I’m very excited to have Michael Lanz on the show. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Accedo.tv. Accedo has been a pioneer, continues to be a pioneer in the video experience transformation across the globe. Company was established in 2004. Under Michael’s leadership, Accedo has grown from a startup to a global company with over 500 employees.
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16 offices with major customers like HBO, NBC, Universal, and Dacha Telecom. With over 2,000 video service deployments worldwide, Michael has guided Accedo to become a trusted partner for video service providers, looking to monetize content in various business models and adapt to changing consumer expectations. Welcome to the show, Michael.
01:19
Thank you so much, Vijay. Yeah, first question, you know, just curious, you know, what made you agree to the podcast today? Well, well, first of all, I’m listening to a lot of podcasts, and it’s an exciting medium, I think, and very good for anyone sort of who’s interested in it, sort of want to get get a bit more deeper and more personal type of media consumption.
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when you don’t have time for anything else. So think this is great. It’s something I enjoy doing. And of course, when you reached out, this seemed like a great fit. I feel sort of a bit of a kinship with you guys. We’re sort of in the same space. We’re solving the problems that our customers are asking us to solve. And I think we can do that in a very good way. So I’m very excited about this. Awesome. Thank you again.
02:17
for being part of this. Before I jump into monetization strategies, I’d love to hear about your entrepreneurial journey. So you’ve been at this for over two decades and you’ve seen how tech has changed over the last 20 years. And maybe you can comment on that and also what sparked your interest in the media and streaming industry. Yeah, it’s amazing, isn’t it? Two decades.
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I never thought I’d still be here after two decades, of course, but when you enjoy something and you’re part of an exciting industry that has gone under so many different transformations over the past two decades. And frankly, the decade prior to that was also very transformative with the emergence of sort of a multi-channel
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Pay TV was sort of a, know, 90s thing, obviously. media as we know it, and TV and sort of video entertainment has evolved tremendously over the past 30 years. And it’s just a super exciting industry to be in. So I started prior to founding Accedo, myself and my co-founder, Fredrick, we were management consultants.
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focused on the transformation of the media industry due to the advent of internet communication. So obviously back 25 years ago, 2000, 2001, there were a lot of ideas on how streaming media will evolve. And of course, we who were there at that time, we know it wasn’t much.
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that was available, like some flash video potentially, but that was it. But you can see those changes that will happen in the industry once technology matured. And I think sometimes you underestimate what kind of impact the technology shift will have in an industry, but in media, it was so obvious, right? There was no physical distribution.
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would be needed in the future. And that transformation would happen obviously first on text and audio and sooner or later with video. And I think that’s something we can see in hindsight that that happened. So once we decided to embrace that technology change, it was kind of obvious that we should go in somewhere in this industry. And we chose to go in in what we knew best, which was the sort of
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user experience or video experience part of the ecosystem. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
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kind of agree with you on the technology disruption, how it enabled new ways of doing things.
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you could actually have a reliable stream, streaming video, and it transformed the industry. In addition to tech disruption, you know…
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business models have also evolved, right? Business model disruption happened and a lot of our customers are now dealing with both technology disruption, business model disruption, how to evolve their business model to include streaming, subscription, or pay per view, or monetization, advertising, and a combination of all of those, right? So it’s a…
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I agree with you, it’s an exciting time to be serving all of these customers. And so, know, bit on your entrepreneurial journey, I was at the NBA Tech Summit, something I learned I didn’t know, maybe it’s thing going on now. And everybody was talking about, you we had NVIDIA CEO there, Johnson Wong.
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speak for about 40 minutes. It was really fantastic listening to him. And several people mentioned this whole new notion of a new quality in the CEOs they’re looking for. It’s called the founder more. And then you and I have been founders for all along. And so have you heard of it? And I think what they’re talking about founder more is really deeply caring about the outcome for the customers.
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if necessary, getting into the details of that value creation. So just wanted to know if you can share your perspective on it. Well, I haven’t heard about that specifically. Well, I know, of course, about Jensen. I have the greatest respect of what he’s built with NVIDIA. But I do think there is, of course, a level of sort
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care. You are with the company with your heart and not only your mind, if you’re a founder. And I think that has sort of an element, of course, that, you know, if you, if you invest sort of the feelings in the company, I think everyone knows that and you care more about sort of the delivery, you care more about the customers. I think that is an element. And I’m sure there are founders who don’t care as much of the company. They just want to make a quick exit.
