Insight on the global video delivery business

September 2022

The DTVE Interview: Olivier Jollet, Pluto TV | FAST channels | Content discovery | Streaming technology

FAST times

The reinvention of linear
in the age of connected TV

WelcomeDigital TV Europe
September 2022

This

issue

Editor’s note

12 Full stream aheadW

22
4. News digest A round-up of recent top industry stories.
10. The DTVE interview: Olivier Jollet, EVP general manager, Pluto TV
The Pluto TV boss tells Jonathan Easton about the Paramount-owned
streamer’s contrarian approach to the industry, expansion plans and theimportance of partnerships and collaboration.

elcome to Digital TV Europe’s IBC special issue.
The return of Europe’s premier broadcast andprofessional video trade show after the global pandemic isof course a cause for celebration. The TV world has however changed
massively since the last time the industry gathered in Amsterdam.
Our special issue addresses some of those changes. We are now
more firmly than ever in the streaming age, and our line-up offeatures fully reflects that.
With subscription video-on-demand maturing and consumer
spend being cut back as the cost of living bites, ad-supported
streaming video is on the rise. In this issue we consider in depth the
emergence of free advertising-supported streaming television (FAST)
and the challenges and opportunities it presents.
The proliferation of streaming platforms has accelerated the trend
towards service providers adopting the ‘super-aggregator’ model. Thatmodel makes sense if it delivers a differentiated user experience that
includes some form of advanced content discovery. We also look at
the complex challenges and opportunities of advanced, personalised
content discovery.
Finally, the rise of streaming has also led broadcasters to movetowards IP and streaming technology to accommodate new viewing
habits, including for live and linear programming. In this issue welook at the rise of streaming technology and its application to live
programming.

12. FAST times in streaming At a time of rising costs and an
overwhelming number of options, consumers are increasingly turning
to free alternatives to expensive subscription services. Andy Fry reports.
20. News analysis: How Disney overtook Netflix as the world’s
biggest streaming operator Disney’s ability to overtake Netflix definedby vision, ambition and resources, reports Jonathan Easton.
22. Making content stand out from the streaming crowd The
availability of content at any possible moment means platform operatorsneed to do more if they want their shows and movies to make an
impact, reports Anna Tobin.
28. Streaming live and at scale With video live-streaming increasingly
becoming the norm for watching sports, what makes a successful
service. Adrian Pennington reports.
34. Tech news All the latest industry technology news.
40. People Recent key industry appointments and promotions.

3

Stuart Thomson, editor
Published by:Informa Tech, 240 Blackfriars Road,
London SE1 8BF
Website: www.digitaltveurope.com
Editor Stuart Thomson
stuart.thomson@informa.com

Art Director Matthew Humberstone
matthew.humberstone@informa.com
Marketing Executive Abigail Appiah
abigail.appiah@informa.com

Deputy Editor Jonathan Easton
jonathan.easton@informa.com
Sales Manager Grazyna Gray
grazyna.gray@informa.com

TVWatchfrom© 2022 Informa UK Ltd
All rights reserved. Reproduction without
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News

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

News
digestNews and analysis of the international digital TV business.

Warner Bros. Discovery and BT complete Eurosport-BT Sport
joint-venture deal
Warner Bros. Discovery and BT Group have completed the mergerof BT Sport and Eurosport into a combined 50:50 joint venture.
The deal, announced in May following the reveal of exclusive talks in
February, will create a significant player in UK sports with an extensive
portfolio of premium sports rights including UEFA Champions League,
the English Premier League, Premiership Rugby, UFC, the Olympic
Games, tennis Grand Slams, cycling Grand Tours and the winter sports
World Cup season.
The combined company’s board is equally split between BT and
WBD, with BT consumer CEO Marc Allera serving as the first chairperson.
In a press release, the companies said that BT Sport and Eurosport
will “retain their separate product propositions for a period of time”,
with the intention to “launch a new sports brand in the market andpresent this combined sports
offering together with anentertainment offering from
Warner Bros. Discovery.”
While Discovery launched
its sports-housing discovery+
streamer into the UK market
prior to its merger withWarnerMedia, HBO Max has
not launched in the country
and the company has halted
its rollout as it looks to launch a
combined streaming service in
mid-2023. This statement provides a hint that whatever that new service
is, it will launch in the UK complete with this new JV’s rights portfolio.
Marc Allera, chairman of the JV and CEO BT’s Consumer division
said: “As we enter our ninth season, today is day one of an exciting
new chapter for BT Sport. I am extremely proud of the teams and theestablished brand and broadcaster that BT Sport has become, and I lookforward to working with Warner Bros. Discovery to create an exciting
new sport TV offering for the UK.”
Andrew Georgiou, board member of the JV and president andmanaging director, Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Europe, said: “Today
marks the start of our journey to build a new sports destination for fansin the U.K and Ireland. Combining BT Sport and Eurosport U.K. together
with Warner Bros. Discovery’s world-class and growing entertainment
offering will result in an exciting new proposition for consumers.
“It’s important for fans to know they can continue to enjoy BT Sport

4

and Eurosport U.K. as they do today and we’ll keep them updated
on future plans as soon as we can. We are pleased the transaction
has closed and we can now further engage all stakeholders in
the process of establishing the JV and developing its extensive
combined sports offer.”
Executive shakeup
Warner Bros. Discovery has also announced its new-look executive
teams for MENA and EMEA.
Former Discovery exec Jamie Cooke, who was named WBD’s GM for
CEE, Baltics, Middle East, Mediterranean and Turkey in June, has outlined
his team, with Roni Patel taking on responsibility for managing content
licensing for the combined region and the Nordics.
Lee Hobbs is leading the
EMEA-wide pay TV channel
business, including Discovery
Channel, TLC, HGTV and ID
brands. Hobbs will also take on
responsibility for the new-look
EMEA WBD Creative Agency,
which will work across content
and channel brands.
Elsewhere,
Andrei
Grigorescu will be responsible
for ad-sales for the combined
region,while
Cristina
Valasutean will lead business development and distribution in Romania,
Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Kenechi Belusevic will be responsible for biz dev & distribution in SEE(Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, FYR of
Macedonia, Slovenia, Albania), Baltics (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania), CIS(Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Ukraine,
Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan), Mediterranean(Greece, Malta and Cyprus), Israel and lead on commercial sports
development across the combined region.
Francesco Perta will be responsible for business development& distribution in MENA and Turkey. Grigory Lavrov leads on trade
marketing across the combined region and channel management for
TLC and DMAX in Turkey and Fatafeat in the Middle East.
Mabelie Bruijns will be responsible for all communications across the
combined region and pay-TV networks business in EMEA.

