This summer of streaming holds lessons for business

Sion Wynn-Jones: An ability to effectively control the delivery and monitisation of digital assets is critical

After a summer of football, tennis, cricket and rugby internationals all falling at the same time, it’s hard to recall a bigger summer of sport. The fact that this sporting feast coincided with the launch of a significant number of internet-hungry multimedia devices should come as no surprise, and the obvious synergies between the two has helped fuel the ever-increasing appetite among consumers for online multimedia content.

Cisco predicts that there will be 46 million users of internet video in the UK alone by 2014. Unsurprisingly, businesses are keen to feed this appetite by integrating multimedia content delivery into their strategy.

However, balancing out the risks and rewards is a must if you are to secure ROI. Consumers worldwide expect much of this exciting content to be free, so an ability to effectively control the delivery and monitisation of digital assets is critical.

The increasing availability of affordable web TV-enabled devices means more platforms to cater for. Working across multiple platforms is traditionally challenging, often requiring a separate provider and system to format and stream content to each one. This is complicated, time consuming and costly.

Reliability is also critical and web sites with multimedia services need to be completely available on demand, as well as capable of supporting large numbers of simultaneous users from around the world. Any problems will instantly have a negative impact on the audience’s perception of both the service and the brands involved.

Preventing back-end IT infrastructure issues has become easier and more cost-effective, with new offerings that format and manage publication, distribution and syndication of digital content through one system and with one supplier.

Such systems help simplify the monitisation process at each stage of the online media value chain, including signal acquisition for live events, media encoding and multi-format transcoding, live and on-demand streaming as well as advertising integration, reporting, pay-per-view billing and traffic data analysis.

With the right systems in place it is possible to balance the risks and rewards, adding value to your existing proposition, while improving customer engagement with your content and driving that all-important additional revenue without over investment.

Sion Wynn-Jones is product manager at NTT Europe