Despite huge shifts, “TV’s still going to look a lot like TV five years from now”: Ooyala’s Bismarck Lepe

Unless you take a keen interest in back-end online video technologies, you’ve probably never heard of Ooyala, and yet you’ve probably used its services without realizing it. It powers video offerings from the likes of Dell, ESPN, Virgin Media and Yahoo Japan, as well as a range of magazine and newspaper websites.

Ooyala offers video management, monetization and analytics tools that serve an audience of more than 180m consumers worldwide. This position puts the company in a great position to observe the rapidly changing world of online video and the shift TV broadcasters are making to the Internet, as demonstrated in the Video Index Report it published in February this year.

At the recent MIPCube conference in Cannes, France, we spoke to Ooyala’s President of Products, Bismarck Lepe about his observations on how these changes in online video consumption are affecting not only broadcasters, but advertisers, the movie industry, cable and satellite service providers.

Lepe doesn’t agree with the suggestion made by Cindy Gallop at MIPCube that the TV industry needs to be ‘blown up and started again‘. Instead, he believes that “It’s still going to be storytelling… Television’s still going to look a lot like television five years from now.

“What do you care that your content’s coming from IP versus connecting it to a coaxial cable or having free-to-air satellite? That’s the beauty of this industry, that you don’t have to completely blow it up for it to be something new.”

You can listen to the full conversation with Lepe, who prior to co-founding Ooyala was a Senior Product Manager for Google’s AdSense product, below.