OTT and Video in 2025: A look at the year ahead
Having just started the new year, now is a great moment to reflect on the exciting time ahead of us. What will the biggest trends be for 2025? Which opportunities lie in front of us, ready to be scooped up? What is going to be top priority in the OTT, Video and TV industry? In short, what is coming in 2025?
The battle for sports
You will likely not have missed the NFL games on Netflix during Christmas, or the boxing match a few weeks before that. In other news, DAZN has also recently acquired Foxtel for a whopping $2.1 billion, a big sports rights holder in Australia, in a bid to further increase DAZN’s sports-only stream offering. With even Netflix jumping into previously unknown sports territory, the battle for sports rights is going on a full force. 2025 will likely see an even bigger uptick in this battle for sports rights, with Amazon trying to take up a piece of that pie as well. Sports-only parties like ESPN (owned by Disney), and the aforementioned DAZN, I expect have a tough battle ahead of them.
Important to note is that’s not only the rights themselves where this battle will occur, but also a battle for screen- and watch-time. With Netflix and Amazon offering more than just sports, the entry barrier to pick up a subscription and watch something is quite a lot lower. If anything, users are more likely to keep a subscription going because they have more to watch other than seasonal sports matches. It does bring us to our next point, which especially Disney with ESPN can benefit from.
Bring back the bundles
Yep, it’s more of that. Going back in time as it were, with operators having long offered traditional television with additional channels available via add-ons. While in today’s day and age this might not be driven by operators anymore, I do expect a resurgence in bundle offerings. One of the prime candidates here is Disney with ESPN (and often Hulu involved too). All Disney-owned subscription services, that can be gotten for a lower fee for all 3 (or just 2) if you get them as a bundle as opposed to individual subscriptions to each service. Especially looking at the sports battle we discussed earlier, a bundle-bet will be crucial for the likes of Disney to stay competitive. With Netflix offering both regular VOD and sports from the same subscription, there is no need for a bundle of sorts, making their offer rather competitive.
In the same trend, the likes of Amazon and YouTube expectedly also going to bet even more on their ‘channel/add on based’ approach. They have the scale and technology already available, with especially Amazon already offering additional channels via Prime Video. It is both a great way for niche players to offer their content at scale without having to invest in the tech, and of course for Prime Video to remain relevant. YouTube particularly will continue to seek for ways to add relevance. At the time of writing they get the most amount of watching minutes, especially with the creator economy lively and well on YouTube. There is of course a big treat from other parties especially focused on shorts like TikTok and Instagram, especially when those parties don’t stand still and look for similar opportunities to stay relevant.
Writing this now, maybe that is the name of the game in 2025. Staying relevant. And bundling can be one of the means to achieve that.
SGAI and Shoppable Ads
While we may have settled on relevance being the name of the game in 2025, there are many aspects to actually achieving that. Sure, it matters a lot for users to find you and stay with your services, but if you can’t find a way to monetise your offerings… you really are in for a rough time. Luckily, there are some big opportunities to increase revenue, especially on the advertisement front.
One of them saw much of the light of day in 2024 already, with early adopetrs dipping their toes into this new technology. Server Guided Ad Insertion, or SGAI, is what many in the industry say is a revolutionary new approach to advertising in video. While typically you would either use Client Side Ad Insertion or its counterpart on the server (Server Side Ad Insertion), SGAI aims to combine the best of both worlds. One of the biggest differences here though, is the availability to introduce different ad formats (like a side-by-side video and ad box, or an L-bar). With 2024 seeing some of the early adopters trying and learning how SGAI works best, 2025 is bound to be the year that more companies jump in on this exciting monetisation opportunity.
Another opportunity I expect to see gaining traction are shoppable ads, and shoppable integrations in general. Especially YouTube has been jumping in on this, which makes a lot of sense given the nature of a lot of their content (creators selling merchandise via the platform). It can be an interesting additional revenue stream, which goes beyond just regular video ads. Especially when you’re operating specific brands that end users can identify with, e.g. a football sports team, not having options to directly buy jerseys and the likes is a missed opportunity. You can apply this of course both in regular video ads (e.g. with QR codes for linking to shopping environments), or directly inside the video watching experience. In any case, very much worth exploring, especially if you intend to make the most use of your content, and a trend I do expect to be picked up in the new year in front of us.
And more
Of course, with a big surge in the use of AI across the industry, we’ll see a lot of things impacted that we might not even expect yet. There is a lot of experimentation happening with AI-optimised codecs, which, while not yet applicable in production at this moment, will definitely have an impact in how we deliver video. Maybe not yet in 2025, but we’ll definitely see the starts of it.
In that same trend, I expect AI and machine learning find its way to many more areas. Whether we’re talking Sora-esque services to generate video from text, AI-optimised workflows for subtitles and audio translations, or even bitrate adjustments with existing codecs. AI/ML is everywhere, and I expect a lot of noise from it in 2025.
Expectations of 2025
As we’ve kind of established, at least according to my own opinion, relevance might just be the name of the game in 2025. With a clear battle of sports contents happening right in front of our eyes, on the other side of the aisle an uptick in bundling of content might just offer that relevance. With bigger OTT companies going for sports, and sports companies seeking bundles, both sides might just continue to be relevant.
In the end though, profitability is important, we all need to make money. A focus on new opportunities, both with SGAI and shoppable experiences, are great ways to achieve an increased amount of profitability. With the early adopters having shown what is possible, 2025 is poised to see more companies adopt these new monetisation strategies and more.
Finally, of course, can’t talk about any industry without mentioning AI in some way, shape or form. I can really only link it to a form of machine learning and LLMs, which is what powers most AI implementations nowadays of course. Regardless, there will be a lot of movement and opportunities to leverage AI-capabilities. From codec adjustments to video workflow improvements all the way to AI-generated video, there are a lot of opportunities to explore in the year ahead.
Never a dull moment, wishing you all a great start of the year!
