September 2014
www.tvbeurope.com
TVBEurope 35 Special Report: OTT Multiscreen
them; Sky customers with Netflix accounts, or AT&T customers that are subscribed to Hulu. Why is that? It all comes back to that key issue of content. Want to watch House of Cards? Sign up for Netflix. Just as it was the primary driver of user adoption last year, the proliferation of content is on course to be the biggest driver of subscriptions in 2014, too. With more and more new and legacy content being added to these services every month, users will flock to them in their droves. Think of how many people, who perhaps wouldn’t be classed as tech-savvy, started using iPlayer, simply because it allowed them to access all BBC content from the last seven days. Now consider the attention that market would give such a service if it said that all BBC content – from last week or thirty years ago – is available to stream. It is clear that content is driving viewership more than ever. In addition to this, the penetration of the bigger screen smartphone has also changed the nature of viewership somewhat. Watching a movie on a 5.5-inch, 1080p screen is actually quite a pleasant experience – the user feels less inclined to reach for their tablet when their smartphone is providing them with the same benefits. As a result, it would be a fair assumption that the desire for on-the-go viewing will increase in the next 12 months as users demand data plans that can keep up with their appetite for content. However, the market does need to develop to meet these user desires, and that requires a little bit of maturity from the players involved. If the 2000s proved anything, it’s that consumers are no longer willing to be ripped off by greedy media entities that make them pay through the nose and limit the number of ways they consume content. While we’ve mainly moved past those darker days, content owners are still concerned about the security of their offerings. There are limits to the number of devices a user can attach to an account in many cases, and that is going to need to change as the number of connected devices in a household increases. Users have proven themselves to be, for lack of a better word, ‘trustworthy’ when it comes to content – if they can get it easily and legally then there’s no need to pirate it. The market needs to treat users with the maturity they have proven they deserve. All this talk of the future naturally leads us to talk about IBC. The last couple of events have seen the second screen act as one of the real hot ticket items, but while I think there will still be plenty of focus this year, it won’t have the buzz around it like it has done. I wouldn’t be surprised to see second screen applications, which last year were standalone, rolled into larger offerings where the technology becomes an integrated part of the larger OTT offering.
Having now reached a tipping point in the industry, when simply providing an OTT/multiscreen offering is not enough, I’ll be most interested to see how technologies begin to merge to create innovative new products. Attendees should also keep an eye out for how smart watches could disrupt the
existing models. Viewing content may not be suited to such devices, but there are other things that the micro-feature-focused platform could add to the market. The IBCs of the past couple of years have not done much to reinvent the wheel. I hope that 2014 shakes things up a bit.
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