JMPlanche_Witbe

Jean-Michel Planche

Jean-Michel Planche is the Senior Vice President of Innovation & Technology and co-founder of Witbe. He has been at the heart of Internet and digital technology innovations for the last 25 years. In the early 90’s, he founded Oleane, the first Internet Operator in France. In 7 years, Oleane became the second largest ISP in France and was acquired by France Telecom. Planche became France Telecom’s Senior VP of Business Internet services. He then founded Trancred Ventures to invest in digital breakthrough projects and left France Telecom in 2000 to create Witbe.

Five Reasons OTT Changes Everything

TOP of MIND by Jean-Michel Planche

In 2015 OTT is the buzz word coming from every mouth. Many people think of it as a new opportunity for video businesses and they are right. For sure, there will be some damage to the traditional linear video business model, but the prospect of delivering so much more than classical TV makes it worth it.

Why is this? It is because we are talking about two completely different things. There are five characteristics of OTT video that change everything about traditional TV viewing:

  • User-Centric
  • Software (R)evolution
  • Scalability
  • ATAWAD
  • Quality

Let me explain.

User-Centric

OTT video is really the opposite of classical TV. Before, the intelligence of the television service was in the center, but not on the edges or with the customer. Just think of a traditional “rabbit ears” TV which is not particularly intelligent. Now with OTT, being an Internet technology with a user-centric focus, the intelligence is (could be) everywhere— from ingestion to delivery, all the way to the end-user’s hand, on the device.

Software (R)evolution

OTT video is more of a service and software intelligence opportunity than a hardware problem.  The massive cloud adoption we are seeing is a clear signal of that. More and more of our customers request our Quality Control Solution as a full software set, like the encoders. There is no room anymore for space/energy consuming hardware like the probes we were forced to deploy everywhere in the past.

Scalability

Curiously yes, OTT video is really a scalable solution. What else can scale at a worldwide level like the Internet does?  Sure, there are bandwidth issues. But beyond that, it’s all a matter of quality control and management. The Internet won over every other past (network centric) technologies because of its philosophy. It scales at a worldwide level. You can read about “Inter Galactic Computer Network” works from J.C.R. Licklider*— one person I consider as a true father of the Internet.

ATAWAD

OTT is by definition an ATAWAD service. ATAWAD is Any Time, Any Where, Any Device … what else could it be really (© Nespresso).

Quality

Quality enfin ! Yes, you know it’s one of my mantras but who can any longer say quality doesn’t matter. I often hear “on the Internet I cannot control the quality, I cannot know exactly what’s happening” … and usually, I laugh. I often see Netflix or Youtube “reports” blaming the Internet service providers and… I cry. Yes we can really understand the quality issues. Yes, we can control them, but only if we ask the good questions. Bad questions with good answers always produce something that looks good, but don’t work in the long term.

Let’s talk about all of this further at the next OTT Executive Summit. I hope to see you all in New York City on June 17th.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._Licklider and April 21, 1963 publication: http://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider-IntergalacticNetwork.pdf

I often hear “on the Internet I cannot control the quality, I cannot know exactly what’s happening” … and usually, I laugh. I often see Netflix or Youtube “reports” blaming the Internet service providers and… I cry. Yes we can really understand the quality issues. Yes, we can control them, but only if we ask the good questions.