The global online video platform (OVP) market is set to double by 2019 as video rapidly becomes a critical means of stakeholder communication and collaboration for enterprises across the globe, according to a report from research firm Frost & Sullivan.
An OVP is a fee-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) online content solution that enables content owners to ingest, transcode, store, manage, protect, publish, syndicate, track and monetize online video.
Where budgets are constrained and in regions where the economy has yet to pick up, OVP deployments are slower, while home-grown solutions and low-cost alternatives such as the YouTubes and Vimeos of the world are diverting small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) and smaller content providers away from investment in professional OVP solutions.
The pricing for OVP use is based on a software license fee, plus bandwidth. The platform license fee is typically determined based on how many content pieces are in the system as well as the number of components in the video platform ecosystem.
The report, Analysis of the Global Online Video Platforms Market, found that the market earned revenue of $369.4 million in 2013 and is estimated to reach $800.2 million by 2019.
In addition, OVP vendors must at least invest in building relationships with reseller channels in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific to widen their market scope, as well as offering analytics, metrics and personalization to enable companies to derive value from their video assets.
The firm said this would help OVP vendors differentiate themselves in the evolving market, which also requires investing in tighter technology partnerships to provide customers with value-added services and critically analyzing product portfolios.
Frost & Sullivan observes that Brightcove, Ooyala, Kaltura and thePlatform are still essentially the largest participants in the OVP space.
However, over the past few years, a number of regional participants have developed, including Xstream and Arkena, notable participants in Europe; Brazil’s Samba Tech, which has been the vendor of choice in the Latin American markets; and Australia’s Viocorp, a significant OVP participant in Australia and New Zealand.
The study also suggested there is confusion around what constitutes an OVP owing to the number of features, including transcoding, digital rights management (DRM), analytics and multiplatform delivery.
From a customer’s perspective, comparing various product features, pricing and deployment options is complicated, and the report warned that this lack of market awareness around exact capabilities of an OVP makes consumer education and the right messaging critical.
Due to content proliferation and the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend, OVPs are becoming an essential fixture as media and entertainment (M&E) companies are urged to economically deliver video to fast-growing, fragmented video-enabled consumer devices.
The OVP market will be critical to ensure business success for M&E firms as more niche content finds its way online and intense competition causes customers to differentiate on content selection, time to market and quality of experience.
“In addition, OVPs that can manage and monetize video assets can be a huge help to M&E firms that are so far failing to handle the complexity of publishing video online,” the report noted.