www.digitaltveurope.com

News

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Samsung TV Plus gets new look, expanded content offeringand renewed ‘commitment to future of FAST’Samsung has announced a new brand identity for its TV Plus FAST
platform.
The service currently offers more than 1,600 channels globally across 24
countries and 465 million devices. The company said that users streamed
TV Plus content for nearly 3 billion hours over the past 12 months.
Samsung said that the new branding signifies its “commitment andinvestment in the future of FAST,” adding that the platform’s integration
on select Family Hub refrigerators in the US and Korea indicates this.
Coinciding with this rebrand are a number of renewed high-profile
content partnerships with A+E Networks, The E.W. Scripps Company and
BBC Studios. The latter will launch a new channel dedicated to Top Gear.
The channel marks BBC’s 5th channel that has launched on Samsung
TV Plus, including BBC Home, BBC Food, Classic Doctor Who and Antiques
Roadshow UK.
The rebrand will also bring a refreshed news offering from ABC News
Live, CBS News, LiveNOW from FOX, and NBC News NOW. In addition
to delivering national and international news coverage, Samsung TV
Plus has launched an expansive initiative to bring live, local news andweather to consumers around the US. Today, the service offers local news
programming tailored to viewers’ local region across more than 40 DMAs.
In addition, the company also said that it plans to double the sizeof Samsung TV Plus’s VOD offering in 2023 via new and expanded
partnerships with content distributors and rights owners including
Lionsgate, Vice Media, and others in an effort to grow its ‘already expansive’library.
Won-Jin Lee, president and head of the service business team at
Samsung Electronics, said: “As an early player in the free ad-supported
streaming TV space with unrivalled expertise across hardware, softwareand services at a truly global scale, Samsung TV Plus has become a top
viewing destination for consumers around the globe. We are thrilled torecognise the massive growth we’ve achieved so far across 24 countries

and over 1,600 channels globally. Samsung TV Plus’ new brand signifies
our continued investment into the future of FAST.”
Sang Kim, SVP of product and marketing, Samsung Electronics, said:“Our new look, programming and partnerships come at a time whenmany consumers are overwhelmed by a myriad of monthly bills andsubscriptions. We are proud not only to manufacture quality devices,
but ones that provide additional value through instant and free accessto entertainment spanning movies, music, news, art, gaming, health andmore.”

In brief...
beIN Media hails closure of ninepiracy operations
beIN Media Group and the Alliancefor Creativity and Entertainment(ACE) have reported the closureof nine illegal piracy operations
by Egyptian law enforcement.
Sixteen Egyptian police officers
were involved in the raids andwere supported by the Egyptian
Ministry of Internal Affairs. These
raids resulted in the arrest of the two
operators and seizure of domains,assets, and IT equipment, beIN said.
The nine sites shut down in thisrecent action were: yalla-shoot.
today, one of the most popular live

5

football streaming websites in the
Arabic-speaking world, with a totalof 125 million visits in the last two
years; yalla-shoot-kora.com, a live
football streaming website popularin the region; yalla-shoot-arabia.com,
another such site active since March
2020; yalla-shoot-arabia.net, active
since March 2021; hdkoora.com,
active since early 2018; kooora4k.
com; korawatch.com; kooraliveonline.com; and alqnassport.com.

free TV tier as part of its yallo offering.
Yallo is launching yallo Free TV as afree, advertising-funded TV offer that
can also be used by customers ofother providers. The service comeswith basic features and is targetedat those looking for a service that
supports ‘occasional televisionviewing’, according to the provider.
The launch of the free offering
follows Sunrise UPC’s acquisition of
streaming startup Wilmaa TV in June.

Sunrise UPC launches free TV
offering
Liberty Global-backed Swiss service
provider Sunrise UPC is introducing a

Roku TV launched in Germany
Roku has announced the launchof Roku TV in Germany, marking
the latest regional expansion

for the company. The company
previously launched its streaming
players in Germany in 2021, andhas revealed Metz blue and TCL as
the first partners to launch Roku
TV models for the German market.
Sets will be available from Octoberin sizes varying between 32” and65” in HD, 4K and 4K QLED. Arthur
van Rest, VP International at Roku,
said: “People transition more of theirentertainment time to streaming,
while continuing to watch asignificant amount of broadcast TV,
so we are excited to launch Roku
TV in Germany and offer a great
experience for both.”www.digitaltveurope.com

News

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Patrick Drahi’s Altice gets greenlight for BT stake purchase
The UK government is to take no further action in relation to Frenchtelecom tycoon Patrick Drahi’s stake in BT.
“Following careful consideration, the government will take no further
action on the acquisition of 5.9% shares by Altice in BT and the Final
Notification has been issued to parties,” the Department for Trade andIndustry said in a statement.
Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng called the acquisition of an additional
5.9% stake in the UK telco by Drahi’s Altice in for a full national security
assessment in May. Altice previously held a 12% stake in the telco.
Altice increased its stake BT from 12% to 18% in December, prompting
warnings from the government that it could intervene to prevent a fulltakeover.
Kwarteng’s decision to kick off a review came a few weeks ahead of adeadline that would open BT up to a potential takeover bid by Altice. The
French group said at the time it upped its stake that it did not intend tolaunch a takeover bid, triggering a six-month period under which it isprevented from making such a move under the takeover code.
It has always been considered unlikely that the UK government would
permit a foreign company to acquire BT given its involvement in national
security work. BT’s role in extending connectivity nationwide likely alsocame into play in considering any risks associated with Altice upping its
stake.
Subsequent to Kwarteng’s high-profile intervention, press reports
appeared suggesting that the government would cap any further stakebuilding from Drahi and may stop him from taking a seat on the board.
Uncertainty about the fate of Altice’s existing stake remained, but has
now been cleared up, leading to a rise in the telco’s share price.
The DTI could still intervene if Drahi decides to up his stake further. It
noted in its statement that “any future transaction could be subject to a
separate assessment”.
The UK government last year gave itself powers to scrutinise andpotentially intervene in market acquisitions on national security grounds
under the new National Security and Investment Act.

Change at the top for Altice France
Following a poor period for SFR, Altice France CEO Grégory Rabuel has
left the French company and will be replaced by Altice Média chief Arthur
Dreyfuss.
The management change will also see Mathieu Cocq, until now
executive director for Altice’s overseas operations SFR Caraïbe and SRR,
become chief executive of service provider arm SFR, a post hitherto held
concurrently by Rabuel.
The internal note said that Rabuel was leaving by common consent
with Drahi after 13 years with the company. Drahi was quoted as warmly
thanking Rabuel for “the colossal work undertaken in recent years”.
Dreyfuss will remain at the head of Altice Média, while Laruent Halimi,
executive director, legal, at Altice France will become secretary-general of
the group, a post until now also occupied by Dreyfuss.

In brief...
Xperi board approves split
TiVo owner Xperi has approved
the separation of its business into
two entities. Xperi, had previously
announced plans to separate its IP
and product businesses into two
standalone units. This move is now
on the verge of completion, withthe company announcing formal
approval from the board on August
29. The product business, whichhouses TiVo, IMAX Enhanced, HD
Radio and DTS, will operate underthe Xperi banner (trading as XPER).

