Akamai Knows of ‘Several’ 2020 OTT Launches Not Yet Announced, Says CFO

Built into Akamai’s 2020 revenue forecast is the assumption that it will “participate” in many of the new over-the-top video services “that are coming to market, and some that are expanding,” said Chief Financial Officer Edward McGowan on a Q4 call Tuesday. The network provider expects 2020 revenue growth to be in a range of $3.06 billion-$3.11 billion, vs. $2.89 billion in 2019, said McGowan. “In addition to more global expansion of existing OTT offerings that have been announced for later this year, we are aware of several new direct-to-consumer OTT launches planned for late spring and early summer” that haven’t been publicized, he said. Akamai also is counting on a big second-half revenue bounce from streaming for the Tokyo Olympics in Q3 and the presidential election “cycle” in Q4, he said. “It's really hard to call how successful these will be,” he said of the new OTT service offerings. “We have conversations with the customers. We know what their plans are. We make sure we build our capacity to be able to capture as much of the traffic that we can. But it really does come down to end-consumer demand.” Akamai’s goal is to “grow our share, have even more massive scale,” said CEO Thomson Leighton. “Already today, we're the go-to player, if you ask any of the big OTT guys, and we want to grow that further.”