March 13, 2020
By Tim Siglin Contributing Editor
Featured Articles

The State of Streaming 2020 Research Report

There's no shortage of research on what consumers are watching and how they're watching it, but precious little on what sorts of workflows OTT platforms and other streaming publishers are using to deliver all that content. The first annual State of Streaming report takes a look behind the curtain at the mix of content types and workflows—including live, on-demand, on-prem, and cloud—that have taken hold today, as well as the business reasons behind those technology decisions.

The report is based on a survey of 515 streaming industry professionals conducted by Streaming Media, Unisphere Research, and the Help Me Stream Research Foundation, and sponsored by Amazon Web Services, (AWS). We were pleasantly surprised by the number of responses from across the industry and across the globe, and the insights will not only help shape the industry going forward but will provide a baseline of industry facts through which we’ll gauge growth in future annual State of Streaming surveys.

What did we find out?

The numbers show that 52% of respondents have been in the industry between 6 and 15 years, and an additional 26% have been in the industry longer than 15 years. So our findings come from a place of experience, which lends more credence to some of the key takeaways.

Another insight is that a significant portion of those responding to the survey said they used cloud-based services for a portion of their workflow, but they also used on-prem equipment. About equal numbers used only on-prem equipment as used only cloud-based services, but most used a hybrid approach. In a group of pull quotes highlighted in the survey report, it quickly becomes clear that certain portions of respondents' workflows are best suited for cloud or on-prem solutions.

Third, we found that streaming isn’t just for over-the-top entertainment (OTT) services that rely on subscriptions or advertising. A cross-section of responses from medical, educational, government, and not-for-profit organizations highlights the diversity and scope of streaming’s advancement as a much-needed communications tool to teams, parishioners, first responders, and other key groups.

Fourth, respondents told us that security and piracy are a concern, but when it came to ranking business and technical concerns, they didn't even make it in to the top five. Want to find out which concerns were of greater importance to the State of Streaming survey respondents? Download the survey here to find out.

And there's one other finding worth pondering: Business and revenue models around live streaming are moving towards parity with on-demand streaming.

Download your copy of the report today.