The Big Interview: Ooyala

Jonathan Wilner, VP, Products and Strategy at Ooyala, spoke to sportindustry.biz at this year’s Cannes Lions about club’s taking control of their own content, and where sports broadcasting might be heading next…

Tell us a about Ooyala?

We have been an online video platform for about nine years, we power many different sports properties built for live sport, 24/7 for channels, things that are owned and powered by operators and we also do a tremendous amount of on demand highlight clips.

In the sports world our customers vary. There’s ESPN in America, which is the largest sports network on the planet, then there’s all the highlights you see on Sky Sports every day that are running on SkySports.com and on Sky Sports apps and we power lots of different football clubs as well, such as Southampton and Arsenal. Many different clubs in the Premier League are using us for their behind the scenes channels and some of them are even moving to taking more control of their own rights and producing things – an example of that would be Chivas, the largest football club in the Americas. They have recently taken control of their own rights and are going to go direct to their audience, which is really a first for football clubs around the world.

How are Chivas sharing their content direct to their fans?

They have a hybrid subscription and advertising model. They have more global fans than most Premier League sides other than Manchester United, but it’s a first for them. They broke off with their long-term broadcast partner Televisa, the dominant broadcaster in Mexico, and are going on a subscription and hybrid basis.

So it’s a bit of a test case, do you think other teams will follow suit, or will Chivas return to the broadcaster?

I think that they are in it for the long haul, they have something of a maverick owner who likes to go his own way and I don’t think that they necessarily will turn back because I don’t know how dependent they are on TV rights.

With the products and services that you provide, do you see sports broadcasting heading more in this direction – what is your vision of the future?

I don’t think it is going to be one way or the other. I think that what’s interesting is that now, like many things in media, there is going to be a variety of hybrid models. I worked for Fox for 10 years and I am extremely familiar with the way things have been; I think it’s great for leagues and teams to have a variety of different options that work that weren’t necessarily there before. I think we are going to see a variety of options and I think they are also going to look at subscription plans and hybrid plans to continue to sell rights to the people who are willing to pay for them. It’s going to take a long time over a series of moves for things to change. It’s not a binary thing.

There is so much happening right now but looking back for a moment; can you pick out any changes in broadcasting that you saw coming and was anything a surprise to you?

In terms of changes we saw coming, we have been invested in this space for over nine years so we saw that consumers wanted to consume content on their schedule on their device and that was going to require change in the way TV was created and delivered. We expanded beyond just being in the video player space and created software that helped the way content is made in the form of Ooyala Flex, which is about to be employed by Sky and by ITV as well. It’s a software-based workflow, it’s replacing a lot of things from traditional TV production that are responsible for things like how highlight clips are created. I think that is necessary because of the need for personalisation.

We also saw that people would want to be watching things that are happening live but the thing that I would say has surprised me is the resilience of the traditional pay TV model system. But when we see things, like what is happening with Chivas, with Facebook Live, Twitter, and in some ways with SnapChat, I think we are seeing that the pay TV ecosystem is beginning to change to adapt to the way viewers are consuming things today.

Do you see different media consumption habits amongst sports fans in different markets?

The differences we see are the availability of content based on rights, mobile availability and pricing. The more broadband is available, and at a lower price, the more consumption we’ll see. There is no difference between what a football fan in Mexico wants to watch than a football fan in the UK. Sport is universal.

Who are your competitors?

As we expand we are competing with a lot of traditional pay broadcast vendors, we are coming in with a fresh cloud based offering that’s delivering flexibility and features at scale that’s moving in a way that I think traditional broadcast vendors are not able to keep up. There are customers like Sky and ITV that need to deliver things much more quickly and in many more different ways than they used to.

On the advertising side, we power M6, Canal+ and RTL across Europe for doing ad positioning and in that case we are competing with a series of companies that include Google with their ad serving and also we are competing with free wheel that is owned by Comcast.

We own all of our data, and that’s very similar to Google but when it comes to ad monetisation we are providing an independent alternative. One that does its own inventory that’s solely focussed on helping content owners and operators to make money from their audience without also trying to sell our inventory or take that audience somewhere else.

What do rights holders need to do to improve their offering?

It’s all about personalisation. It’s about fans getting sport the way they want to watch it. The NBA has now rolled out a system where you can select highlights from players or events that you want. The one way broadcast where it is being cut for the entire audience, is not all that fans want, they want things personalised.

The second thing is that while often fans want to lean back and be entertained there are times when they want to interact with other fans or with the club, the league or the player. There is more that rights holders, leagues and teams could do to offer that interaction experience.

The third thing fans want to watch things how they want to watch them, not just inside the traditional pay TV device ecosystem.