Special Feature | Multiscreen Monetisation
It is also a monetisation opportunity. As IHS Screen Digest states: “Taken together, these elements go right to the heart of multiscreen’s raison d’être. Pay TV multiscreen is not a reaction to eroding subscription bases, or revenue loss in the present. It is a form of insurance, and secures the future where consumers continue to purchase high-value pay-TV subscriptions. It is an opportunity to re-engage subscribers and provide a cohesive, multi-device gateway to linear and non-linear content.”
The report also discovered that “across the world’s two most developed media markets, North America and Western Europe, consumers in 2012 spent €97 billion on subscription pay-TV packages; expenditures at the box office, in distant second, only accounted for €14 billion worth of spend.”
The majority of consumer content spend is therefore still based around Pay-TV subscriptions. Consequently, TV operators can retain consumer loyalty, and a certain amount of control over the overall user experience, by providing high quality and compelling content.
IHS Screen Digest reported that in 2012, operators in the US were unable to reach 24 percent of TV sets in pay-TV households via the set-top-box. This gap is expected to narrow by just six percent through 2014, 2015 and 2016. The challenge for the pay- TV operators will be to extend multiscreen content offerings beyond the set-top-box and reach an even wider audience past PCs and mobile devices.
The financial implications of closing this gap are massive, as reaching out to fixed devices such as games consoles, Smart TVs and Blu-ray players will require operators to write native code, optimise user interfaces, test, and debug applications. Nevertheless, the report concludes there are three key multiscreen technologies that can help operators future-proof their operations and secure future multiscreen revenues.
The first is the HTML5 specification, which helps to reduce the costs of providing services by enabling ‘write-once, play anywhere’ content across many software platforms and browsers. This can enable operators to deploy a broad set of devices from a single codebase in the backend, which
will transform development times, cost and user ease-of-use. The report reveals how we have already seen this specification being used by a number of key media outlets. They include YouTube (which have trialled an HTML5-based version of the video service on an opt-in basis since 2010), ABC (the ABC Player UI has been shared across PC and IOS devices) and the Comcast-owned ‘the Platform’, of which the reference player automatically defaults to HTML5 playback on iOS, Android and Windows 8 devices.
A successful, monetised multiscreen service must also be secure. At ACCESS, we believe conditional access and digital rights management systems (DRM) offer the best solution for IP-video services. DRM helps to prevent the illegal distribution of content while providing new business models such as content previewing, super-distribution and gifting, which increases content distribution and usage.
However, cross-device DRM interoperability does not exist at present and operators have to both pay and manage for multiple, independent DRM systems. Their number will only grow further due to the scalability of HTML5. The arrival of new, third party, integrated DRM solutions to the market will offer a level of security and cost-effectiveness that will enable operators to extend their device reach without incurring expensive operational costs, removing the obstacles in the way of the content rights acquisition process.
The final challenge for operators to overcome is to pinpoint a reliable and secure method of processing and delivering content to subscribers. Many have elected to shun the home network in favour of an access network, which has historically made proprietary conditional access technologies for media sharing and distribution over the home network almost impossible, as each individual device has needed to interface directly with the access network.
In our eyes, the advent of the DLNA specification offers a key open standard which simplifies the processes behind sharing content across a wide number of CE devices on a local network and provides operators with a sustainable financial model for their multiscreen offering. DLNA based solutions enable viewers to have the satisfaction
ACCESS
ACCESS is a global company providing leading technology, software products and platforms for web browsing, mobile phones, wireless handhelds, digital TVs and other networked devices. In TV, ACCESS is working with operators and consumer device manufacturers to provide software solutions that are evolving the face of digital entertainment delivery and consumption, opening up a host of new opportunities for new market entrants and existing TV operators alike. ACCESS TV-centric solutions include NetFront™ Browser NX and the media sharing solution NetFront™ Living Connect.
and convenience of transporting their own personal media to their operator’s multiscreen user-interface. By providing these types of services, operators can help encourage further subscriber loyalty.
DLNA-based solutions remove the requirement to transcode content in the headend at the same time as distributing broadcast and unicast copies of the same material. DLNA also makes it much simpler for consumers to consume the media that they have produced themselves however they desire, from the smartphone to the tablet and on the best screen in the house, the primary flatscreen TV.
It’s interesting that the IHS Screen Digest paper sites insurance as the main driver of present multiscreen deployments: we would go a little further. We are beginning to see an ‘arms race’: when one operator launches multiscreen in a territory such an offering moves very quickly from ‘insurance’ to a ‘must have’.
It’s also our opinion that consumers that have signed up for OTT services have done so because they perceive these services to be more exciting than the VoD services offered by their existing operators. If these operators can increase VoD buy-rates through launching multiscreen services – including their own OTT offerings – then that multiscreen powered increase in revenues can be substantial.
ibeconnects.com | May/June 2013
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