6

The remaining IP licencing business,
which owns more than 10,000
patents and applications and will be
run by Xperi veteran Paul E. Davis, will
be named Adeia (trading as ADEA).
BT launches streaming-only
option for Freeview channels
UK telco BT’s TV Box Pro customers
can now access the bulk of theoperator’s TV service without
the need for a terrestrial antenna
via a streaming-only mode on
its advanced set-top. BT is also

launching the BT TV Box Mini, a new
multiroom compact TV box, whichlets customers watch TV in an extra
room of the house,
YouTube targets streaming
aggregation
Google-owned YouTube isreportedly set to launch its own
video streaming channel store.
According to the WSJ, YouTube will
join the likes of Amazon, Roku andApple in launching what is beingreferred to internally as a ‘channel

store’. The platform, which is said
to have been in development for
at least 18 months, would allow
consumers to access streamers ala carte through the main YouTube
app. It already offers streamers like
HBO Max, Starz, and Showtime tocustomers in the US via its YouTube
TV vMVPD service. YouTube is one of
the most ubiquitous apps installedon smart devices. In 2021, it became
only the second ever app on Android
to be downloaded from the PlayStore over 10 billion times.

www.digitaltveurope.com

Sponsored content

The content supply conundrum:

more content, more diversity, less time and resources
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An unsolvable equation?
File complexity + provider diversity + content diversity + lack of metadata +blind processes + peaks and bursts: these are real-life hard facts that makeachieving fast, predictable, scalable, cost-effective content supply in the nonlinear age a conundrum for broadcasters and publishers, as well as for content
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The Nomalab platform accepts any type of video file as source and willprocess it into any deliverable file(s) specifications, then deliver it to its
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Leading French publishers and broadcasters such as 6play, Salto, M6Group or TF1 Group already use Nomalab for agnostic and elastic content
provisioning.
Nomalab will be at IBC, Hall 2 A36g. Book a demo here

News

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Record generational dividein latest Ofcom report

DAZN launches DAZN Bet
beta in the UK

The gulf in UK video consumption habits has been laid bare in Ofcom’s
latest Media Nations report, with younger adults now watchingalmost seven times less scheduled TV than those aged 65 and over.
According to the eagerly anticipated annual report, people aged 16-24
spend 53 minutes in front of broadcast TV on an average day, down 66%
over the past decade. Adults aged over 65 by contrast spend an averageof 5 hours and 50 minutes per day watching broadcast TV, slightly higher
than 10 years ago.
While nine in ten 18-24-year-olds typically bypass TV channels andhead straight to streaming when looking for something to watch, 59% of
55-64-year-olds and 76% of those aged 65+ still turn to TV channels first.
The change in consumption habits is borne out by an increasing
dependence on a trio of streaming giants – Netflix, Prime Video andDisney+. A fifth of UK homes (5.2 million) subscribe to all three platforms.
Commenting on this record generational divide, Ian Macrae, Ofcom’s
director of market intelligence, said: “The streaming revolution is stretching
the TV generation gap, creating a stark divide in the viewing habits ofyounger and older people.
“Traditional broadcasters face tough competition from online streaming
platforms, which they’re partly meeting through the popularity of their own
on-demand player apps, while broadcast television is still the place to go
for big events that bring the nation together such as the Euro final or thejubilee celebrations.”
The report also looks at the impact of the cost-of-living crisis in the UK,with SVOD subscriptions falling by more than 350,000 to 19.2 million in
Spring 2022. Three quarters of customers who said that they had cancelled
a subscription earlier this year said they would resubscribe depending onchanges in programmes, needs or circumstances.
At the same time, there has also been a significant increase in PSB
streaming service usage, with 82% of Brits saying they’ve used a player like
ITV Hub or BBC iPlayer in the past six months.

Sports streamer DAZN has revealed the UK as its first beta market
for its gambling brand DAZN Bet.
First announced in April, DAZN Bet marks the company’s foray into
sports betting and is formed as a strategic partnership with gamblingtech provider Pragmatic Group. It was pitched as a “fun, convenient,and integrated experience for casual bettors to enjoy.”
Several months on from its initial reveal, DAZN has announced
a beta launch in the UK with plans to launch in Spain and other
European markets later this year.
The beta launch will allow DAZN Bet to better understand how
subscribers like to interact with gambling, and will provide thecompany with further insight as it looks to diversify its revenue
streams.
Mark Kemp, CEO, DAZN Bet, said: “The initial launch of DAZN Bet isthe start of an exciting journey across media and sports betting andfurther delivers on commitments we have made to revitalise sports
viewing for fans. The launch is only stage one. We are on a mission tocreate a richer product that is integrated into DAZN’s sports streaming
service, where possible, providing sports fans with something much
more immersive and interactive than what is currently available.”

In brief...
Warner Bros. Discovery pulls out
of GB News as co-founders quit
UK newscaster GB News has suffereda major blow, with major Warner
Bros. Discovery pulling out its
investment. WBD will sell the sharesthat Discovery acquired prior to themerger of it and AT&T’s WarnerMediato existing backers Legatum Ventures
Limited and Sir Paul Marshall in a deal
worth £60 million. The broadcaster’s
co-founders Andrew Cole and Mark
Schneider have also resigned ascompany directors.

8

Walmart adds Paramount+
US retail giant Walmart is to makeParamount+ available to subscribers
to its Walmart+ service available at
no extra charge. Walmart said it was“taking its membership offeringto the next level” by adding thestreamer to its list of benefits as abonus. Walmart+ members will
be able to stream Paramount+as a benefit as part of theirmembership starting in September.
The Paramount+ Essential Plan will
give Walmart+ members access toParamount+’s content including
original dramas such as 1883 andStar Trek: Strange New Worlds andlive sports. The Walmart+ offering,
also includes in-store benefits suchas mobile scan-and-go, unlimited
grocery deliveries and musicstreaming from Spotify Premium.
Viaplay signs long-term partnershipwith Erling HaalandViaplay has announced its latest
marketing initiative as it continues toexpand its business throughout Europe:a long-term, multi-market partnershipwith Manchester City and Norwegiansuperstar striker Erling Haaland. The
22-year-old Leeds-born Bryne native,
who signed for City in the summer,
will serve as a Viaplay ambassador in
the nine European countries in which
Viaplay has rights to Premier League
football. Viaplay, formerly NENT Group,
made waves in 2021 when it secured abumper six-year rights deal with the EPL
in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and theNetherlands.

www.digitaltveurope.com

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The DTVE Interview

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

The DTVE interview:
Olivier Jollet, EVP & general manager, Pluto TV

The Pluto TV boss tells Jonathan Easton about the Paramount-owned streamer’s contrarian
approach to the industry, expansion plans and the importance of partnerships andcollaboration in an increasingly competitive FAST space.

