Paul Davies
Head of Marketing, Yospace
Yospace had the pleasure of speaking to long-time customers and partners at IBC 2025 in Amsterdam. In this series, our conversations explore the latest trends in streaming, ad tech, and monetisation, as well as the achievements and experiences that have come from collaborating with Yospace.
In this instalment of the series, you can read our chat with Andy Bell, Head of Technology, Content Systems at Channel 4. You can also watch it here:
I started at Channel 4 to deliver 4oD 20 years ago, a very long time ago, and at that point, the industry didn’t really exist. You look around the halls [of IBC] today, 20 years on, and there are so many solutions that solve problems that we had and couldn’t solve, apart from developing solutions ourselves.
It was a very fragmented set of components and systems that we had to put together, whereas today, you can buy solutions pretty much from one organisation. So I think that’s the biggest change in the industry.
I think the journey has been really fun. [It has been] really, really, really enjoyable to see the industry evolve and focus very much on digital and IP rather than traditional television and broadcasting.
We deliver a lot of live output: our daily news, and we do a lot of big sports events - football, Formula One, etc. So my team is very much involved in getting the content in, processing, and preparing it. But also, with the relationship with Yospace and our integration for dynamic ad replacement, we can fill and replace ads in any of our content. In all of our live output and all of our on-demand output as well. So it’s been a really, really useful journey.
People want to find content easily. There’s an enormous amount of content out there now, so easing that journey and providing applications that are intuitive for viewers, and recommending the right content for them rather than everything or something irrelevant, is really important.
So the content journey and the viewer experience are obviously significantly different. Channel 4, like any other broadcaster or content provider, very much focuses on making the user journey and experience frictionless.
Doing it well and keeping it invisible to the viewer is very important, and doing it everywhere. Making sure that no matter where the inventory is, we can serve dynamic content, not just commercials. In the future, perhaps different types of content will be served to different viewers, [and you would] be able to do that on every device type, every service, traditional linear television, and digital - it doesn’t matter.
The switch to being able to cover the underlying ads, while still broadcasting in the traditional, schedule-based way, is interesting. Addressable advertising is a very interesting one. There’s a lot of complexity in how to deliver it. There are a lot of different platforms that require content to be prepared in different ways, signals to be applied in different ways, so that’s a real, complex challenge.
I’m spending quite a bit of time with all the suppliers here [at IBC] just trying to understand how we can improve that journey.
When I met Yospace originally, they were pretty much the only organisation that could deliver this type of service. We had a really difficult challenge, being able to support devices that weren’t really mature, with video specifications that were pulled together from all over the place - a bit fragmented, as it was originally. Yospace took that challenge on.
We ended up with a solution that worked pretty quickly, and we’ve continued over the last 10 years to just build on that. The experience has been great. As a supplier, there’s an excellent relationship. We throw lots of demand and change at Yospace on a regular basis. They take it on, and we get the results. So yeah, we’re very pleased.
