32 TVBEurope Special Report: OTT Multiscreen
Leveraging the cloud for hybrid-TV architectures
in which access to content is authenticated against subscriber entitlements registered in a pay-TV environment.
By Simon McGrath, general manager, Europe, thePlatform
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onsumers today expect to watch their TV content online – on any device via the internet – but they now expect to be able to access this content whenever and wherever they choose, with a quality of experience traditionally only available on the main screen.
Considering the delicate balance of the television economy, content owners, TV stations, advertisers, and pay-TV service providers are motivated to give the consumer the content they desire, with the best possible quality, while maintaining their own value chain, making advertising more effective, and subscriptions more valuable. This has led to the development of content-led, web-based players and apps, and TV Everywhere – a hybrid environment
Both these developments rely on cloud-based video management, web-based software standards, internet delivery, and browser or native app-based presentation – a distinct, separate architecture to traditional TV delivery, with huge benefits of scale, agility and economy. Delivering web-based video broadcasting of events or linear channels at scale is now more technologically and economically feasible than ever before. Viewing audiences are watching live events online in growing numbers, a trend we saw with the 2014 Super Bowl, the Sochi Olympics, and recently the FIFA World Cup. Around the globe, viewers accessed these live events on desktop, tablet and mobile devices. The cloud-based architecture used to deliver live content to these alternative screens has profound implications for the delivery of traditional TV services to the STB.
The challenge and opportunity lies in providing a consistent and valuable consumption
experience across new and old consumer devices, and exploiting the best of traditional infrastructure and the best of the web, in an economic and scalable manner. There are service features that must remain consistent and common between platforms. Content discovery, recommendations, product packaging, authentication, subscription and policy management, and advertising benefit from centralised management and control. A hybrid TV architecture does this by supporting the best of DVB (S, C or T) integrated with the best of online web TV, under the common control of an open video management system. The primary advantages of cloud-based TV
architectures are economies of scale, speed of innovation and the ability to manage multiscreen distribution flexibly. A cloud-based video management system, with established API integrations to EPG and data providers, encoding and packaging platforms, advertising networks and CDNs, players and devices, as well as a galaxy of other third parties, offers an opportunity to consolidate disparate systems. Such a system enables service providers to manage live linear programming and its associated metadata to support realtime, dynamic EPG updates for consumption by all devices. This allows for search and recommendations from a single source. Sophisticated commerce features with integrations to payment gateways can easily extend the reach of the service to non- subscription customers, and present a unique customer attraction and conversion feature. Many of today’s largest pay-TV operators and video subscription services rely on cloud-based video systems that incorporate the best of TV and the web, including: BT’s YouView, Comcast’s X1, Liberty Global’s Horizon TV, Sky TV New Zealand’s cloud-based UI, Telstra’s T-Box, Viaplay’s online subscription service, and others. By leveraging a cloud-based video management system, not only can service providers mirror the full TV experience via broadband, but they can also create more intuitive features across IP- connected STBs, and other devices. And, when cloud systems are engineered to work in parallel with legacy TV systems, leveraging existing infrastructure investments, they provide a clear migration path to an all-IP based architecture. As today’s TV providers continue to revamp their current systems to serve the diversity of devices and manage major live event streams, we see the importance of a more robust system architecture design. Indeed, powerful cloud-based hybrid TV architectures are available now.
www.tvbeurope.com September 2014
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