You Down With OTT?

Back in 1991, I was a freshman at Indiana University and the first few months were a haze with my new found freedom. When I look back to that time the one song that stands out is Naughty By Nature’s “You Down With O.P.P.” It was THE party anthem back in the day. You can visit the Genius page for the lyrics to understand why.

Recently, on one of my morning runs “You Down with O.P.P.” started playing and it got me thinking about a similar sounding acronym – OTT. Over-the-top (OTT) is a concept that you can thank the iPhone for ushering in and in the process opening up the mobile internet to anyone and everyone. Let’s first go back in time before we can thank Steve Jobs and Company.

15-20 years ago if you had a mobile phone you were at the mercy of your phone carrier such as Vodafone, AT&T, etc, some would even say you were a hostage. The reason is because the phone carriers had all the power back then, they decided which phones would be allowed to connect to their network and more importantly they would only allow certain “apps” on those phones. Today, if you are at the top of the Apple App Store or Google Play Store you are golden. Back then, you had to cut deals with the carrier to be “on deck”, meaning you would get valuable screen presence on their phones and in the process handover a large chuck of revenue to them. Or in many cases there was no “app” but just an SMS code you could send to get information like horoscopes, stock quotes or other bits of information that the carrier would monetize from the content providers.

Then Apple released the iPhone for sale in June 2007, which was really Apple’s trojan horse into the AT&T network. When the iPhone was first launched there was no App Store, the only apps available were the ones that Apple shipped with iOS. A little over a year later on July 10th, 2008 Apple launched the App Store and that set in motion a whole new industry – the app economy. Multi-billion companies were created like Snapchat, Ola, WhatsApp, Uber, WeChat, etc…

It meant that apps could be created and would automatically connect to the internet without needing the prior approval of the carrier who previously called the shots. In short, these apps went over-the-top (OTT) of the carrier. Today, these carriers are essentially “dumb pipe” providers and much of the revenue and intelligence is with the app providers. So yes in fact, “We Are All Down With OTT”.