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But I you and I, we have been with our companies for so long, right? It’s sort of a part of our DNA. That’s part of what we do. It’s part of the value that we deliver to the world essentially. So I agree with the mindset. Of course, I hope that I can in some ways deliver on that sort of founder mode promise. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. What you said, you know, really we bring our heart and mind together.
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And so that makes a lot of sense. So let’s first talk about the importance of user experience in driving engagement. What’s the single biggest trend in UI UX for video platforms that no one is talking about? What will drastically change the landscape in five to 10 years? If you can put out a group.
08:57
Crystal glasses. I think I’ll answer this in two ways. One is sort of what I think, because obviously if no one is talking about it, I think it’s very hard to see about it. But I think in a 10-year perspective, I two trends that are interesting. And I think one in particular would be something that I would love to get your take on as well. Let’s start with that.
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what I would call a hyper personalized UX that I think is something that people are talking about, but nobody’s really doing it. And that’s the notion that… So the problem is that everyone has used any of the video streaming services. You know that you’re getting a lot of promotion for stuff that you’re not really interested in, or you’re interested in it
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but just not right now, because right now you’re looking for something completely different and it’s not a family event, it’s a of a personal video event and so on. So I think with the advent of AI, of course, I would expect that it’s not only about sort of content segmentation, but it’s also about UX segmentation. You may want things, UX personalization. You may want things presented in different ways. You may want…
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something that is personalized to you, not only in the content presented, but in the way it’s presented, right? Maybe you’re in a discovery mode, you want to do something, then you want more sort of trailer videos or so on. And sometimes you just want, you know, the next video in your UX. Yeah. And I think this is something that no one is doing well at the moment.
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not even sort of a company like Netflix, it tends to be sort of overcrowded in the UX. And I think this is something that there should be a lot of innovation with. And historically it’s been too messy, too difficult to do this across many devices, across sort of many different users. But I would say with the advent of AI, it should certainly be possible to attack this. And maybe in the future you can have…
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This is the interesting thing for you, Vijay. You can have a hyper-personalized business model as well. Maybe that could be a way to adapt to specific users. Yeah. I think, know, great point. And I agree with you. And no one has solved this really, this problem of, you know, personalizing experiences, right?
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hyper-personalization of experiences, And I agree that there’s a lot of value creation potential. And it’s interesting you brought AI into this, right? I was listening to somebody else on this whole AI thing. It’s all about creating magic for the consumer, magic for the user of the platform, right? Today, it’s not possible.
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But with AI, it’s quite possible to create that magic for the consumer. He goes to the application and he sees, man, that’s magical. I think AI would definitely enable creation of that magic for the consumer. And I know you are thinking about it. And we are also investing quite a bit this year in coming up with personalization and
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know, offers and really don’t overwhelm the user with so many different options that it confuses them and, you know, creates fatigue and confusion. And really, you know, instead of improving conversion, it actually goes down, right? So I agree there’s a lot of potential. I think in five years or maybe even sooner, we will be able to deal with that magic. We will be able to help our customers deal with that magic to the consumer, right?
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Which leads into, you know, kind of another question, you even often I face when I go to look for something to watch, it’s so hard to find the right thing to watch. mean, some, know, especially if we sit down with the family, it’s even worse. You know, I was with our kids recently for the Christmas break and we were, you know, turned on the TV and said, let’s find something to watch. You know, the decision fatigue and so it…
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you know, the research shows that it takes 47 minutes for people to find something to watch, You know, how should the streaming services think about, you know, reducing this time and, you know, the UI is too complex in simplifying that user experience? Well, this is a, of course,
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the million dollar question in this industry. My take is that I think many video services are so they have of course invested a lot in content, right? Which means that they’re proud of their content. It doesn’t matter what content it is. Could be anything from sort of entertainment to sports to documentaries or news or anything, but they’re proud of their content that this is what makes them tick.
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And they want to show the users everything, right? And if you’re not clicking on something next time you’re logging on, you will be shown something else, right? They want to show what they have because they feel that the more they present things, the more they promote, the more there will be clicks and video views. But I think in many cases, less is more, right? And we’re seeing sort of as things mature.
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you will find these specialized experiences. If we’re looking at retail, completely different experiences, you see that not everything ends up in sort of a Costco or something, right? There will be a need for certain narrower experiences, which caters to a specific use case. And I think that analogy, I think works here as well. Sometimes you need
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to be presented with a smaller selection because that helps you, that adds to the experience, you may not see everything. And maybe that was something that you’re not being shown that you would like to watch, but the experience itself is actually better with less displayed. Now, the 47 minute thing, I believe,
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that there are some viewers who actually enjoy the searching, right? This is part of the entertainment experience. So I think we shouldn’t read too much in the absolute numbers because there are always those people who actually enjoy searching and discovering and watching trailers, reading about the actors or whatever. But I do think it’s important for a specific video service to look at trends.
