At the end of 2024, the broadcast and media industry was abuzz with reflections on the year’s trends, as well as predictions for what lies ahead. In a recent Radical Moves Broadcast Unscripted podcast, Streaming trends to look out for in 2025, we had the pleasure of catching up with industry experts, Bleuenn Le Goffic, VP Business Transformation, Accedo; James Varndell, Senior Director of Product Management, Bitmovin; Gatis Gailis, CEO, Veset; and John Moulding, Editor, Streamification to explore the standout themes from 2024 and consider how they might shape the coming year.
Spotlight on value, cost and complexity
One of the key trends seen last year across the media industry was the drive to reduce complexity and overall operating costs. As Bleuenn Le Goffic, VP Business Transformation, Accedo explains, “media and entertainment companies have realised that they can do better with less, reducing the complexity, and reducing the cost of their overall platform as well”. Media companies are reevaluating their own strategy to ensure they’re investing in the right areas for maximum business impact. As noted by Bleuenn, “they are really asking themselves, what is strategic to their business, and what are the critical areas to be good at and invest in?”.
Helen Weedon
Managing Director, Radical Moves Ltd
Media companies also questioned whether they were getting enough value from their technology stack. Reliability on its own isn’t enough anymore; this need to see more value from technology is leading to a lot of focus on measurements. James Varndell, Senior Director of Product Management, Bitmovin explains “everyone is trying to measure the impact of what they’re doing, and the value of the technology they’re buying and paying for. They want to measure the ROI they’re getting from the technology investments and the impact on the end consumer”.
As we start 2025, Bleuenn thinks that this focus on value and impact is set to continue: “we’ll see media and entertainment teams asking much more from vendors. They’ll want to know not just what the software is good at or how it will help their technology roadmap, but critically, they’ll want to know the business impact. I think we’ll see more and more of the overall technology ecosystem talking about business KPIs, when before all that vendors were talking about was SLAs and reliability.”
Possibly linked to this need to reevaluate and even change technology vendors is something that Gatis has noticed, which is that service providers and channel owners are changing the transport protocol they use for transporting content. As Gatis notes “we’re seeing clients moving away from Zixi to SRT, which seems surprising because Zixi is generally considered to have better management tools than SRT”.
This emphasis on reducing complexity and cost reflects a maturing market where long-term sustainability is prioritised over rapid, unchecked growth. The drive to simplify operations also highlights a shift towards strategies designed to withstand economic pressures and adapt to continuously evolving consumer behaviour.
John Moulding, Editor, Streamification feels that “we’re moving into a new chapter for streaming, where the cost of distribution comes down quite a lot”. He believes that “we’re at an inflection point with the cost of streaming, because multicast adaptive bitrate streaming, and the work that CDNs and federated CDNs are doing pushing deeper into the networks is getting a lot of traffic off the networks [between 65% – 85% according to figures given by some credible vendors]. That’s going to have a substantial effect on cost at some point.” And of course, there’s a possibility that these cost reductions may well lead to new competition entering the market, both big and small.
Sports innovation
Sports content was obviously another standout theme from 2024, with many providers investing in sports rights in the hope of attracting new subscribers. However, as Bleuenn points out, “this remains a highly costly strategy and doesn’t necessarily lead to the impact that the providers had wished for”. It’s possible that providers will come to realise that sports may not be the answer they are searching for and so as Bleuenn puts it “2025 will differ from 2024 because not everything will rely on sports”.
On the flip side, the focus on sport over the last year has helped drive technology advancements around functionality, such as multiview and low latency. As James explains, providers are monetising the functionality as a means of improving ROI from sports rights: “technology enhancements with features like multiview playback and low latency are being made available to subscribers, often at a premium. If you pay a premium subscription tier, maybe you can watch all matches at the same time, whereas if you’re a on lower, perhaps ad-supported tier, then you can only watch one match at a time, and similarly for low latency”. It’ll be interesting to see how these developments evolve in 2025.
We also saw more focus on advertising in 2024, driven in part by the wealth of sports content that graced our screens last year. As John explains, “these new sport experiences bring some genuine incremental revenue potential with advertising, a lot of which is now on the side of the content so is non-interruptive, with formats like overlay, and picture-in-picture”.
Cloud and AI
In terms of cloud adoption, although “most vendors are already in the cloud, and are cloud native” as Bleuenn highlights, the broadcaster shift to the cloud seems to have gone up a gear. Gatis notes “[2024] has been a different picture from previous years. We have seen some very traditional players, including major state broadcasters with lots of channels, fully moving to the cloud. We’ve not seen this level of movement before.” Gatis has also noticed that “more broadcasters are using the cloud for disaster recovery” and that “it feels like the market is moving in this area”.
Alongside cloud, AI continued to be a focal point in industry conversations throughout 2024 but as James points out, “customers don’t want vendors to use AI for the sake of having an AI powered feature if it doesn’t have any value.” He goes on to explain “it’s about how you can use AI to make an existing feature, better, more cost effective, faster, with better output. Or, how can you use AI to enable you to do things that you’re not currently able to do with technology today”. However, although there is no point in having AI for the sake of it, Gatis adds that “cloud vendors who haven’t yet started with AI will most likely lose out in the long run”.
What else is coming in 2025?
As noted by John, broadcasters are evolving their distribution strategies, especially smaller broadcast players, as they continue to shift to streaming. Broadcasters, he explains, “have realised that they can become aggregators”, but smaller channels face tougher challenges. “If it’s a small channel brand owner, how do they get themselves noticed in an increasingly streamed world? If they’re not big and don’t have the brand power like Netflix, they’ve got to find a home,” whether on larger BVoD platforms, YouTube, or their own apps. He adds, “they have quite a big challenge ahead, so we’ll have to see how this plays out in the next couple of years”.
John also expects to see “linear streaming breaking outside of the app” with “whole program guides with up down channel app experiences where the content is streamed.” He adds that this experience will “become very important when we try and migrate older viewers into streaming, because they don’t have to change their behaviours”.
While sustainability perhaps grabbing less industry headlines in 2024 than some of the other key themes, there was as Bleuenn said, “a lot of experimentation and testing still happening”. After “starting the transformation quite some time ago”, she expects there to be a lot of movement around sustainability in the coming year, and critically, “this time, we’ll see not just intent, but actual results”. Let’s hope that’s the case.
As noted by James, there was also a lot of development around new advertising formats in 2024, “we’re seeing new ways of showing ads alongside the content such as picture-in-picture ads, side-by-side ads, and L-shaped ads”. He went on to add that “as we go into 2025, these new ways of presenting ads will open up new opportunities for showing ads in the relevant context of what’s on screen.”
Gatis Gailis, CEO, Veset, agrees that this contextual format of advertising, with ads based on context of what is being watched, is gaining a lot of traction and will likely be a key trend in the coming year: “Veset now has several clients using contextual advertising, which we didn’t see in previous years. They tend to squeeze the main video and either do a full html5 overlay, or do picture-in-picture, or similar, to try not to lose the viewer during the ad break.”
Of course, none of us have a crystal ball so it’s always difficult to predict what lies ahead. But I think we all agree that the industry is poised for a period of significant transformation, as vendors and service providers continue to innovate, technology and particularly AI technology advances, and broadcasters and media companies navigate challenges and capitalise on opportunities to ensure a strong and sustainable future. Bring on 2025!