At a time when Paramount has been heavily pushingits new subscription platform Paramount+, it iseasy to forget that it has another major streaming
service that is quietly spreading its reach across theglobe.
Acquired by then-Viacom in early 2019 for US$340 million
Pluto TV has grown from 12 million monthly active users to morethan 68 million monthly active users who have streamed over
4.8 billion total viewing hours across 30 countries and territories
generating more than US$1 billion in ad revenues in 2021. It hasdone this by purposely taking a contrasting approach to the trends
in the market, Olivier Jollet, EVP general manager at Pluto TV
international and head of mobile at Paramount tells DTVE.
“We built the company on three contrarian principles: Free10

in the age of subscription; linear in the age of on-demand andad-supported at the time where almost all services were goingad-free,” he says. “This is still the core DNA of our product, reallybringing a lean-back experience into a more on-demand-driven
streaming market.
“This vision is still there and even if at the beginning no one
believed there was a future in a linear experience in the streaming
market, the success of Pluto TV proved that the vision was right.”
The most recent expansion of Pluto has been to the Nordics,
where the platform has merged with Viaplay-owned BVOD
service Viafree. Jollet explains that the company takes a measured
approach to expansion and looks to work with players in thatmarket instead of trying to provide outright competition.
“When we started talking with NENT Group (now Viaplay), we

www.digitaltveurope.com

The DTVE Interview

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

approach to streaming with its premium SVOD service andhad discussions on how we could partner together and whether we
FAST Pluto. However, the distinction between the two is moreshould compete against each other for building a free streaming
defined than just a price point, with Jollet holding ambitions fordestination,” Jollet says. “We took the decision to join forces andPluto to be better established as a more brand-agnostic platform
build one destination for free streaming in the Nordics combining
where different rights holders can leverage their content libraries
FAST, AVOD and BVOD into one platform.”
regardless of whether they have their
Jollet praises the results as
own streaming services.
“outstanding,” and says that it has
Examples of this cited by Jollet
a “much broader audience than if
include Netflix showcasing its hit
we’d have launched each platformteen drama 13 Reasons Why on Pluto,
standalone.”More and morewhile the company has signed a
The next stop for Pluto will be inpeople are shifting
content deal with Sony Pictures
Canada, where it will launch withto streaming, which
Television that brings a range of its
more than 100 channels and overdoesn’t mean that TV
content to the platform.
20,000 hours (about two and a half
will disappear, but I
At 68 million monthly active
years) of content, fuelling this is ausers, Pluto TV is clearly no slouch,partnership with Corus, similar tosee that the potential
and its scope is matched by the drivethat with Viaplay, with Jollet at theis massive. I stillof its leader who wants the streamer
time described as a “game-changing
believe we’re at theto really establish itself as the departnership”.
beginning offacto FAST platform globally.
Expanding on this, the executive
the story.
“I still believe we’re at thesays that the case in the Nordics
beginning of the story when I
and Canada is a “concept that issee how quickly the market isapplicable in a lot of markets”
developing,” Jollet surmises. “MoreHe says: “I believe in the power
and more people are shifting toof partnership personally. I think westreaming, which doesn’t mean that TV will disappear, but I see
are in a very competitive landscape and having the ability to buildthat the potential is massive.
one destination instead of building 10 or 20 different destinations“We are willing to not only be the leading FAST platform, but
is great for the end users. But it’s also great for advertisers who are
we also want to be the leading destination for free streaming.
also looking for a platform with scale to balance versus meta or
Our company mission is to entertain the planet and the planet is
Google.”big!”
Looking forward, Paramount clearly has a dual-pronged

11

www.digitaltveurope.com

FAST

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

FAST times in streaming
In a moment of rising costs and an overwhelming number of options, consumers are
increasingly turning to free alternatives to expensive subscription services. Andy Fry
reports on the FAST revolution.

T
Survivor, originallybroadcast on CBS,now has a 24/7
home on PlutoTV
as a dedicated,
standalone
channel.

12

he multi-billion dollar battle for supremacy in
the SVOD arena captures plenty of headlines,
but one of the hottest stories in the media
business right now is the resurgence ofad-funded television. After decades of being
overshadowed by pay TV and SVOD, the rise social tv,
AVOD and free ad-supported TV (FAST) channels has reenergised the relationship between brands and content.
The expansion of the FAST ecosystem has been
especially intriguing. Virtually unheard of prior to the
Covid-19 pandemic, linear FAST channels are now being
launched almost on a weekly basis. In the US, there are
currently more than 1,000 channels available acrossaround 20 platforms – including the likes of Pluto TV,
Tubi, Xumo, Roku and Samsung TV Plus. A recent reportfrom nScreenMedia predicted the US FAST market would
generate US$4.1 billion in ad revenue in 2023, up from
US$2 billion in 2021.
Rest of world data is less robust, but there areencouraging signs here too. A report by FAST channel
facilitator Amagi estimates the number of FAST channels

grew by 99% in 2021. Amagi co-founder Srinivasan
KA explains: “Consumers are exhausted by the costand overwhelming choices of subscription services.
Increasingly, they are clamouring for linear ‘lean back’
viewing experiences.”
Some observers have likened the evolution of FAST
platforms and channels to an overdue reboot of the basic
cable model. Easy to access and free to use, FAST allows
viewers to engage passively with content via slick EPGs. Asan added benefit its ad load (for now) tends to be lighter
than traditional linear TV. All this, explains Amagi, is why
viewing is rocketing. In 2021, total FAST viewership hours
grew by 103%, while the average viewing session duration
increased by 8%.

A new medium
The difference between FAST and cable, however, isthat the new sector has created a once in a generation
opportunity for challengers/disruptors to enter the platform

www.digitaltveurope.com

FAST

and channel business. While it’s important to note that TV
heavyweights like Comcast (Xumo), Paramount (Pluto)
and Fox (Tubi) are actively engaged in FAST as platform
operators, the likes of Amazon (Freevee), Samsung, Roku
and Rakuten TV have also made solid headway. This year,
Google launched 50 FAST channels and sister brandYouTube will follow suit imminently.
As channels, an expanding array of content owners
is migrating to FAST – some of which have channel
experience (AMC Networks, A+E Networks), some ofwhich don’t (Banijay, All3Media etc). Fremantle CEO Jens
Richter, a FAST advocate, says: “We have been running
Buzzr as a digital channel in the US for a few years, butchannel curation is essentially a new business for us. FAST
is a logical next step because of our expertise in content
production and distribution. It is an opportunity we’retaking very seriously because it opens up a new revenue
stream and gives us access to valuable audience data.”
Getting into the channel business has meant “building
teams in London and LA that have the know-how to runchannels,” he says, “the curation of ideas, programming,branding, communications and selling. For us it’s been astrategic initiative that runs in parallel to our programme
licensing business.” The one operational area Fremantle
has outsourced is what Richter called “the interface”
between platforms and channels. “Potentially, you’re talking
about dozens of versions of channels across geographies.
So for that we use Amagi.”
Currently, Fremantle has around a dozen FAST services– ranging from genre-based channels like gameshowchannel Buzzr to programme-specific channels such as its
Baywatch Channel. Underlining the fluid nature of channel
composition in this arena, there’s also a Jamie Oliver FAST
channel on Freevee in the US (Tubi, as an aside, has adedicated Gordon Ramsay channel). “For us, FAST is anadditional option in each territory,” says Richter. “With
Baywatch, the show had been through several licensing
arrangements before it felt like the right time to create a
non-exclusive channel. But even within the digital ad-freespace we have the choice of licensing content to AVOD or athird party channel.”
As a case in point, Fremantle recently licensed American
Idol 2022 to Samsung TV Plus. Initially, Samsung TV Plus
offered the show as an AVOD exclusive before shifting itover to Entertainment Hub, a new owned and operated
channel it has just launched (alongside other thematicchannels such as Wild Planet).
The approach at All3Media is similar. A3M International
EVP strategic development Gary Woolf says “our first FAST
channel off the block was So…Real, a North American
lifestyle/reality channel; we also have a channel for The
Only Way Is Essex in North America. Last November welaunched our Midsomer Murders channel in North America(on Roku), and we’ve got others planned.”
Like Richter, Woolf sees FAST as “part of a joined up
distribution plan. If I look at Midsomer Murders in North

