Paul Davies
Head of Marketing, Yospace
Yospace had the pleasure of speaking to several long-time customers and partners at IBC 2025 in Amsterdam. In this series, our conversations explore the latest trends in streaming, adtech and monetisation, plus we celebrate the achievements and experiences that have been gained along the way.
In this first instalment of the series, we spoke with Stefan Lederer, CEO and Co-founder of Bitmovin. You can also watch it here:
Well, we started 12 years ago. We started out of research and development and standardisation right at the beginning, when OTT streaming started with MPEG-DASH and HLS. We built the first reference implementations around it, right out of university and right out of our PhDs.
It was the right technology at the right time. Suddenly, those customers appeared and wanted what we did in research, and the rest is history.
OTT streaming is a real business today. When we started, it was like the new thing. Everybody played around with it, and nobody needed to make a business out of it, but today the whole industry has shifted towards streaming.
The new norm is that streaming needs to pay the bills. So, everybody is significantly more serious about the monetisation and the top line, as well as the costs and the bottom line.
Our background and our DNA is innovation, and we try to find partners that share this DNA. Yospace clearly has that.
And so we said [to Yospace], hey, server-guided insertion is a new thing; it fits into the theme of the current time in terms of optimising profitability and revenues and making a business out of streaming services. So it's really extremely important for the whole industry and for our customers.
We need to find partners that go ahead with these technology steps, show how it's working, show it's real, and make it easy for our customers to deploy it, and that's what we did with Yospace.
Server-guided ad insertion (SGAI) is a completely new technology. It's fully standardised on the HLS side, it's still getting finished on the DASH side. So, from that perspective, we are still in new territory here.
We need to test it out. How does it work with the integration on the encoding side, on the player side, the feedback, the decisioning, and the complexities on the Smart TVs?
There's a lot more logic that happens on the client side suddenly, and that's more load, more work that we all need to test out. Does it work on all devices or a subset of the devices?
So we try to do as much of the discovery and the learning before our customers put the technology into production.
We work on really cool technologies, like what server-guided ad insertion (SGAI) is today. A previous version of the technology we deployed 5, 6, or 7 years ago with joint customers in the field, so there's a lot of expertise in how to do things like that already, through this long-lasting partnership.
We ran into each other in, literally, some of our first customers 10-12 years ago and have worked together ever since.
Specifically, the interesting use cases, the interesting customers that push the envelope and really go ahead in terms of new technologies - that’s where we typically run into each other, and that's a cool sign.
