of which have ever-changing availabilities, latencies and service reliabilities. Essentially the experience behind every video stream is ultimately dictated by a dynamic operating environment, created by the current status combination of these services, and yet how they are programmed to work together is static.

The greatest current technology opportunity in the streaming media industry will be solutions that work to maximize the efficiency of existing systems by building a unifying intelligence layer to manage the workflow of systems we use to deliver video. Likely this must be left not to the work of dedicated individuals, but with intelligent systems powered by AI and ML that have the endless capacity needed to handle the frequency, scale and volume of adjustments on a per-stream basis; technology glue. However, before any type of intelligence can be implemented, a few foundational things need to be established first. At the core of Datazoom’s approach is creating three things in the market; a standardized data “currency” that’s accepted by all systems; a point of exchange that all systems peer into to source data; and a real-time speed at which the data currency needs to move.

I made an investment in Datazoom because I believe that their offering helps to address many of the issues that face our industry today by providing a data ingest and management platform that allows customers to provide a more consistent end-user experience through service optimization. After launching at NAB, Datazoom has customers in trial, some of whom I will be able to talk about in detail later this year. If you’d like more info on Datazoom, feel free to reach out to me at any time.

Note: While I am always looking at new companies in the space, to date, this is the only private company I have invested in.