13

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

America, we’ve got a premium SVOD partner which carries
all seasons – and is the first home for new episodes – sothere will always be clear water between that and what we’re
doing in the free space; we’ve got seasons on PBS affiliates
we’re mindful of; we’ve got AVOD partners for the show;
and then we’ve got the FAST activity. We plan carefully.”

Quality and quantity
Hitting a certain quality threshold goes without saying, butwhat else do rights owners need to be mindful of when
launching channels? “Volume of content is one,” says
Woolf, “realistically at least 100 hours; a viable schedulerefresh rate so that the channel doesn’t get stale; and thatthe channel does ‘what it says on the tin’. An example ofthis last point is So…Real. We’ve seen that channel reallygrowing this year, and the beauty is we can use multiple
brands.” When a channel is reliant on a single show, it’s
important to take “a deep dive” to sustain interest, adds
Woolf. “So as part of our 25 years of Midsomer Murders
celebration, actor John Nettles is introducing ten favourite
episodes.”In addition to shows, there’s an expectation that would-be
FAST channels will have considered back up content liketrailers and interstitials: “Aside from them being a delivery
requirement with many platforms, they can also serve a real
purpose retaining audiences,” says Woolf. “It’s important
to use the ‘real estate’ around programmes to support thechannel and keep viewers locked in.”

FAST is not about alwayson channels, but tacticalservices that help platforms
distinguish themselves fromtheir rivals.
Baskar Subramanian, Amagi

The ability to launch digital-first ad-supported channels
is not new, of course. IP owners have been doing it for
years on YouTube. Woolf stresses, however, that FAST is“a very different experience to YouTube. Successful FAST
platforms tend to have an EPG – so it’s very simple tofind what you want to watch. We’re fully in control of theschedule and promotionally there are more opportunities
to work with FAST platforms than on YouTube. That said,
YouTube channels have their place – and we work with
our sister company Little Dot Studios to make sure we’realso driving revenues through their network of YouTube
channels.”
Shaun Keeble, VP Digital, Banijay Rights is another exec
masterminding a significant shift into FAST. He says FAST
channels “are almost always curated either around IP, genre

www.digitaltveurope.com

FAST

Blue Ant Media’s
paranormaloriented HauntTV
is available
on platforms
includingSamsung TV Plusand the Roku
Channel.

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

or brand. We have focused our efforts on launching curated
genre-based channels that house recognisable IP including
Deal or No Deal, Fear Factor, MasterChef, Survivor, All Realand Reel Truth Crime.”
Banijay currently has 10 FAST channels, spanning acrossterritories such as the US, Canada, the UK, Germany andBrazil, working with various platforms. “We are planningmore single IP and aggregated channels, which will soonbring our live streams to over 50. This is complementaryand incremental to linear TV distribution. The FAST

channel distribution model is typically non-exclusive andfocused on exploitation of titles in their third or fourth
distribution window.”
Keeble sees FAST as the route to potentially lucrative
ad revenues: “FAST channels are typically watched on aconnected TV, meaning they are attractive to brands thatwant their messages on living room devices. EPGs and theability to partner platforms on marketing are a strong way
to signpost channels.”
Like Fremantle, Banijay Rights works with Amagi on theinterface with platforms. It has sought to amplify its reachand revenue by leveraging Amagi’s cloud-led solutions
including Cloudport – a cloud-built playout and distribution
solution which allows multi-country feeds to be centrally
managed. Amagi’s other products like Thunderstorm and
Planner have also been leveraged for dynamic ad insertion
and automated content scheduling. “Typically Connected
TV platforms expect distributors to use a third party
facilitator to host their FAST channel,” says Keeble, “acting
as a gateway. Some facilitators offer full suite packages
including content scheduling programmes and ad selling
technology. The would-be channel owner would need theability and infrastructure to send digital files to facilitators
including video files, meta data and artwork.”
Theoretically, anyone with 100 hours of programmingand the capacity to produce some short-form content could
launch a FAST Channel. But this reckons without theWhat next for FAST?
Original content including sport: Rob Gambino, director of playout
strategies at Harmonic, told DTVE that the popularity of FAST channels
is “paving the way toward new developments and a superior streaming
experience. In the next 12 months, FAST will evolve, giving viewers accessto more original content including premium movies and live sports.” Edgio
is bringing live sport to FAST, using its tech capabilities to tackle everythingfrom latency to ad insertion.
Genre eats all: As FAST real estate becomes more valuable, thepressure will grow on single IP channels. Given a choice between a
cooking channel and a chef-specific channel where will audiences alight?
Possibly, single IP channels will take on a more tactical role. If there’s adifference from cable, it’s that FAST can probably absorb a wider range ofgenres (eg six variants on true crime).
Personalisation: Amagi CEO Baskar Subramanian expects
personalisation to drive greater choice and stickiness in the FAST
ecosystem: “As it evolves, do we want FAST just to replicate cable? Why
should two people have to watch the same cooking channel if one ofthem is vegan and the other likes BBQ?.”
Hybrid Platforms: With SVOD platforms entering the AVOD space (egNetflix) and FAST channels upping the ante on quality, the gap between
the two camps is blurring. The future probably lies with the kind of multitiered solution that Comcast (for example) is heading towards via Peacock,Sky, Xumo et al.
Localisation: SVOD ‘global’ series help amortise production costs. But

