Monetising Streaming: New Ventures, New markets

The Panel Discussion: New use cases for live streaming, moderated by IABM’s CTO Stan Moote, gave panellists Oliver Lietz, CEO and Founder, nanocosmos, Christof Haslauer, CEO, NativeWaves and Joe Foster, CEO, Easel TV, a platform to deliver their new content services and experiences, catalysed by live streaming developments in the industry.

Haslauer, who demonstrated what football “would and should” look like if streamed on a mobile phone, played a video of a mobile streaming platform with personalisation and monetisation features at the viewer’s fingertips. Team details, player rankings, on-demand replays, replay camera selection and switch camera angles, and the ability to sync mobile and TV to use the broadcast audio were all part of the experience. The platform also offered betting and social media opportunities as a route to further audience interaction.

Next up was Lietz, who talked about “what we see as the use case for live streaming, which is all connected in our cases as audience engagement for interactive use cases based on low latency live streaming.”

The use case focussed on work based events such as annual meetings, but also other activities such as live training, workouts, wellness, entertainment and shopping. Activities which bring up the challenge of latency: “The monetised use cases, like betting, auctions and live shopping, where you really have a monetised revenue funnel connected to every live stream. So every participant can dip in the live stream and can purchase some things, which means the person needs to stay in real time and 100% stable to keep up with the monetised revenue.”

The use case exemplified RTMP/ SRT/ WebRTC/ WHIP and low latency and on the distribution side, with data driven metrics, speech translations and transcription, AI driven and AR supported live streaming.

End-to-end and D2C

Joe Foster of Easel TV was next to talk about end-to-end services, “If you want to own and operate your own streaming service, our angle is that we can provide the whole service meant to end in a very, very short period of time.”

He talked about the challenges of creating straight-to-market content: “A lot of the content is sort of being syndicated out, because the challenges of raising a direct-to-market service are actually an obstacle to get people using it. And yet at the same time, streaming is ultimately democratising - what you can do with it. You can do these amazing things because you can own your own content you can you can own your own audience and you can start to do exciting stuff. But if it becomes too complicated to do it, then you don’t do it and only the big boys have ended up doing it like Disney, and then you feel you have to give your content to them and sell it through that way.”

The use case demonstrated how to make D2C platforms easy and quick to use, and to engage with an audience with no technical knowledge at all. He commented that then the only challenge left was “how to manage the live event itself,” and that by creating multiple user experiences, you create markets.

Robust Systems with Valuable Service

Stan Moote went on to open the panel discussion asking how do you manage streaming when some sports events, such as cricket can last for days?

To which Oliver Lietz answered: “That’s why we built our system to be robust.” He also noted that nanocosmos have their own CDN.

Foster added: “We don’t fight with syndicated content. We don’t make content going out to broadcasters or somebody sent anywhere else. What we’re trying to do is offer something that could complement that and can provide a really rich environment, adding much more content, adding more immersive content to communities that want it.”

The panel went on to discuss the challenges of convincing the consumer, branding content, and having a log in service.

Haslauer illustrated how data providers are available and can be utilised for tier one, two and three sports, “they’ve been pulling the data from it and leveraging them… We pull it right, from, for example, existing data API’s, and then thinking about which data is available. Making the first version like you know, the UI components, how this could look like how the user source could look like. But then like interactively improving them and giving feedback in which data should even be collected to make a great experience.”

Lietz built on the importance of creating a valuable service which “someone wants to pay for, because someone needs to answer the question, how do we make it to so valuable?”

Moote wrapped up the conversation by praising the developments which “people have been talking about this for years.” Making media more interactive and having your own CDN, meaning companies can put in their own branding and having a platform which can also tap into local advertising - through local sporting events, something which has previously been restricted to radio: “(this is) running a new market here.”