Yospace is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, a period of time that has seen huge transformation in digital video. We’re marking the milestone by asking some of our valued partners about their own journeys in digital video and what they think the priorities are for OTT advertising moving forward. This week we’re speaking with Dom Foulkes, who is Broadcast Technology Manager at Channel 4.

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Can you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?

Hi, I'm Dom from Channel Four Television and I'm the Engineering Manager for our streaming services.

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Can you tell us a bit about your own journey in the digital video industry?

So I started working on coding and Mux systems. I worked on the UK's first IP based, digital terrestrial mux system. At that time, IP delivery was a really efficient way of transporting video to TV transmitters. Then I stayed with IP and now it's become the core of everything we do.

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I worked for DAZN, launching what was quite a niche sports streaming app and is now a pretty well known brand in the sports streaming industry. I moved to Channel Four a few years ago as I was really interested in working for a public service broadcaster. And there's no better disrupter than Channel Four. We're really loud, we're very exciting, and it's a really fun place to innovate and grow.

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Channel 4 has had a big summer, with high profile Paralympics coverage. Tell us a bit about what you were doing for that.

So we're all buzzing after the end of the Paralympics. We're already tired as well, but it was fantastic. We had 20 million viewers across our linear and digital platform, so about a third of the UK's population tuned in.

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We had 7.9 billion viewer minutes, we had 45 million people watching on our digital platforms, and so it was a really successful Paralympics for us. We had our best audience share since 2012.

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It was all supported by our really key partners, including Yospace, who made it happen and made it a real technical success as well as a viewer success.

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How important is viewer experience in making such big events a success?

Our viewers are really critical. What was really important for the Paralympics was to make sure that anyone who wants to watch can watch wherever they want to watch, on any device, whenever they want to watch, and that we stream every single minute of sports.

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And Yospace really helped with that. As well as supporting our advertising, they support the watch again feature on our app. It means anyone who's tuning in who has missed the start is able to rewind and not miss a single minute. So they’re really helping with that viewer experience.

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TV advertising is at a pivot point as more and more viewers move online. What do you think is working well? What needs to be improved?

Personalization. And our dynamic ad product is really successful. We're working well. We're still adding more devices.

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Something we were working on for the Paralympics actually was improving accessibility across commercials. So we've added for the first time subtitles on our commercials on our streaming service. And I really hope that we can continue that journey and make commercials as accessible as our program content.

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So we're still working on that and hope to make a lot of progress on that next year.

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As an extension to that question, what do you think the biggest priorities will be for ad-funded broadcasters over the next few years?

The priority is going to be personalisation, monetisation, and doing that smarter. Having spent some time at the IBC show this year, it's really clear that a lot of those AI concepts have become real products that we can deploy. And I think that's going to be really, really important for our advertisers and broadcasters to enable better personalisation and monetisation ads.

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You’ve been a valued partner of Yospace for over a decade now, that’s a long time in streaming. What does the relationship mean to you?

Yospace and Channel four have been working together for over 10 years. I've been around for about half of that, and when I first joined that relationship, it was clear that it was a very collaborative and very strong relationship. As we've worked and developed further, the spirit of working together is only strengthened.

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Yospace is one of those partners where, every time we embark on a new project, there is definitely a real spirit of togetherness and we want to do the best thing to create the best outcome for our viewers. Yospace has been a fantastic partner to work with.

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Read more about our decade of working with Channel 4, here.

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