Birlasoft’ s media and broadcast services team attended the NAB Show in Las Vegas in April 2022. We observed the following primary trends on the conference stage and in meetings with key broadcast media vendors and enterprises with a presence on the show floor.
Top Key Trends from NAB Show 2022 Las Vegas
Content enrichment solutions adoption continues to surge
According to a new report from Ampere analysis, the global spend on content is stipulated to reach US$ 220 billion, i.e., an annual growth of 5%. This is almost an increase of US$ 100 billion in a decade (2012-2022). Furthermore, as competitive pressures, inflation, and the cost of customer acquisition continue to rise, spending on niche and unique content repositories will accelerate in the coming years. A good example is Netflix's content spend accounted for close to 57% of total revenues in 2021. So, as the cost of content will increase multiple folds, most media enterprises need to protect and enrich the value of each of these media assets in the long run to safeguard margins. This was ardently evident through some of these media technology vendors on the NAB show floor that investments into content enrichment workflows will be one of the priorities in the next 18-24 months. These were as follows:
- One of the fast-growing French data management solutions highlighted its core capabilities woven around volumetric unstructured information repository migration, archiving, protection, and orchestration across multiple enterprise-wide touchpoints (back-end to front applications). Data consolidation, intelligence, and ongoing monitoring within a single lake is vital and initial phase across the content enrichment ecosystem long-term.
- An AI-embedded archive enrichment solution based in France with close to 35 employee strengths showcased its unique value proposition centric on metadata and video repository indexing of legacy (tape to file) and new age digital assets at scale. TV networks, brand marketing, educational institutions, and publishing are the primary target customer base for this fast-emerging media technology vendor.
- A cognitive service (AI) enabled descriptive metadata and image enrichment technology vendor spun off from a leading educational institution's think tank predominantly enables news and time-bound project-centric media enterprises to accelerate their annotation capabilities at scale.
Therefore, it can be witnessed that content enrichment workflow is slowly but gradually gaining momentum across the media value chain attributed to the rise in the cost of content acquisition along with margin pressures.
Backlight unveils its orchestrated Universal content management ecosystem
In 2022, media enterprises are steadily embarking on the digital transformation 2.0 journey, i.e., the creation of personalized and converged digital services offerings to maintain market share and improve subscriber retention rates1 . These roadmaps further increase ICT complexities across the content supply chain, adding higher fragmentation to the existing "Best of breed" media technology ecosystem. Thus, pushing most of the media enterprises to embrace the unification of the content supply chain as one of the top business priorities to be focused on in the next 18-24 months. Furthermore, most media technology vendors have diversified (through both organic and inorganic modes) their capabilities and functionalities building a vertically integrated ecosystem woven around single or multiple workflows across the content supply chain. A few examples witnessed at the recent NAB show are:
- Backlight recently acquired Wildmoka to strengthen their unified but modular offering around the Universal content management ecosystem. This acquisition enables them to not only horizontally diversify offering to allow its media and broadcast customer base to enhance the production volume, reach, and monetization avenues of their live TV & video assets without offsetting broadcast-quality UX on digital platforms but also compliments its upstream value proposition, i.e., Iconik (cloud-native media asset management with a strong presence across enterprise video space), ftrack (real-time creative workgroup collaboration monitoring), Celtx (streamlining pre-production workflows) and Zype (tailored expansion of multi-channel publishing at lower TCO).
- One of the leading and highly diversified (condition access, digital rights management, forensic watermarking, and app shielding) content security providers globally revealed a need for converged security offering with TV & video anti-piracy services as an overlay across both linear and non-linear TV ecosystems.
Thus, the push-pull syndrome from both the buy and sell-side will gradually shift the procurement strategies within this space towards vendors offering horizontally integrated Universal ecosystems across the content supply chain on a long-term basis.
Enterprise video vendors are creating in-roads within the modular media & broadcast space
One of the flagship highlights of this year's NAB 2022 was the emergence of small to mid-size enterprise video vendors with negligible tier-I and tier-II media and broadcast referenceable customer base on the show floor. Most of these vendors have been operational within the education, healthcare, and financial services-centric video segments for the past 12-36 months. Some of these are as follows:
- A US-based technology provider with close to 5 employees base incepted in 2019 focusing on financial services enables hybrid workgroup collaboration, i.e., internal video referenceable used cases in the banking segment. The primary unique value proposition is to provide DVR (recording) within the multicast environment at lower TCO (with negligible maintenance, support, and re-engineering costs).
- A UK-based cognitive service (AI) enabled speech-to-text vendor incorporated in 2003 with a strong enterprise B2B and B2C customer portfolio includes Atexto, Sentient Machines, Instructure, Digital Anarchy, and Vail Systems showcased referenceable used cases within e-learning, automotive, and customer support businesses. It is multi-lingual (close to 33 languages) based closed captioning, compliance, transcription reporting, and customer engagement will be the core addressable business priorities within the media & broadcast space.
According to a research report published by MarketsandMarkets, many of the media & broadcast technology vendors are aggressively focusing on extending their offerings and solutions within the enterprise video space to reach US$ 26 billion by 2025. However, this year it's the reverse osmosis, i.e., enterprise video technologies expanding footprint into the media & broadcast segment.
With the ongoing fragmentation of media and broadcast technology space, as showcased at the recently concluded NAB conference in Las Vegas, ICT services providers such as Birlasoft have long-tail opportunities across most of the service lines, especially system integration (fragmentation of content supply chain demand tight integrations across both back and front end applications), and managed services (SLA backed monitoring of end to end Universal ecosystems along with media value chain across both linear, non-linear, and multi-modal entertainment platforms).
More from this Author
Recommended
Media and Entertainment | 9 min Read
Media and Entertainment | 4 min Read