How the COVID OTT Surge Has Impacted Performance

Watch the complete panel from Streaming Media East Connect, "Is Too Much Choice No Choice at All?" on the Streaming Media YouTube channel.

Learn more about OTT at Streaming Media West 2020.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Matt Rivet: One of the things that we've been hearing a lot about is that OTT viewing in particular has been really spiking, and there's been a surge in viewing over the last three months. I'd be interested. Ali, if you had some thoughts on just what that has meant for performance. Have the networks that we've been using to watch OTT been able to handle it?

Ali Hodjat: It's an important question, I'd especially like to focus on the security, how content protection is impacting the performance of OTT services. The recent numbers I've seen showed about a 9% increase in number of subscriptions and about an 8% increase in revenue. Obviously, we all agree, this has given a great opportunity for streaming service operators to take market share from linear TV and PayTV services. What we have seen in Intertrust specifically focused on the number of DRM licenses that we deliver. We have seen spikes. For example, in one of our tier-one customers, we saw a 16% increase from February to March and anotherr 5% from March to April. So again, that is really important, because when you look at the increase in the number of subscribers, and increases in viewings, each piece of content is encrypted with a protected delivery of the DRM licenses.

And now we are talking about an additional 50-60 million subscribers or viewings happening every month, it's really impacting the performance of the backend system. Obviously, one factor that you mentioned is the traffic on the internet, but again, delivering the DRM licenses robustly at this kind of scale and being prepared to instantly scale it up during these events ... There's the conference news and everybody watching that live is important.

Another factor is really about the viewing experience. So when you look at low-latency streaming, as the subscribers are really used to how they watch the content, how there's not much buffering and the DRM licenses have delivered instantly and robustly to manage the low-latency streaming. This has to be maintained again during this tough time. And so again, the product teams are really focusing on making sure there is a DRM license, delivery performance, meeting the peak demand, as well as managing the low-latency streaming the same way, that quality of experience for the users during this treaming surge stays the same.