The technology required to bring TV and video content to phones, tablets, Smart TVs and other streaming devices becomes more complex every day. Our job is to tackle that complexity on behalf of the OTT, Pay TV and broadcast companies that rely on us to “make streaming simple” so they can focus on their core business. In our latest Spotlight blog post, our new CTO, David Brown, looks at some of the ways 24i is making clever use of technology to deliver on that promise. New year, new challenges As we start 2023, the streaming industry undoubtedly faces some challenging times with increasing tough competition and strong economic headwinds. But, in my experience, it’s at times of adversity that technology can really shine - evolving and innovating to find new ways that set a company apart from its rivals.  For 24i that means using technology wisely to advance the video streaming user experience, increase engagement and reduce costs for our customers. I can’t wait to get stuck into this exciting task! Innovating the video streaming user experience So where will 24i be putting its tech focus in 2023 and beyond? We’ll be: 
  • Extending the use of our Backstage content and application management interface
  • Adding even more integrations from Backstage to third party solutions that will bring our customers a wider selection of capabilities including FAST channel support
  • Making increasing use of machine learning to improve content recommendations within our highly-configurable white-label video streaming apps
  • Optimizing our cloud deployments to enhance the video and content management workflows available to our OTT and Pay TV operators and, in particular, to squeeze out every last drop of latency to ensure live streams are optimized
Backstage - making video streaming apps modifiable and modular Backstage is at the heart of 24i’s technology strategy. It’s not just a content management system, it’s an application configuration platform that allows our customers to adjust and optimize the look and feel of their video applications across multiple devices in real-time. It’s also an integration layer that helps to deliver on the modularity promise of our award-winning 24i Mod Studio streaming platform, allowing our customers to easily add and remove features, functions and third-party integrations as their needs evolve over time.  I really can’t overestimate the importance of Backstage to our customers or the impact it can have on their business. It’s a really flexible and intuitive interface to use. It enables our customers to add new metadata and process assets from ingest right through to DRM encryption and delivery to the CDN. All about engagement - bringing personalization to every video streaming app Our most recent developments allow metadata from Backstage to be passed through the technology behind our 24iQ personalization service. This means we can automatically generate rows/rails/bars (every customer seems to prefer a different term) of content in our streaming applications that are personalized for the end consumer. Ultimately, this improves both the volume and range of content that individual consumers watch, which is obviously great for our customers’ business.  If you’d like to know more about how you can use personalization in your streaming service, check out our e-book that’s full of great advice from our experts and leading streaming companies. ‍Flawless user experience on every device helps streaming services stand out While managing and surfacing metadata and content recommendations is of enormous (and increasing) importance to streaming services, it’s all for nothing if the user can’t easily navigate the interface that surfaces that metadata. Thankfully, 24i excels at graphic design and user experience for streaming video applications.  We’re rightly proud of the work our design team do to create our configurable white label applications for all devices, and refining the user experience in these apps will continue to be a huge focus for us in 2023. It has to be, because UX is so central to ensuring that consumers keep coming back for more content, maintain their subscriptions or watch more ad-funded content. As I mentioned before, that’s what makes our customers’ businesses thrive. There are so many OTT, Pay TV and broadcaster streaming applications out there that offer a frustrating user experience and with the ferocity of competition in the streaming marketplace, it’s just not sustainable to be among them.  2023 is set to be a landmark year in the evolution of video streaming and I am excited to help 24i steer its technology forward.