There’s a gap in the market to be filled with scheduled linear channels streamed via the internet says Josef Vasica, CEO, Provys
In our daily endeavour to develop more and more sophisticated software for the broadcasters, we sometimes have to stop and think about the reality behind the scenes of our daily visible business landscape. I do not mean just forecasting the future needs of the media industry but rather recognising everyone who joins the industry food-chain, including all the masses of entertained consumers.
Who else but Provys, or any other broadcast management system developer should know? I hear you ask. Oh yes, we control statistics evaluation; we gather and analyse all as-run-logs; outputs from people-meters and other market research data. But are we able to recognise where the market is really heading?
The IT industry has a clear answer: the TV industry is just at the end of its life; the younger generations do not use television sets any more; they watch recorded programmes when they want on their computers or handheld devices.
The broadcasting industry still enjoys masses of viewers who want to be entertained in the original passive TV way, ie. by precisely scheduled programmes served to taste in accordance with the published menus. But there is a catch: modern broadcast technology allows the launch of many more channels than ever before but the advertising revenues crumble into smaller and smaller pieces.
So the broadcasters create more channels, and of course, holding a huge amount of content, they also wish to hit the tubeless people and compensate for the shrinking earnings by sharing incomes from the ever growing internet advertising sector.
For a moment, let’s forget the older generation watching TV as the main source of home entertainment. Today, the computer-literate generations, including the youngsters, are much busier than their predecessors. They get home in the evenings and for them, theoretically, an endless choice of entertainment is available, because the amount of content online today is unprecedentedly huge and is growing exponentially.
But in all honesty, who from this active generation would schedule the evening sequence of videos while preparing dinner? The most usual requirement from these people would be to simply select a genre and get passively entertained. Or maybe, just to turn on some favourite audio-visual background to relieve the stress of the day.
Our experience indicates that there is a clear gap in the market to be filled with a range of scheduled channels streamed via internet in a linear manner. This is why we have developed and launched a new cloud-based service named Stream-Circle for broadcasters or any other organisations that need to cast their media content or live video enriched by graphics and social media messages into the internet, while keeping control over the content composition, timing, and delivery.
Stream-Circle is a smart add-on to standard streaming and VoD services such as YouTube where the viewers have to actively search in order to play the content. The Stream-Circle service builds on top of this concept and gives users control over what will be presented and when to the viewers. It combines traditional linear broadcast planning (where we have strong expertise) with internet delivery at a very low cost.
