Ahead of the forthcoming OTT Streaming Platform And Content Management Summit, Broadcast Media Africa spoke with Mr Frans Blommestein, CCO of MwareTV, Netherlands, with regards to his participation in the industry summit taking place on Tuesday, 21st – Wednesday, 22nd February 2023, in Cape Town, South Africa.
During our conversation, Mr Blommestein highlighted the significants of affordable content in order to reach more people in Africa.
The following is an excerpt from BMA’s conversation with Frans Blommestein:
BMA: What influenced your decision to agree to participate in the 3rd International OTT And Streaming Platforms And Content Management Summit?
Frans: Mware focuses heavily on the African market to offer a full end-to-end cost-effective OTT solution. Many Mobile and FTTH operators are looking for interesting, additional revenue-generating Value Added Services (‘VAS’) on their networks. Linear TV, Video On Demand and Education offered on an OTT platform is such a VAS. At the summit, Mware will explain to various operators the most effective way forward to launch such an OTT service, which will also benefit content producers.
BMA: How would you describe the current transformation that is taking place in the OTT and streaming platforms and Content Management? How can practitioners take advantage?
Frans: Content producers need an OTT platform to distribute their content, and OTT platform providers need content to offer an interesting proposition to Operators. In the African market, like in other markets, the technical cost to offer apps, manage the content and distribute content at a good quality should be as low as possible so more users can afford to pay for the content offered by the Content producers or aggregators.
Content producers can offer their content in cooperation with an OTT platform to various Operators who already have the ‘eyeballs’ (mobile and internet subscribers). Mware is adding more and more local and national content to its white label platform, which content and platform is offered as a VAS to the Operators.
BMA: What is the biggest industry challenge faced at the moment concerning content creation, content distribution on streaming platforms, and generating adequate revenues/funding for content and programmes that viewers/listeners want? How can these challenges be faced, specifically?
Frans: The biggest challenge is to create an interesting content package which can be offered at an acceptable price. This price should cover the content fees, the OTT platform costs, the distribution costs of the streams to the subscriber and an acceptable margin for the Operator. In addition, by offering a fair subscription fee to subscribers, you will get more subscribers, generating more income (content fees) for the content creators.
BMA: What can fellow industry professionals do or continue to do to improve local content and its distribution in the multi-platform environment?
Frans: Local, good-quality content is important for an Operator to offer a wide range of content to its subscribers. The best way to distribute the local content of a producer is to partner and join OTT platforms so your local content will be part of a broader offering. For example, Mware as an OTT platform provider, operator and broadcaster, cooperates with operators in the African market, collecting various local content of a specific region and bundling this on their OTT platforms. An OTT platform is not limited to satellite distribution due to its internet distribution and, therefore, can offer the service worldwide.
The better quality local content providers can offer at a reasonable price, the more ‘eyeballs’ of Mobile and Fiber Operators will subscribe to the service.
BMA: All said, please tell us what you hope fellow participants will take away from this industry event.
Frans: I hope all participants will see the market in Africa is growing rapidly. Investments in mobile and fibre infrastructure is high. In 3 years, more than 800 million people will use 4G/5G networks which are made for data distribution. These ‘highways’ needs to be filled with ‘cars’ (‘content’). We all must work on a TV offering people can afford, which means an acceptable fee for subscribers, interesting local, national and international content at a good quality streaming service. The time to market is now.