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to look at trend lines. Because clearly the audience is probably behaving largely in the same way. So if you’re seeing that your trend lines are going in the wrong direction, know, people are spending more and more time with discovery and less time with viewing, there is something fishy with the UX. You need to look more carefully at it. But if the trends are going in the right direction, and you always have some outliers and so on, but trends going generally in the right direction,
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people are watching more, they’re more engaged. And I think your bread and butter, right? If churn goes down, if engagement is increasing, renewals are good, you’re doing something well, right? So you need to find those KPIs that are important and not look too much on the absolute number of minutes that people spend to search. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, you know, what you’re saying, you really look at the data, learn from the data.
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just accordingly. And there is a, the point is valid that some people may like window shopping, right? So, know, so how do you really, they can actually choose to do window shopping or, you know, for those that are people in a hurry, they get presented, right? So one of our customers actually have done some good work in this area is, you know, really you’re talking about depending on the use case,
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you need to do things differently really triggered a thought in me that NBA we work with, depending on your favorite team, know, even favorite player, they change what you see in your app, right? And so even simple things like that and keeping track of user preferences would make a lot of sense. So the next topic is really
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in the new age of short form video, you know, so I have two kids and they’re Instagram, you know, fortunately they’re not on some of the other, you know, short TikTok and all that, with social media, short form content, it’s really changing the way people are consuming content, right? So how are some of the OTT providers approaching this content discovery?
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you know, actual consumption and engagement.
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Yeah, it’s a great question. think, let me say some general observations first and then I can take one example of someone who’s doing this very well. So I think if you are a subscription service, then obviously,
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there is no way you will be, mean, short form content doesn’t really drive subscriptions necessarily. It’s another type of experience. then I think most of our customers are using the short form videos off platform, if you will, as marketing opportunities. It’s a way to engage with the…
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I don’t know, the actors, the cast or the director. I mean, you’re not interacting with them, but you’re getting sort of the additional content, which would then hopefully create some sort of viral effects, which will create sort of demand for the video. And that’s a science of its own, right? To create sort of attractive short form, a viral marketing to drive interest for the main platform. And I…
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You have certainly not an expert on that. But then you have some types of content, which is sort of short form in nature, which may not be a subscription service or may have subscription elements, but it would be ad funded. I’m thinking about news in particular. You may have sports where the main event of the sports is sort of subscription or pay per view, but you have
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in the platform, have more promotional content and so on. And then obviously it makes sense to bring all of that short form content that you would anyway have interviews or sort of analysts or, you know, short form documentaries on a news platform or something like that. It would make sense to bring those into the main platform. And of course, one of the things that
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that we know many of our customers who have that are sort of, you know, looking at is this sort of auto play functionality. You want to have sort of the short form video tying into each other, right? So it’s sort of a natural flow and depending on sort of, you know, whether you, what you’re interested in and what you’re playing that would then.
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influence what type of videos you would see next, right? So your example earlier, if you’re interested in one particularly, Steph Curry, I don’t know, that’s the only basketball player I know. But so if you’re interested in Steph Curry, you would be seeing sort of short form videos about him potentially. And so I think there are ways of tying that in onto the platform as well. That’s the other use case. Okay, got it. Got it. So
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you know, for the benefit of our audience, you know, we keep hearing, you know, he’s certain I keep hearing AR, VR, XR, know, these are kind of buzzwords that are coming up. You know, how far away are we? These come to play with what use cases are there for streaming services to consider this seriously, right?
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Maybe some trends you have seen and maybe you can share some thoughts to the audience. Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about this topic. you know, to draw conclusions of today, think one of those persons, think one needs to look at history. And any type of consumer electronics that is introduced initially,
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It will take some time to get up to speed. It’s too expensive. It’s too clunky. You know, some functionality is missing and then, know, with improvements, then sort of the rollout speed increases. And once there is rollout, you will get more content and so on. It’s the same with, you know, VHS, the color TV, DVD player, the smart TV and so on. think the only.
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only one which was sort of, you can argue was faster was the emergence of the sort of modern smartphones with Android and iPhone battling it out sort of and growing faster than sort of historic trends for consumer electronics. But you can also argue that smartphones were actually already thing when iPhone was launched, right? So it’s difficult to sort of argue that, you know, that was faster than anything else.
