Our love affair with Australia

*This blog post first appeared on the Massive Interactive blog. Massive was acquired by Deltatre in November 2018.

It’s easy to attribute innovation in OTT to mainly come out of the United States. Netflix, which as of its last quarterly earnings report has almost 140 million registered subscribers, was born from the country and has gone on to penetrate virtually any market where broadband is a thing.

Western Europe is another obvious choice. The land of the BBC iPlayer, a benchmark in the world of public service broadcasting-gone-digital, stands as an example of streaming video done right, while revenue projections for the region are expected to hit $23 billion by 2023.

But for us here at Massive, there is one often overlooked market that sits amongst the giants. And that market is Australia.

The country down under has quietly developed a hotbed for OTT innovation rarely seen elsewhere. International powerhouses have taken an interest in the territory to further their global content and OTT ambitions. CBS, the American mass media corporation that reported full-year revenues of $14.5 billion earlier in February acquired the struggling Network Ten in late 2017 before launching a branded version of its pure-play OTT service ‘All Access’ to the market twelve months later.  

The numbers back it up too. With 9.1 million subscriptions to OTT services recorded in 2018 (a 54% increases year-on-year) the revenue generated from SVOD alone is staggering – almost $700 million. Not bad considering that only 43% of Australian homes are registered for an SVOD service. Clearly, there is still plenty of market to be had.

Take Kayo, the recently released live sports service offered by Foxtel that provides coverage of more than fifty leagues and federations, including the AFL, NRL, A-league, and NBA. Since launching in November, it has already shown signs of disrupting the status quo of premium sports rights being tied to expensive pay-TV packages, collecting 115,000 paying subscribers in the process 

For us at Massive, Australia holds a place close to our hearts. It’s where we first opened our doors over 23 years’ ago and began our work to change the way the world consumed entertainment. We are proud of our journey from Australian start-up to a global leader in the world of OTT that counts DAZN, AT&T, PCCW, the BBC, WWE, and Bell Media, amongst many others, as clients and partners.

I’ll be in Sydney for the whole of March to spend time with our product development and UXD teams – representing almost one-quarter of our workforce – and meet with industry colleagues from some of the major operators. I’ll also be attending Sydney Video Technology meetup, where our very own Dominic De Lorenzo, SVP Products, will be talking on the shifting focus of OTT video operators. You can sign up to attend by clicking here.

Would be great to see you there.