Advanced Television

Akamai leads Cloud Video Service market

April 25, 2014

Cloud video service companies provide the backbone for OTT video services, TV Everywhere services from content providers and sport’s leagues, and movie studio’s nascent movie stores and Ultraviolet offerings. “This market was characterised by significant in-house versus off-premise decisions just 12 to 18 months ago,” according to ABI Research practice director Sam Rosen. “Now, most traditional broadcasters and distributors, as well as new entrants to the market are universally adopting cloud services until their solutions scale to number in the top five to ten video services.”

The cloud video services market is led by Akamai, a content delivery network (CDN) that strikes impressive relationships with nearly every other vendor in the video ecosystem to handle the video distribution needs of Tier 1 customers. Second in the market is innovative Ooyala, the second largest (by revenue) online video platform (OVP) which has focused continually on the needs of media customers. Brightcove has largely acquired its way into third place with acquisitions of Zencoder (cloud based encoding platform) and more recently, Unicorn Media (with a strong ad insertion capability).

The market is rapidly growing from $2.3 billion in 2013 to $4.6 billion in 2019, according to ABI Research. “Like any complex and rapidly changing market, there are significant opportunities as well as a few pitfalls. Mobile managed video platforms and Southern European markets led to some hiccups in growth during 2013.In the future, we expect the OVP category to grow faster than other business models servicing this market,” adds Rosen.

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