14

FAST is largely a territory by territory proposition. Samsung TV Plus, forexample, is now in 16 markets with distinctive services. Although it has
partnered global content providers including the BBC, Banijay and ITVStudios, Richard Jakeman, European head of business development for
Samsung TV Plus, explained in a podcast with consultancy 3Vision that it isimperative content is localised.
Consolidation: FAST may be free but that doesn’t mean viewers wanta dozen competing platforms. Inevitably, the market will shed also-rans as
advertisers and audiences coalesce around preferred platforms (perhaps
hybrid as outlined above). The question is whether anyone can find a way
to connect up what has become a disjointed discovery experience (somany apps, so many business models). Sky Glass is an early attempt toprovide a ‘super-aggregation’ solution.
Efficient ad tech: Industry leaders like Comcast view advertising on
FAST as a useful complement to traditional TV and AVOD. The trouble isthat the digital ad-first market is highly-fragmented. Comcast’s ad solution
division Freewheel is exploring ways to simplify the process of connecting
ad buyers and sellers. Last month, for example, it teamed up with AMC
Networks to introduce a self-service linear addressable advertisingsolution. This makes it easier for programmers to access addressable
advertising across all of their inventory supply pools, including digital, settop-box video on demand and linear. “Our purpose is to better connect
buyers and sellers with solutions that make TV advertising more efficient,says Mark McKee, general manager, FreeWheel. “

www.digitaltveurope.com

Sponsored content

Q&A: Cédric Monnier, CEO & co-founder, OKAST
Cédric Monnier, CEO & co-founder, OKAST, explains what content providers needs to think about when launching into the world of freeadvertising-supported streaming television (FAST).
What are the key things that a content provider needs to consider
before launching a FAST channel?
FAST is somehow the best combination of old TV and Internet: freeaccess to content, no need to choose, laid-back experience, poweredby proven advertising technologies (programmatic) based on usercentric data. Most content providers are embracing this new form of
distribution, seeing it as the perfect opportunity to monetise theirextensive inventories, giving a new life to their niche content.
Two essential things must be kept in mind when looking for success:•It’s TV(!): meaning you must build a linear schedule as goodas you used to do in broadcast: the weekend is not the sameas weekdays, prime time is not morning, etc. The audience
watching a FAST channel on a connected TV will not see thedifference from regular TV channels, so they do expect the best
quality content and an attractive schedule (so forget automatic
random scheduling of content!).
•
It’s advertised: it is key to have an advertising strategy that
supports the scheduling, not only with 6-10 minutes ad breaks
but also auto promotion jingles and alternative content when
the ad replacement doesn’t work as well as expected.
Leaders and key players like Pluto TV, Samsung TV Plus, Rakuten
have engaged in a complete review of their channels lineup, looking
for more premium ones. There will be fewer opportunities and morecompetition to be part of their offering: new channels will have toprove they are ‘ads bankable’.
Therefore, it would be wise to establish a holistic strategy where
FAST channels are not only going to walled garden CTV platforms but
also aggregators’ apps, OTT platforms and websites.
What do channel providers need to think about in securing accessto platforms?
In this value chain there are two stakeholders: the software provider
building the channel, and the distributor (mainly CTVs) putting it on
screen and managing advertising.
Some key issues to be careful of:•
Hidden costs that can occur from the software vendor:
platform fees, CDN fees, resulting from increasing numbers ofdelivery platforms.
•
Ad revenue deals with CTV: when they manage your fullinventory, they can take the lion’s share. Better to secure an
inventory split to add more ad servers.

••

Data reporting: knowing the audience and boosting ad
performances rely on the quality of provided data. Getting
access to transparent in-depth data is a gamechanger: walled
garden software solutions and CTV analytics can be a blind
spot.
Reliability: a black screen has always been everybody’s worstnightmare in broadcast, and it’s the same for FAST! Validate
cloud performances and security measures set in place by thesoftware vendor.

What can OKAST Channels offer to FAST channel providers that sets
the product apart in the market?
We’ve been doing OTT and broadcast for years, so it was quite anatural move to build OKAST Channels, where we included a provenplayout with advanced schedule engine, and an in-depth data engine
complemented by a complete advertising solution (SSAI plus ad server
management with more than 25 SSP pre-integrated).
We therefore streamline our OTT expertise (more than 400 platforms
launched in four years), our native cloud infrastructure, and a constantbroadcast grade attention to security and reliability in a simple solutionthat you can integrate in your existing infrastructure.
What steps would you advise existing OTT players looking to enter
the FAST world to take and how can you help them with this?
FAST is very exciting but still a young market, sometimes a bit like theWild West!
Our classic advice to any lead or customer:•
Have clear revenue targets: don’t try to be everywhere before
you can optimise the business model and get a positive ROI.
Start first with the big leading platforms!
•
Don’t underestimate the lead generation effect from your FAST
channel to your own OTT platform or application: indirect
subscriptions can often complement ad revenue and AVOD
revenues.
•
Strategise ads: the more you understand the audience, themore you can adjust your schedule and content selection. It
will help to increase the CPM value and get more paid ads.
At OKAST, we not only deliver a software to use, but also accompany
our customers at every step from building schedules to launching,then analysing data and iterating until they get a successfulchannel.

FASTlimitations imposed by platforms. The growing consensus
is that leading platforms are unlikely to want more than150-200 channels once they have matured – to avoid
detracting from the sector’s ‘lean back’ appeal. Amagi CEO
Baskar Subramanian says: “FAST is attempting to solve theparadox of choice, the idea that there is so much content
audiences are having problem discovering something towatch. So a sensible limit on channels is likely.”This upper ceiling is not the only issue restricting
opportunity for new entrants. Of the total channels available
on each platform, around 25% of channels are likely to be
in-house operations (the situation at Pluto TV). “After that,the question becomes – which are the best channels to fillout the portfolio? That isn’t immediately obvious, so we’reseeing a lot of churn,” says Subramanian.

Room for growth
Assuming mature FAST territories play host to aroundhalf a dozen platforms, some of which carry the samechannels as each other, then the total market for third party
channels will probably drops into the mid-hundreds. Of
these, says Subramanian, some will be repurposed versionsof existing linear channels which reduces the shelfspacefor newcomers. AMC Networks, for example, has arounda dozen FAST Channels including The Walking Dead
Universe.
One company moving in precisely this way is Blue Ant
Media, a content studio that already has a strong channel
footprint. Jamie Schouela, president, global channels
and media, says: “We’ve been operating as a traditional
broadcaster for several years with our Love Nature PayTV
channel, which is currently in around 130 territories. In
2020, we launched Love Nature as a FAST Channel in
the US on platforms like Roku and Samsung TV Plus.
We immediately saw audience and revenue growth andrealised this was a material business. So we launched
FAST channels in areas such as paranormal (Haunt TV),
true crime (Total Crime/Crimetime), home and lifestyle(Homeful) and HistoryTime (History). These are areas
where we have strong content and can add value.”
Schouela has no doubt that channel experience has
enabled Blue Ant to get to grips with FAST quickly: “It’s areal advantage because we know how to curate a channel.
A lot of folks have entered FAST without any experience,but audiences respond to all the things we know how to do,scheduling, marketing etc.”
So far, Blue Ant has gone down the genre route.
Schouela is looking at “single IP channels, but I’m not surethey can have the same longevity as genre channels. There’s
a role for single IP channels in helping platforms achieve
spikes but were focused more on brand-building.” In termsof creating differentiation from other channels in the same
niche, he adds: “We want our channels to be distributed
across multiple platforms to achieve reach, which inevitably

