Our tagline for IBC2025 is ‘Launch Faster, Scale Smarter, Spend Wiser’. These three business goals are increasingly crucial to success in 2025 and beyond, and today we look at the critical need to scale smarter.
The video industry continues to grow at scale, and if broadcasters and operators wish to grow with it, the ability to scale quickly and smoothly is of utmost importance. The global video streaming market size alone is projected to grow from $811 billion in 2025 to $2.66 trillion by 2032, with an average annual growth rate of 18.5%. Meanwhile, both content volumes and viewership numbers continue to surge. In the US alone, the list of unique program titles now tops 817,000, while worldwide VOD services are expected to reach 2 billion active subscriptions this year.
This represents a 65% increase since the end of 2020, highlighting why the ability to scale is crucial. What’s more, streaming providers need to be able to take advantage of market opportunities much more quickly than that. Rather than being measured in years, weeks are preferable. Days are even better.
At Viaccess-Orca, we work with leading broadcasters and service providers worldwide to help them scale smarter — across infrastructure, user experience, and operations.
From our conversations with customers over the course of the year, we have identified the main areas that matter most when it comes to being able to scale quickly and smoothly, along with their wish list for future developments in the area.
The two main areas where the ability to scale is crucial are in terms of user numbers and content.
Content libraries are getting larger all the time, and it is not unusual to find them doubling in size through the course of a few short weeks, especially if an aggregation deal has been done with one of the big global streamers. But it is important to note that the sheer size of content libraries lone will not attract subscribers; key is the ability to seamlessly deliver that content to the waiting audience.
In other words, growth is about more than just spinning up servers to accommodate more content. It is about following through on that to ensure that this content can be easily located, surfaced through recommendation engines, has marketing collateral ready to go via the EPG, and more.
In today’s modern interconnected technology stacks, if one component scales suddenly then everything else must scale equally to reflect that. Viewing peaks, for example, need to be proactively forecast and accommodated, and this can change dramatically with the addition of new content, especially live sports.
The ability to add users rapidly is obviously critical for rapid growth too. This needs to be done seamlessly, without impacting the service for existing customers, and speedily, so that the onboarding process is frictionless. Tens, and even hundreds, of thousands of new subscribers can be added in a very short period, especially when a streaming service expands into new territories. Everything associated with the expanded user base needs to ramp up at the same speed to ensure there are no gaps in the service. This can cover a significant number of interconnected systems, everything from payment processing for new customers, to Targeted TV Advertising, to business analytics looking in detail at the new intake of subscribers’ viewing patterns.
There’s no doubt that the cloud is central to this process of accelerated agility and achieving scale. But there is still a definite gap between the promise and its current ability to deliver on those promises at a cost-effective price. Data egress costs for cloud-based solutions can be high, especially if they have not been architected with cost-optimization in mind. Anyone building a green-field facility will undoubtedly choose the cloud now in 2025; but those with legacy on-prem equipment are faced with a slightly more complex choice.
Moving streaming workflows wholesale into the cloud can be both time consuming and expensive, which is why many media providers with legacy solutions tend to look at hybrid solutions that mix the two. While the industry is extensively transitioning to cloud native workflows, this is a smart move. While on-prem solutions may not have the flexibility to scale that cloud-native solutions have, they are generally stable and robust.
Furthermore, with hybrid systems, we can wrap a Kubernetes-based microservices architecture around the legacy tech. This allows us to quickly and seamlessly scale all parts of the system required for responding to new market demands, while keeping the underlying system intact. It is a cost-effective, efficient solution that really helps organizations to scale smarter.
At VO we are at the intersection of multiple systems. We ensure all components communicate with each other and enable even distributed systems to scale smoothly and at speed. This gives us excellent visibility into new market trends. The ability to cope with expanding content libraries and rapidly scale up subscriber numbers are key, but these cannot be considered in isolation. Siloed systems are thankfully a thing of the past, and in today’s polyglot ecosystem that underpins the modern streaming environment, the ability for all components to communicate seamlessly and exchange information at speed and volume is crucial. Having one part of these systems scale while others lag is simply not acceptable.
Interestingly, what we find for many of our customers is that one of the key areas of focus rapidly becomes the UI. To cope with growing content libraries, they want the UI to effectively curate and display content and surface the right title at the right time. They are also looking to use UI to drive engagement and secure new subscribers to their offering, heading off any thoughts of churn with a compelling, user-friendly interface that can react rapidly and accommodate fast to reflect changes such as new titles, topical events, and more.
The key takeaway? Broadcasters and operators not only need the means to scale, they need the ability to scale smarter. Talk to us at IBC2025 and find out how we can help you do just that.