Another year of CES is in the books, and amid the stories on wearables, VR, and streaming deals in the sports industry, NeuLion saw its own stay on show floor highlighted by a slate of deals anchored by the swelling adoption of 4K streaming. Among the news items making headlines were the company’s deal with Sony to bring live 4K content to Sony televisions by embedding NeuLion’s DivX CE Technology to its products to enable live 4K streaming events and OTT services; a partnership with Samsung for live 4K OTT services on Samsung Ultra HD Smart TVs in 2016; and a new 4K mobile app designed to play any video from a mobile device to every every connected device that supports all video formats. In addition, the company announced a deal to help launch Univision NOW, an OTT service that will offer live video streams of Univision’s broadcast channels directly to consumers via a subscription service, complete with interactive features.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with NeuLion’s co-Chief Technical Officer Eric Grab about CES, the company’s evolution and what to expect next.
Grab on the company’s evolution at CES: There’s been a growth pattern and expansion that has gone deeper into electronics so we are able to have builder relationships to get to the most valuable content which is sports. The fact that we continue to grow live operations is a big piece of this as doing live Internet video can be a particular challenge for companies. So we are specializing in that and we have a great platform for it. It ties a lot of pieces together, so that if people want to view live Internet sports video that’s better than what you’ve got on current linear TV – because you’ve got the interface, you’ve got the context-aware features of the sport – it gets people engaged. Now we are pushing the limits with 4K, so now we can get higher resolution, so getting that to the consumer is something we are passionate about and that’s where we are building out from.
On the needs of sports partners: Our partners want deeper engagement with their fans, they want to explore VR and 360 video, as well as more details in analytics. It has to work on multiple levels of stats. They are expecting a better experience. The Internet should be differentiated from plain, old broadcast TV. How do we make it better? So they are expecting us to give those consumers a better experience.
On what’s next: We are betting on more live sports and international expansion. We are betting on 4K. I think we are going to see a continual shift to people expecting the kind of control they get in Internet video and once they see it, we don’t expect them to go backwards. For us, it’s expanding in the right markets of different sports. Univision is a great example of us diversifying and getting into different content types.
On biggest hurdles: You do have some technology adoption issues. 4K is hot but then you look at market penetration of 4K displays. You also have Internet bandwidth, and probably only 20% of US households can deal with 4K streaming. I think a challenge is that it is a business model change. Moving from these big carriage deals onto Internet video is a big shift, even though that’s where the momentum is going because it is hard to get off the current revenue streams. Whenever you have disruption at that level, there are always obstacles for them, so our pitch is that if they come with us, our platforms is evolving very quickly and that they will keep getting updates to bigger and better things and reduce their risk but managing that ourselves. We don’t just do little pieces, we do the whole thing.