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With that said, I think we’re still sort of in a very early stage with the technology maturing. The things that I’ve seen, my team is sort of working on some amazing things, some which will be demoed next week at the Mobile World Congress. You’re seeing, and me personally, I’m very excited about the sort of AR glasses, which are sort of like slightly oversized.
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uh, sunglasses rather than these sort of immersive, uh, vision pro type of devices that you get a headache from, right? So these are sort of a smaller, um, uh, sort of, uh, weight and sort of easier to carry. And of course you have a better battery length and so on. You can’t do the same thing. You can likely, it would be a bit sort of weird, um,
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video consumption experience. And the video consumption on a Vision Pro is fantastic, right? So you can’t do everything what you can do with those more high-end devices. But similar to what we saw when we started Exceeder 2004, it’s pretty clear that the technology is maturing extremely rapidly.
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There is a fragmentation among OEMs that are all sort of competing for attention, they’re competing for innovation. So it’s clear to me as daylight that, you know, in two, three years, technology will have matured. So we’re getting over those teething issues. And once that technology is there, then you can start to look at mass market applications. So if I go back to your original question,
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What can we do today? What are use cases? Well, in an immature market, I think you need to find audiences which are inherently early adopters. So then you have a higher chance of finding an audience for your content. And what do we have in sort of media in general? Of course, you can argue that you have sort of these industrial applications and so on. But since you and I are primarily in media,
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Let’s focus on media. I think sports is one of those use cases because the sports fan, if you’re interested in certain sports, you more or less have endless budgets. You only see how much an NBA ticket is to go watch it live and you realize that for the price of one ticket, you could get a high-end VR or XR device easily.
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If you can offer the right opportunity for those audiences to immersively consume content, there is a market there. So when we recognize that and we have great conversations with sports companies around the world, we have founded something we call the XR Sports Alliance, which is an alliance among sort of industry technology companies to further
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innovation around use cases for sports. So this is something we launched just a couple of months ago. We announced the first cohort at the CS and are getting new people joining as well. So it’s sort of a sharing of ideas type of forum. So that development is something we will keenly monitor via this XR Sports Alliance going forward.
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I personally think that sports is just one of many, different use cases, but due to the way the market evolves, I think it will be the first one that will have a critical mass. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And I have two comments. the one is on the technology adoption, how over time it will get better and size gets smaller and you
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more use cases can be brought in. if you remember a Google Glass, you know, came out many, many years ago, nearly 10 years ago, I think. So I went and got a Google Glass, right? And every year I would take out and use it for 10 days, right? And guess what? That use case was for me, right? And of course you could read your emails and everything on the Google Glass. know, so…
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My use case every year for many and until last year was skiing with my kids and recording them skiing. It was so easy you can actually tell it, hey, record video. This year I couldn’t get it to work. It’s been so long. Google discontinued the product. So I couldn’t get a new version. so what then my kids told me, hey, dad, there are new AR glasses now. You should get those. So I’m going to get to one of the
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Maybe you can send me a recommendation on a good air glass. Yeah, I’ll certainly do that, Vijay. So ping me separately and I’ll let you know what the team recommends. I’m not sure what we’re working on, which is a prototype of what is commercially available, but I’ll be happy to let you know what is available. And the second comment is sports, right? It makes a lot of sense. think sports would be the first use case for this AR VR type of experiences.
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I don’t know if you’ve seen the Las Vegas sphere, the MSG sphere, right? It’s a completely immersive video experience. It was quite amazing. I was blown away, right? There’s a company called Cosm, you know, so they are actually doing this mini sphere type of things and they have one in Los Angeles. They have, I think, well funded, you know, half a dozen planned. Basically, you go to that place.
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where you can actually consume, you know, watch a game like a Superbowl or something like that. It’s a more of an immersive video consumption experience, which is what you’re talking about. You using these glasses, you can actually provide that, you know, people sitting at home, they’re there at the stadium, right? Which is, you know, pretty amazing. it will take some time before you get sort of everything, you know, the…
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the smell and the sound and the lines to the bathrooms and everything that I think people, it’s a part of why you enjoy going to the live events. But I think, you you can get quite some distance to sort of that sort of truly immersive reality. And I think I’m certainly looking forward to some, you know, huge commercial deployments of those.
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experiences so you can have this in home which I think is exciting. Makes sense. moving on to live sports, live sports streaming, right? And people used to think live sports is the way why the cable bundle would stay on. They were proven wrong. Now live sports is being streamed across the globe, know, cricket in India, soccer in Europe.
