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Sarah Palmer Executive GM – Products & Pricing, NBN
In advance of her address at the OTT TV Summit in Sydney this March, Informa caught up with NBN Executive General Manager, Sarah Palmer.
In an exclusive interview she shed light on what NBN are doing to ensure the long term sustainability and commercial viability of OTT.
Sarah, how much impact has the arrival of Netflix had on NBN?
The arrival of major OTT players into the Australian market in the first half of 2015 has seen overall data consumption increase substantially.
Before that period the average nbn end-user premise was downloading around 70GB per month – within six months of the arrival of OTT consumption had increased usage to 110GB per month and it is currently sitting at 150GB per month.
In a relatively short period of time millions of Australians are now consuming OTT services – with many of them doing so on the nbn network.
How is NBN supporting the retail service providers to monetize OTT?
The biggest thing we are really doing is to open up the entire broadband market for OTT services by delivering access to high-quality broadband of at least 25Mbps to all Australians.
By doing this we really are ensuring that Australia will be one of the very first countries of its size in which all citizens are able to access high-speed broadband and therefore access OTT video services, nobody will be left behind.
Is there any other product development that NBN is pursuing to reduce the cost of OTT delivery for service providers?
The biggest role that nbn is playing in this area is to make sure that we continue to deliver the best possible value to RSPs in terms of the pricing of our Connectivity Virtual Circuits (CVCs).
Only a short while back CVC was over $20/1Mbps but we have already reduced that to around $15/1Mbps and are looking for ways to further reduce the overall cost per Mbps of data for RSPs as we expand our Dimension Based Demand pricing model.
What’s happening with OTT delivery over satellite?
We are very proud of what we are doing with the Sky Muster service in delivering access to high-speed broadband to absolutely anywhere in Australia.
With Sky Muster we are enabling a young child in Tennant Creek to watch You Tube videos in the same way that a child in Toorak or Tamarama can – not many other countries in the world can really say that.
What does NBN believe is the current uptake of OTT services and what does it predict it will get to in five years?
If the growth we have seen in the last couple of years is anything to go by then there is really only one way for the OTT market to go –towards continued growth.
We are not in the market forecasting business but what we would say is that we expect the OTT market to mature and head off in new directions.
Of course most of the attention will be on the general entertainment OTT players but OTT video is not just about entertainment there is also huge potential for educational and informative content so we expect to see more growth in those areas too.
Learn more about the OTT TV Summit and book your place here.