OTT Video

Over-the-top, Sticky Wickets and other Market-Appropriate Terminology

Over-the-top (OTT) Video is a moving target in the service provider industry. In the United States, OTT video is exemplified by the Netflix streaming service, which is enabled by a range of consumer electronics devices capable of streaming video to a television set. If you live in the U.S. or Canada, where more than 3/4 of households subscribe to Pay TV services, then OTT is Netflix.

But. In other countries, the lines between OTT, VoD and IPTV are blurry at best. Dominant public broadcasters and a wide variety of free-to-air (FTA) programming makes it hard to think in terms of video going “over the top” of anything else. As a matter of fact, the term “OTT” lacks cultural applicability, such as using baseball terminology (e.g. “triple play”) in countries where the sport isn’t played.

In markets where fewer than half of households subscribe to Pay TV services, OTT is often referred to in more appropriate terms such as “hybrid television.” For example, the United Kingdom is another market where “OTT” technologies have been in play for several years, but that market is dominated by a public broadcaster — the BBC. And then there are European countries with numerous FTA networks and a variety of cable, IPTV and DTH satellite services.

As OTT video technologies — in the form of hybrid set-top boxes and Connected TV sets — are imported into new markets, the “OTT” term gets abandoned for more meaningful language that includes words such as “hybrid” and “broadband.”

What We Mean By “Moving Target”

One of the biggest challenges in describing a phenomenon-in-process is in breaking out what we’ve learned so far from what we think is going to happen. As such, we’ve broken our OTT research into:

  1. the foundational explanation of what has happened so far, and
  2. our predictions for how OTT video will impact service provider businesses in global markets.

As we publish this research, we have discovered two outgrowths of OTT Video research. The first is that hybrid TV Platforms are a necessary next step. And the second is that it’s impossible to talk about OTT Video in a vacuum that excludes Multiscreen solutions.