Prior to Parks Associates’ Future of Video: OTT, Pay TV, and Digital Media, Sourik Samaddar, Principal, CDN Cloud Services, Akamai gave his insights on the entertainment industry with the firm's analyst team.

Sourik will participate on the expert panel Evolution of the Smart Home: Gaining Traction on Tuesday, December 10 at 3:15 pm. Panelists who will join him on this session include:

• Rob Caruso, Vice President of Device Partnerships, Netflix
• Brian Cavanagh, Chief Operating Officer, Omnimesh
• Joel Fineman, Director, Publisher Development, Premion, a TEGNA company
• Erik Ramberg, VP, Head of Global Business Development, MediaKind

The greatest disruption to the entertainment industry

• Birth of OTT services by most of the top players in the industry and for every source of entertainment be it movies, TV shows, sports, gaming. Not only its changing the business landscape but it’s changing viewership experience with TVE.

The technology most likely to affect video services

• Network limitations of the internet is the most pervasive one which has direct correlation to quality, geo delivery / distribution and the premise of the infrastructure (cloud vs on prem)
• Security is another aspect which is impacting video industry in terms of revenue impact for pirated content in the face of sophisticated attacks. Differentiation of video vs web security is necessary to address these sophisticated attacks.

The evolution of OTT video services

• Areas of evolution: quality, security, global distribution

Changes in the user experience

• Movies and shows have combined to become SVOD services
• Weekly episodes on TV shows have turned into binge watching
• The definition of primetime is considerably shifting as people can catch up on live sports later on from replays and highlights
• Gaming has moved from standalone service to online-multiplayer environment to eSports.

What pay-TV will be like

• A-la carte model based on different users in a household