Remembering Neal Page
Andy Tarczon, Founding Partner, General Manager
July 8, 2009
Earlier this week, the world lost Neal Page, CEO of Inlet Technologies. In memory, we are publishing this contribution he submitted to our project “The Future of Over-the-Top Video,” an on-going series where industry executives share brief insights into their view of the evolving broadband video space.
Neal was simply brilliant and every exchange was a chance to share in his expertise and passion for video. He and his firm have been at the forefront of bringing the OTT vision to reality. Through the efforts to stream the Indy 500, Tour de France, Wimbledon, and to bring video to the iPhone, it seems whenever video moves forward Inlet is there and Neal has been their leader. The company will certainly go on, but we will miss one of its founders.
What is the Future of Over-the-Top Video?
Neal Page, CEO, Inlet Technologies
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A lot has been written about OTT video. There is good reason for this….it’s a game changer and it’s here right now. IP connections to devices in the home are in place and growing, while control of digital media consumption has shifted to the consumer. Broadband enables it all, and it is driving a massive disruption in the business of delivering content.
The one constant is that the money flow for media always originates at the consumer. Money swims “upstream” through the consumption device, subscriptions, advertisements and distribution points all the way to the headwaters of content origination. Smart companies throughout this ecosystem will take advantage of this market turmoil to deliver unique value into this new environment. Some will survive and prosper. Many others will die. Consumers will win big. Within 3 years, I believe that precedents for successful business models will have been set. Big companies we know today plus others we’ve not yet heard of will service an unprecedented increase in media consumption and benefit from the resulting money flow.
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Much of the industry, however, overlooks one of the critical chokepoints for growth in OTT video. It’s the infrastructure. In order to scale and meet this demand, the current methods of creating, transcoding, distributing and controlling access to content must be re-vamped. Existing processes are very human intensive and simply don’t scale to the degree necessary to meet the unique new demands of many networks delivering content to many devices. Automation and intelligence must be incorporated into “the infrastructure” to handle this growth. Workflows must become smarter with video-centric intelligence built into the “machines.” Networks must adapt to unique characteristics of digital media. Nimble and automated transcoding of content matched with relevant advertisements must be a de facto part of the next-generation networks. Then and only then will the consumers start the new-media money flow en-masse.