16

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Pluto TV: From channel operator toplatform pioneer
Paramount was late to the SVOD party with Paramount+, but it was quick tospot the potential of AVOD and FAST. Its fast-growing platform Pluto TV is now inaround 30 countries and generated US$1 billion in ad revenue last year. In a recent
development, it launched into the Nordics in partnership with NENT.
Dan Fahy, SVP Streaming, Paramount UK, says the UK iteration of the platform“launched in 2018 and is now available across a range of key platforms. We’ve been
adding channels throughout and now have over 140.”
Five Pluto TV channels come from sister company, Channel 5. And there are morefrom based around Paramount IP (such as long running series including Catfish
and Judge Judy). But Fahy says Pluto TV isn’t configured to only support in-housechannels: “Less than a quarter of channels on the platform are our own brands. It’s a
key part of our strategy to curate a great mix of partners.”
In terms of differentiation from rival platforms, Fahy says PlutoTV is very focusedon its linear channel proposition and isn’t using FAST as a spin-off from a distinct
business. What’s more, the platform isn’t seeking to replicate traditional linear
by having a small number of powerchannels (think ITV or TF1). “We don’t wanta situation where one channel has 25% share and another has 3%. None of ourchannels get more than 6-8% share and we want to maintain that.”
Pluto TV invites flexible partnerships, says Fahy: “There’s a hands-off model, wherepartners can licence shows into an existing thematic channel. Or we can collaborateon the creation of a programme specific channel – as we did with All3Media onchannels like Ten Years Younger and Wild At Heart. We handle a lot of the logistics andwe’re very transparent with performance data.”
Pluto TV in the UK is primarily targeting VOD-first homes – i.e. those who haveturned their back on traditional TV: “That cohort is currently three million but will riseto 10 million by 2030. Services like Pluto TV are about reaching them when they arelooking for a simple but compelling passive ‘lean back’ experience.”
Fahy acknowledges progress is likely to be slower in markets where there is a
resilient incumbent free to air offering. “But we’re ahead of expectations in markets
like UK, Germany, Italy and Spain.” In France, the platform launched its 100th channel
in June 2022 – up from 40 channels at launch.

means competition. But we tell platforms the content on
our channels will be at least 75% exclusive – meaning it
won’t be available anywhere else outside that destination.”
For simplicity/efficiency, platforms will probably mimic
traditional payTV by carrying portfolios of channels
from partners. This further reduces the extent of the
FAST opportunity for content companies. All in all, “it’sa competitive world, for sure,” says Woolf. “I think it’s
probably tougher now than it was a couple of years ago.
With so many FAST channels in existence, the platforms
can afford to be selective. They are looking at where there
are gaps and opportunities, but also churning out channels
that just aren’t doing the business.”
In 2021, Paramount CEO Bob Bakish described Pluto
TV as “an incredibly growth engine for this company. The
expanding engagement attracts more and better content
and advertisers, which drives up ad values. In other words,
the industry is locked in a virtuous cycle, one that seems tohave a lot of room to run.”www.digitaltveurope.com

FAST

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Chefclub: From social media powerhouseto FAST channel operator
One class of IP owner that could make a genuine impact in FAST is social media
destinations that have already built a strong loyal audience. A case in point is
Chefclub, a cooking brand with 100 million social media followers and 2.5 billion
global views a month. Chefclub now has a channel on Pluto TV in France, the US,
Latin America, Spain and the UK. It is also rolling out via Samsung TV Plus.
Marie-Laure Marchand, SVP global consumer products & business development,says: “FAST channels are a big priority for us as they provide the perfect platform
to showcase the diversity and depth of our content portfolio. We are expanding
our capacity as a food entertainment studio which can provide content to a broad
variety of media platforms, including FAST.”

FAST channels are a big priority
for us as they provide theperfect platform to showcase
the diversity and depth of ourcontent portfolio.
Marie-Laure Marchand, Chefclub

From a ‘How-To’ show that goes outside the studio to discover how certain
ingredients are made, to a vegetarian programme that entertains viewers withastounding trompe l’oeil creations, Marchand says: “We can offer shows that meet
every demand. We are also reformatting existing short content from Chefclub
Original and Chefclub Kids into commercial half-hours for the channel.”In terms of the key considerations when launching a FAST channel, Marchandsays: “Firstly, high quality content that catches and keeps the audience’s attention.
You also need a specific format and number of episodes, for example 25 to 30
minute episodes that can accommodate ad breaks and a minimum of 100 hours
to start with. It is also important to refresh a minimum of 20% of your content every
month and produce new content monthly.”
Explaining the relationship with
Samsung TV Plus and Pluto TV, Marchandsays: “Samsung TV Plus is connected TV
which means our Chefclub channel isoffered as part of a bouquet of channels
available on every Samsung TV device inFrance and Switzerland. And Pluto TV is
the number one AVOD service in the US (akey focus for Chefclub), widely available toanyone on mobile, CTV, consoles and theweb. Between them, we can reach an everexpanding range of new viewers.”

This however is a platform-centric view. For channel
operators, the implication is increased production
investment and more reliance on exclusives (which
minimises exploitation value elsewhere). Richter says theneed for original production investment in FAST channels
is coming “in the next 12-24 months”. Schouela agrees:“As the market sustains, FAST channels will need more

17

exclusives and first run content. Platforms are definitely
getting choosier and are starting to drop channels to replacethem with something that is better quality and stickier. So
they will favour brands that stand for something.”

Tempering expectations
Would-be channel operators also need to be wary about
over-exaggerating the amount of ad revenue they are likely
to generate. Earlier this year, a report by VIP+ found thatthe average large FAST channel was generating around
US$23.2 million in ad revenue by the end of the second
year after launch. But this is predicated on the US market,
where ad spend is higher. Furthermore, warns Richter,“many European territories also have access to a range offree TV choices, so take up of FAST is likely to be slower bycomparison.”
There is an argument that the cost of living crunch will
drive people out of SVOD platforms into the arms of AVOD
and FAST. This may be true, but it doesn’t take account of
the fact that advertisers may also cut spend. In other words,
FAST channels may experience slow payback – even if
viewing grows rapidly.
Can content owners increase their ROI by rolling out
the same channels across multiple platforms – as in social
media? Yes, says Subramanian, but they will need to makemodifications to be successful. “There are brass tacks
issues like different ad loads. But we’re also seeing channels
start to diverge in terms of their core demo – so channels
will need to select content accordingly.”
Subramanian agrees there is likely to be consolidation,
but still sees opportunities for boutique players. “FAST
lends itself to an agile approach to channel curation. I could
easily see the emergence of pop up channels – linked toevents and anniversaries; maybe a channel that is launchedaround the Olympics. For some content owners, FAST is
not about always-on channels, but tactical services that help
platforms distinguish themselves from their rivals.”
A slight variant on this idea, content owners could
also view FAST channels as short-term windows in theirdistribution strategy, rather than here to stay channel
brands like Discovery. If FAST platforms decide todeliberately allow a certain percentage of channel churneach year, there may be an opportunity for content owners
to create channels with a one-to-two year life span.
Should platforms prove unresponsive to particularchannel ideas, there’s always the option of going it alone –possibly in partnership with a FAST facilitator like Amagi,
Harmonic or Wurl. “We see apps launching in the spacethat carry a range of FAST channels – so that’s absolutely
possible, and something that Little Dot Studios have done
recently with their Veely app,” says Woolf. “Having yourown app means you’re not benefiting from the traffic ofa big platform; but it does give you flexibility if you canpersuade viewers to install your app.”www.digitaltveurope.com

