Josh is a digital media professional with a comprehensive understanding of the OTT ecosystem. He joined Simplestream in 2015 and has been a part of their commercial and business development team since then.
His primary responsibility is to create, launch, and manage OTT services for various broadcasters, rights holders, and publishers such as British Forces Broadcasting Service, GAAGO, PBS America, Telus, Racing UK, TVSN, and NewsCorp.
Before joining Simplestream, he worked with digital rights experts at Perform Group which has since become Stats Perform and DAZN.
Josh on who is driving the race to make Apps the future of TV:
“The big sports are not having to innovate because they still have the big pay cheque from the big broadcasters. Where we are seeing innovation is through necessity. So, for example, if you are a league and you have lost your pay TV distribution partner, but you know that you have an audience, then “direct to customer” is really a strategy that you can go after. That’s where we are seeing the biggest innovation.”
Josh on potential opportunities for Olympic sports:
“Winter Olympic Games in February 2026, for a lot of the smaller federations, is their big window into being discovered. So a lot of the federations are trying to see how they can leverage the Olympics and get to when those eyeballs are on their sports, to offer experiences that allow people to carry on enjoying the sport.
But recently, TNT Sports announced that the Eurosport brand is ending in the UK and Ireland, and for Alpine Sports, for Cycling, for Weightlifting, they are all of a sudden going to go behind a £30 a month pay-wall. Are their fans going to be prepared to pay that to watch a niche sport, when ultimately they might feel a bit miffed that they are basically paying for Champions League and Premier League rights.
So, I think there’s a huge challenge around discoverability and streaming and syndication to your own streaming platforms is going to become really important for some of these smaller sports, but with really dedicated fanbases.”
Josh on the role of technology in the growth of streaming:
“It’s been a long process. When I first started, it was audio only and then we had Windows Media Player, then we moved to Flash, now we are on HLS, then formats like SRT came out and so all of a sudden, you can get these super Hi-Res pictures and some of the cameras, the actual equipment, can produce these IP formats straight off the back.
So you have no longer got these workflows where you are uplinking to a satellite, you are downlinking to an encoder, you are then transcoding the feed and then putting onto an origin or a CDN and before you know it, you are two minutes behind the live action.
What you can now do is have a completely IP based workflow, you can have latency close, not quite as close, but close to broadcast. The problem for broadcast is that it has the limitation of unicast, so one stream for EVERY viewer, whereas streaming is multicast and each individual can have their own individual personalised stream and then that leads you to other opportunities around localising graphics, commentary or the advertising for example and personalising the experience more.”
