Are the Markets for OTT Content Platforms and Devices Converging?

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Allan McLennan: It seems to me that we're back to square one of separating this up. Is a technical platform that's providing this, or is it actually a broadcast network that is serving up these kinds of content and programming, no matter what the platform is? Let's take Sinclair. They have 180 different markets around the country. They have STURR, which is their IP delivery, and STIRR has been supported by advertising since the get-go. There's an entity in and of itself that's a local broadcast network providing content for their individual communities. Is that the direction we're going to start seeing too? Are we going to start seeing that kind of change? Ronit, are you seeing that kind of interest in Kaltura of building out those kinds of offerings?

Ronit Schwartz: Absolutely. I think if you attempt to separate it, I don't think you'll succeed. I think there's kind of a converrgence of hardware and software and service providers. So, where Roku used to be maybe just the stick and then started offering the content and others had the content, but not the stick, and--to Anthony's point--Samsung being a hardware device and suddenly offering content. We're going to continue seeing that convergence, in the same way that a traditional MVPD used to offer you a set-top box and a modem, and then would feed you the content. We don't really have that separation anymore. But we're seeing a lot of interest from people to try to understand how they can manage their content across all these platforms and devices, how they can manage their users and audience across all these devices, and how to navigate the different business models. We're talking a lot about FAST, but there is still a lot of room for subscription-based businesses. There's a lot of hybrid. So people are still very much experimenting and it's very interesting to see the different models that are forming in the industry.

Allan McLennan: So would that be rebundling the topic of this conversation? What you just described is bringing it all back together.

Ronit Schwartz: I think there's a lot of value to rebundling. 'Cause as you said, people need the ease of discovering and accessing and logging into content. So I think the bundle gives you the unified login, that unified search, the unified settings and billings, and all these user experience conveniences that the people are using while still wanting to maintain control of their content. So I think if what maybe was missing in the traditional MVPD model was curation, so you have like 300 channels, but they weren't necessarily the channels you wanted. And 90% of it you've never watched and you didn't want to pay for all of that and you couldn't find anything in it. So those are the things that we we've moved away from. So now we have the emergence of skinny, bundles, and I am piecemealing the content that I want and curating my own set of programming. As John mentioned, people need at least four streaming services to meet their TV viewing demands. They're piecemealing all these streaming services on top of pay TV, and we're really building our own bundle at home and I want to be able to access it with ease and convenience. And yes, Kaltura will offer the content ingest of the metadata in order to have a unified search, kind of all of the technology that you need in the back-end in order to support that.