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football in the US, mean American football in the US, basketball, baseball, what are the biggest challenges for streaming live sports? What are some of the ways the streaming services are leaving money on the table, you know, with the live sports and what do you see happening and coming up?
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Yeah, live sports in general. mean, I obviously know that sports is sort of an extremely high value item, right? I’m seeing all of these. There is a trend at the moment that the big platforms are acquiring rights to certain live sports. They may not have the full season of something. They only have selected games. They only have it for one, a couple of countries and so on.
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But I’m seeing, mean, we’re talking about Netflix and Amazon and so on. They’re sort of acquiring sort of rights to sports. And I think one of the concerns that I have, I mean, in terms of the quality challenges is sort of well-known for sports. can’t be too delayed. It has to be super high quality and all of those things, right? So that’s a given. But what I think is really the challenge with those acquisitions is that
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You’re very much leaving money on the table because you are not right now. You’re giving, uh, you’re adding those sports rides to every, uh, subscriber regardless if they like sports or not. Uh, the classic way of doing it in cable is that you have like a sports package. may even sell sort of a la carte and pay per view for sports, but you wouldn’t give it away in the basic tier on, on a cable package.
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That sort of, know, ESPN was always sort of part of the top tier or a separate fee. So I think, you know, everyone who’s sort of trying to bundle it to attract new subscribers, I think they’re certainly leaving money on the table. Unless they’re a sports service, of course, and that’s a different story, because then you attract sort of the sports consumer.
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I don’t know what is your take there Vijay, I’m sure you have seen every aspect of this topic. Yeah, yeah, no, I think you make a good point. Actually, there’s a well-known case study, somebody who launched a subscription VOD hoping that, and then they were including some live sporting events in the subscription VOD. They were hoping to acquire a lot of users.
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And then what they realized is that users are smart. It’s a high value sporting event. Let’s say it’s a boxing match. It costs really a hundred bucks or 200 bucks to watch. people would subscribe for $10 service and they would sign on, sign off. So it certainly left money on the table. They quickly realized it’s not a good model. Now we see a lot of potential.
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for sports, particularly acquiring the sports rights is very expensive, right? And they got to figure out to monetize it very carefully. And so we see two issues. One is picking the right monetization model and really driving acquisition. Maybe some, you offer some for free, but then you have a gate, they have to pay. There are different ways of.
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with picking the right business model, number one, and learning from it and being able to basically watch your learning and subscriber behavior and your conversion rates churn and adjusting your models, fine tune your model to optimize so you’re actually building a profitable business. The second thing that we see in sports is really being able to deal with the volumes.
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For example, we’ve been working with Sony in India for the last 10 years. In India and Australia, we play cricket. Five to 10 million people show up to watch the game because it’s a digital stadium. So there’s no size limitation. So they all come up and come and sign up, sign on in five to 10 minutes. Being able to deal with the volume.
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people underestimate the plan. They fail to plan for success, I call it, right? So very important in life sports that you plan for success, right? Deal with changing business model complexity and being able to deal with the volume, right? So if, and we’re helping many deal with both of the aspects and that’s really going to be the key. And again, I mean, everybody’s trying to get into sports now.
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Netflix, Apple, Amazon. so there’s a lot of attention on sports. The rights have gone up, which makes it figuring out these aspects is going to be even more critical because you’re spending boatloads of money to acquire the rights. And then how do you have the right platform that creates the right user experience, that helps you create the right business model?
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More importantly, how do you agile? What is preventing you from being agile? So those are the critical aspects we see. Do you think, so obviously all the big streamers, you mentioned Apple, Amazon and.
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Netflix having sports and you know, you can argue that maybe Apple and Amazon have different reasons for retaining customers because they have other ways of making money. But do you think it makes sense for them to launch sort of a separate tier for sports or should they continue to bundle it in the core subscription? Like an Apple TV sports and Netflix sports and you pay extra. It’s like a super tier. I think time will tell.
38:03
They definitely have deep pockets, these companies, right?
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several trillion dollar market cap. And so they certainly have the wherewithal to withstand, it could be money loser, but if it keeps the users happy. But over time, they’ll have to figure out a way to make sure that those are profitable on their own. These are, as you know, very well disciplined companies and so time will tell.
38:42
But they may go that route of, okay, you guys have to pay extra. So you can have the base tier, but to get the sports package, if you have the base tier, you’ll get a discount. Or you can even sign up independently for the sports package, but it’s going to cost you more. Things of that nature.
