TL;DR
- SMPTE President Renard P. Jenkins says streaming media is no longer a platform, but is rather an environment: “Streaming media is in constant motion, and we have to think about it that way.”
- He asserts that subscriber churn is actually a good thing, providing a dynamic audience to which engineers must adapt.
- Streaming hasn’t necessarily tipped the scales from a profitability standpoint, but its social impact in terms of change and disruption has moved the industry forward by leaps and bounds.
Renard P. Jenkins, current SMPTE president and until recently the senior VP of product integration & creative technology services at Warner Bros. Discovery, delivered a fascinating keynote address at the Streaming Media East conference.
The primary question he set out to address — “Where do we go from here and how the heck do we get there?” — is obviously one everybody at a conference about streaming media wants to hear about from someone in Jenkins’ position. Watch the full keynote session in the video below:
Streaming as a technology has expanded enormously in recent years, but building stable, predictable business models has been elusive.
Perhaps, Jenkins offers, people are looking at streaming the wrong way.
Starting off with a metaphor, he points to the literal platform he’s standing on and then elaborates, “streaming media is no longer a platform.” A platform, he explains, is solid. It doesn’t move. Streaming media is “an environment. Streaming media is in constant motion, and we have to think about it [that way].”
He acknowledges that people are worried about the economics of streaming in the near term, but by way of providing perspective, he asks his listeners to think about the technical progress that has already taken place. “A few years ago, the live streaming experience if you were a user was ‘interesting,’” he says, pausing for effect. “Interesting is probably the best word I can find for it,” he laughs. But he points to the vastly increased quality of streaming delivery in just the past few years and the significant growth of adoption, pointing to roughly 1.2 billion subscribers globally. “When you have that kind of growth, you can see that the reach of this industry and the reach of these products is enormous.”
He also points out the rapid expansion of streaming since the start of the pandemic, with first-run feature films premiering over streaming services and the great success the NFL has had in an even shorter timespan with Thursday Night Football.
He credits that growth to innovations that continue to take place. “CDNs are evolving,” he says, “Codecs are changing to be able to compress [more data without] losing quality.”
In the big picture, Jenkins sees a growing industry, though he admits, “we are seeing… churn from a subscriber standpoint, and some people are afraid of that, and they panic.” But Jenkins asserts that churn is actually a good thing. “You want an audience that’s dynamic. We can’t be afraid of seeing people change or move. But we have to adapt. And as engineers, that’s what we do. We adapt, we build, we change, we motivate, and we move things forward.”
It’s no secret, he says, that streaming has not necessarily tipped the scales from the profitability standpoint. “But if you take a moment to step back, and look at it in terms of social impact, industry impact, in terms of change and disruption, streaming, has moved our industry forward by leaps and bounds.”
Customers are excited about what they can do. “Everyone who had been stuck in the cable world said, ‘I am finally getting the opportunity to go to that ala carte service menu that I always desired without having to be stuck holding 90 to 100 channels I didn’t.”
As the opportunities in streaming expand for creators and consumers, he says, churn is inevitable, but with that expansion of options, companies can no longer count on holding customers out of sheer inertia. There is simply too much competition and so this is the time for streaming media companies to build offerings that people want and let the cream rise to the top.
“We have to make sure, as engineers, as business owners, as streaming providers that we are ready,” he warns. “That means that our audience is going to continue to grow. That means that CDNs have to actually become faster, have to become more robust. One day, maybe we can push that 8K, or that 12K file.”
He stresses the importance of three overarching factors for companies to rise to the top of this increasingly competitive environment. Engineering, which is no surprise, and design, which, he offers, people might not think about sufficiently.
“If you are an electrical engineer, if you are a mechanical engineer, if you are a sound engineer, you were probably not taught design theory in any of your courses,” he elaborates. “You were taught to think about how to put systems together. You were taught about how to put mechanical gears and so forth together. But you were never truly taught design theory. That is one of the things that I believe every engineer, every computer scientist — all of us — needs to make sure we understand.
“That is what’s driving our innovation right now,” he adds. “That and what I believe is the most important job in our industry today: Data science. The data drives our direction. The data also drives the decisions that are being made.”
Scalable, modular approaches to building out streaming services, he explains, along with excellent data and analytics, will lead to successful business models, churn notwithstanding.
As an example of the power streaming can have beyond traditional entertainment delivery systems, he points to Rihanna’s performance at the last Super Bowl. “The number of people that streamed that performance was astronomical,” he notes.
“Now, that’s not my demo,” he admits, “I’m more of the Lou Rawls, Parliament Funkadelic guy. That’s my era.
“But I will say that my daughter and her friends were streaming that, and they could care less about the game. It was all about Rihanna. And that was made possible because the technology is scalable.”
Summing up, he declares, “We need to move away from the idea of streaming versus any of the other outlets. I think we need to start looking at how we optimize streaming.”