As you pick up the freshly made hot cappuccino, a quick swipe or touch and $3.49 gets securely transferred. We may not realize the effortless activity when paying for a coffee or a grocery bill, or any money transaction in return for goods or services, but there is a lot that happens behind the scene to securely debit one ledger and credit another. The digital money transfer transaction looks like a child’s play, but it carries a significant cost, and often a lot of time and complexity. User-friendly. 

I was a Netflix subscriber in the US, not anymore. Back home in India, I tried a month’s free subscription for Netflix and HotStar, and only the latter stayed. What changed? The content is almost the same, and so is the quality, but the key was overall “Value Proposition.” A term often misunderstood in isolation is more a comparative measure based on prevailing environment, competition, and what is found reasonable. Here, Netflix’s value proposition failed to inspire in comparison to. 

In this era of data explosion, collecting data in itself is not sufficient. It needs to be processed, sliced and diced to gain insights for running and growing the business. Unfortunately, majority of data available in the world today is unstructured and hidden making it difficult to process without significant human participation. A large part of data in media industry falls squarely in this category but it has started to CHANGE. Take any video file, and it holds large amount of unstructured data. 

As we close the doors on 2016, we are entering into most fascinating times in the history of online video. Over the top (OTT) video, which started as a complementary service to Television has unfolded into a multi-billion dollar SVOD industry, and shows no signs of slowing down. Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have emerged as new age entertainment giants, and Virtual MVPD providers are re-wiring online to bridge any gaps from traditional TV. It is thrilling to witness new events reshaping OTT services. 

HLS or HTTP Live Streaming provides a reliable way to deliver continuous and long-form audio and video over the Internet. It has become a default standard for online delivery of audio and video serving content on host of devices and browser environments. What makes HLS a better option than RTMP or RTSP chunked streaming is deployment with standard http severs and  http as communication protocol. HLS  can be used to deliver a single bitrate file or in a more advanced format,. 

In US alone, over 1.5 millions households bought an UHD TV in the first quarter of 2016 but with current environment, the short answer is a No and the long answer will need some more reading below. CES saw it and so did NAB and for best part of last two years, UHD remains an all favorite theme for TV, Blu-ray and STB chipset manufactures, camera OEMs, studios, media production houses and OTT platform players in each and every technology show. Ironically there is neither.