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And so, I think let’s have one more topic on monetization, right? It’s, know, today the streaming providers have different ways of monetization, S-ward, subscription VOD, know, monetization through advertising, A-ward, or pay-per-view, or transactional VOD, right? It’s your view on what are you seeing, you know, where are people gravitating?
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which one has legs in the long run.
39:46
Yeah, I, you know, most, I’m not talking about the public broadcasters, but, you know, the commercial streaming company would of course like to make as much money as possible. And I think the emergence of the hybrid VAD model,
40:11
So just spoiler alert, I think every serious streaming company will have all models. That’s what I think. So at some point there will be money on the table unless you sort of charge extra for certain types of content or you may sort of charge extra for watching sort of the next episode early. There are ways of sort of having a T-VOD in addition to an S-VOD. You can figure out ways of making more money. But I think
40:39
The hybrid VOD model, is a sort of an SVOD with advertising inserted, makes a lot of sense. Why does it make sense? Because, you know, as I’m sure we have all seen, it’s not material amounts of money that sort of the SVOD providers make, but it has allowed them to raise prices on the ad-free offering. And I think that’s the secret here, right? It’s not about making necessarily more money from the advertising. It’s about
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creating a differentiation between the tiers, which allows you to raise prices. And I think I am, if anyone had been surprised that there has been so many price increases over the past year and a half without any material churn. mean, everyone has churn, but churn hasn’t gone up as much as I thought it would. And I think part of the reason is of course that you can.
41:33
downgrade to this ad tier if you’re sort of budget conscious. But people are annoyed with ads and I think many of them see that, well, maybe I can pay $5 extra, $7 extra to get to this higher tier. So you’re creating sort of a clear additional value, which you had before, but additional value in the differentiation between the tiers. And I think that’s very attractive for any commercial streamer out there. Yeah. No, I think…
42:03
Great perspective, Michael. I think I kind of agree with you that hybrid monetization is the way to go and the successful ones will figure out the right balance between these different monetization models. And in fact, what you’re articulating is really these models feed off of each other, right? You get people at the top of the funnel through a free tier.
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ad loaded and then you figure out ways to convert them to maybe a less ad load or maybe no ad loads. And then insert that with some pay-per-view once in a while. Even though we have a customer that did like six boxing matches in a year, they had no subscription to UD service. What the boxing matches did is actually drive users that are interested in boxing, but you offered a discount if they have a subscription.
43:02
some them kept the subscription to the service. So there’s way to do it that they feed off of each other. know, of course, data is important. What you’re learning from the data is important. Can you actually bring in some AI to somebody coming in on a free service? Is there some creative ways you can make some offers and promotions to convert them to, you know, even one or two percentage difference in conversion?
43:30
is going to go a long way in making a profitable business. we’re definitely aligned on that. And so I agree with you that hybrid monetization is here to stay. So finally, we both run into this, the whole debate of build versus buy. So how should the customers be thinking about build versus buy?
43:57
Yeah, obviously, I’m slightly biased on this topic. if I put it like this, the question I think everyone should ask themselves, is it strategically important to own the technology platform? by strategically important is, is the technology itself a competitive edge towards, you know, competition?
44:26
And if the answer is no, yeah, or if it’s yeah, partly, know, something like that, then you may consider actually have some, parts of the platform in-house. But the answer is no, I compete with content. I compete with packaging. I compete with design. I compete with my brand or anything like that. Why on earth would you have your technology, create this technology platform and have all the costs and responsibility of having it internally?
44:56
I think that to me is the key question. And of course, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, maybe you had it internally because you felt that it was more secure or you better quality or you’re worried about the vendor’s health or something like that. But we’re way past that level of maturity. Yeah. I think you’re smart on.
45:24
really is it strategically important is the first and foremost question. But even the big guys that have built it in-house, we are hearing that, you know, they are really thinking about do I really need these hundreds of engineers doing this function? Would I ever be better than somebody that is their business to do this function for
45:53
many customers across the globe, right? And they do the best job possible, right? So it’s a, and that debate is happening and really, you know, focusing on what’s our business? What’s the best way to get this function done? So it’s a, and you know, I think that’s, you know, I know you and I know that it’s not an easy conversation, especially if the teams are involved that’s actually doing some of these functions, right? It’s a.
46:22
But, you know, I agree with your perspective and it’s something we have to navigate carefully. That’s why talking to the business leaders is so important. Yeah, I agree with you. And maybe that’s a good way to end this podcast