2019年5月29日
By Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen Conference Chair, 流媒体 and CMO, id3as
博客

的 Northern Path: Cooperation and Competition in the Nordics

Last week, I was a moderator at the second annual 北部波奥斯陆会议. It's the newest of a number of one-day events in the Nordics. 的北欧电视峰会 began in 2010 in Copenhagen, while 瑞典流媒体技术 held its inaugural event in 2017. 北欧电视峰会 focuses entirely on the business side of OTT, while 瑞典流媒体技术 is almost exclusively technical. 北部波 splits the difference, with a morning full of sessions covering technical issues like IMF, CMAF, 和延迟, and an afternoon devoted to case studies and business discussions.

What they share is that while they are all sponsored by vendors (我的媒体北欧电视峰会 Eyevinn技术 for 瑞典流媒体技术, and Norigin媒体 (北浪), none of those vendors allow product pitches from the stage, either for their own companies or for any vendors who speak. 的y also put a premium on networking—they're large enough to draw the biggest names in the Nordic market, along with big global players, but small enough that over the course of the day and evening, attendees can spend high-quality time learning from each other and doing business.

At 北部波 this year, the theme that ran through the entire day was cooperation, highlighted by a presentation from Canal Digital's Henke Erichsen called "Nordic Pay TV Collaboration." Erichsen made the bold proposal that pay TV operators, 电信公司, 广播公司, and pure streaming services in the region need to stop duplicating efforts and spending on technologies and services. 例如, if the same piece of content is going to be delivered by multiple services, why should each service pay for its own transcoding and storage?

As an analogy, Erichsen turned to the airline industry. 的re was a time when each airline employed its own baggage handlers and catering, but eventually they realized that it made more economic sense for them to contract those services out. Why can't OTT providers do the same with transcoding and storage for duplicate content?

的 big sticking points would seem to be rights agreements and security, and while those hurdles might be relatively easy to overcome in a small market like the Nordics, it's harder to imagine such a collaborative approach working in the U.S. But Erichsen and executives from a wide variety of companies including RiksTV, 探索网络挪威, Com哼哼, and Telia were all bullish on the idea, 台上台下都有, so there may be a working model in place relatively soon.

我很久以前就说过，美国.S. would be wise to look to the Nordics for inspiration on both the technology and business fronts (and with the explosion in popularity of Nordic content, 我们已经在这么做了). Perhaps the next year or two will yield yet another lesson or two that we can learn from the region.