OVPs Still Rely Too Much on B和width Resale

在过去的几个月, I’ve seen a lot of customer RFPs from content owners 和 publishers looking for an online video platform (OVP) provider. 在某些情况下, these content owners already use an OVP 和 are looking to change vendors; in other instances, they have a new content business or have been doing things in-house 和 now want to use an OVP for the first time. As customers ask me for feedback 和 share with me the quotes they are getting from the OVPs, the one thing that is consistent among all of them is that the OVP vendors are still getting a large percentage of their revenue from the resale of b和width.

When you look at how these contracts break down, the largest percentage of revenue isn’t coming from platform license fees; it’s coming from the delivery of the videos. And since no dedicated OVP owns its own content delivery network (CDN) -- it simply passed that traffic to a CDN, which it then has to pay for itself -- a large portion of the value of the contract is simply reselling bits. This is something we’ve known about for years, but many of the OVPs have downplayed how much revenue they get from the resale of b和width. 事实是，有很多.

Brightcove, the one publicly traded OVP in the market, won’t disclose what percentage of its revenue comes from the resale of b和width through CDNs such as Akamai or 关注网络. I’ve asked the company reps multiple times, but all they will say is that it’s not a lot. But we have no idea what that really means. Ooyala 和 创作 不公开, 但他们也不愿透露, 公开的, what percentage of their revenue comes from b和width fees. But from taking a look at all of the vendor’s responses to RFPs, it’s a lot.

举个例子, one customer sent out an RFP to move from one OVP to another 和 shared with me all of the quotes it got back. The value of its contract averaged $600,000 over the next 12 months. 从那600美元里,000, $400,000 was for storage 和 delivery, $49,000 was for platform license fees, 和 the rest was made up of one-time setup fees, 支持费用, 集成费用, 和 professional services for some custom analytics work.

That means 67% of the value of the contract to the OVP was from storage 和 delivery. And since that’s not something the client does in-house since it doesn’t operate a CDN, the vast majority of that revenue is being passed on to the CDN. Even if the OVP is marking up the storage 和 delivery by 30%, 它只赚了90美元,000美元，400美元,000的存储和带宽. It’s not bad for simply reselling, but b和width 和 storage prices decline each year.

OVPs that target multiple-system operators (MSOs) tend to get a higher percentage of their revenue from platform license fees, as they aren’t reselling b和width 和 storage, since the MSO is deploying the OVP or TV Everywhere software inside their own network. But for those video platform providers that are selling directly to publishers 和 content owners, a lot of the value of their contracts is in the resale of b和width.

Not all of the customers who use an OVP use it for delivery 和 storage; many have their own contract with a CDN directly 和 only use the OVP for the cloud-based software service. But for those OVP vendors that sell directly to publishers 和 have a lot of their customers using them for storage 和 delivery, a large percentage of their revenue is tied directly to the resale of something they don’t actually own or deliver themselves. That’s something that all of the video platform providers are going to have to change in their businesses if they really want to accelerate the percentage of revenue that they keep from these contracts.

This article appears in the January/February 2014 issue of 流媒体 magazine.