Sponsored content

Hybridity: a smart move for streaming players
Jonas Engwall, CEO of Bedrock, talks about the future of streaming and shares his thoughts on hybridity.

T

he last decade saw a massive increase in online video adoption
and the Covid-19 crisis acted as a proper catalyst for this trend.
Individuals found themselves spending more time at home,with fewer options for entertainment than ever before. This wasan unprecedented opportunity for streaming players to grow theiraudience and their efforts were mostly focussed on offering theirusers more content and better quality and experience to keep themengaged.
However, last year marked a new chapter of the streaming market
as video streaming providers around the globe faced a slower growthof VOD consumption. The competition had become fiercer than everand consumers have been drowning in an ocean of content, having
subscribed to multiple platforms without really knowing what towatch.
Today, to keep up the pace, streaming players have to rethinktheir strategy including their revenue, content and distribution
models. Most of them have already started transitioning to a hybrid
monetisation approach with a quarter (25%*) planning to go for a
combination of AVOD and SVOD. There’s no doubt that hybridity is the
future of streaming, but how and why should this move be made?

Sponsored content

user experience. Based on data related to the user’s demographics
Diversifying the sources of revenues
and consumption, streaming platforms can be relatively different:
As the streaming war heats up, it is becoming increasingly difficult forsuggestions, videos’ thumbnails, colours…. It all can be personalised toproviders to rely on a single monetisation model and maintain theirremain relevant to each segment and offer. Engagement and retention
revenue model. Jonas Engwall, CEO of Bedrock goes through the limits
are intricately linked, so offering a seamless and personalised streamingof AVOD, SVOD and TVOD and EST, and presents and why going for aexperience is a good way to demonstrate your ability to meet theirhybrid model makes more sense today:
expectations while putting performance at the top of your priority list.
The AVOD model offers viewers access to original content or live
content for free, or for a reduced membership rate. But the limits are…and where they need it
found when not managing to maintain sufficient audience growth, toConsumers today are looking for convenience and, as mentioned
satisfy the increasing appetite of advertisers for targeted audiences.
above, they do not consume content the same way, depending on theWith SVOD, there will always be viewers that unsubscribe and it takes
segment they belong to. Some like watching the latest episode of thesignificant marketing efforts to continually add more subscribers. As forseries that everyone is talking about on their phone while commuting,
TVOD and EST players, they have no guarantee of future revenue withso they can talk about it with their colleagues once at work. Others
the one-time transactions.
might prefer watching live a mouth-watering cooking show on TV, at
To overcome these limits, actors in the market are turning to a hybrid
home, with their friends.
model so they can combine two or more monetisation models. This
There are different moments, different ways of consuming andway, they have the means to address various audiences’ expectations,different use cases. It is logical for people to spend more time with big
increase their reach and, therefore, their conversion capacity.
screens, as the viewing experience is better, thanks to (now standard)
By doing so, players can launch competitive offers leveraging AVOD,
technologies such as 4K, HDR, or Dolby atmos. That’s why we currently
commercial animations – such as promotions and discount – bundles or
see the race around big screens intensifying with multiple businesses,
multiple subscription plans.
including Amazon, Apple, Google, Sky, investing.
This diversification means that consumers will increasingly be able
In any case, viewers want to be able to access a wide range ofto choose when to consume content with ads, or to avoid the ads bydifferent video offerings from any device they want. Therefore,paying. Advertisers will be able to touch only those people who arecontent providers should work
interested in watching your ads,
with a partner who can makeand ROI will be easier to measure.
“Actors in the market are turning to a hybrid model
their service available on multiFor example, viewers are more
devices. This will not only help
so they can combine two or more monetisation
willing to watch ads on streaming,
keep their customers satisfied
because ads are more relevant;models. This way, they have the means to address
advertisers can be more confident
various audiences’ expectations, increase their reach but also allow providers to collectand analyse video consumptionthat their ads were viewed, and,
and, therefore, their conversion capacity.”
habits. Using the data that has
ultimately, they are able to engage
been collected, content providers
more effectively with consumers.
can adjust their content and ad
Streaming is a win­
-win-win. It
strategy to ensure it is relevant for viewers.
makes more sense for users, advertisers, and broadcasters.
Bedrock, like other large platforms, is putting a lot of effort into CTV
Going forward, we are likely to see a fracture between players who
and OTT developments because this is where we see a lot of interest at
have diversified revenue streams successfully and profitably, and thosethe moment. But we know that mobile is just as important so we keepthat have not. Collaborating with a partner who understands what’s at
our standards high to deliver a smooth experience across all devices.
stake and has an extensive knowledge in streaming commercial offers is
Overall, the more you know about your viewers’ habits and profiles,
key to future proof a streaming platform.
the better you can retain and improve your commercial strategy. At
Bedrock, we know how crucial it is to leverage this knowledge the best
Pushing the right content and offer to the right user, when they
you can. This is why we use technologies such as AI to give a betterneed it…
view into segments’ specificities and automate upsell mechanisms.
To optimise their chances of getting attention from people and having
From ‘comfort’ features, such as a no-ads option and better video
a positive impact on them, streaming players have to diversify their
quality, to download-to-go and locked content, upsell propositions
content and the way it can be accessed.
can then be tailored to each segment.
From premium to original content, live streaming, replay and bonuses
To an extent, hybridity in all its forms can be a way to address the
expectations vary from one audience segment to another. For example,‘subscription fatigue’ we’ve heard so much about lately. Making suresports enthusiasts much prefer watching live sporting events rather
that viewers can watch what they want, when they want and where they
than recorded ones. Indeed, if anything happened during a game, theywant is key to retaining its viewership and attracting new segments.
probably already know it because it’s been in the press or someone told
In a nutshell, people’s budget for streaming services is not infinitely
them (even by accident).
extensible and there’s already a plethora of offers on the market. So
These last few years, streaming giants have made available morestreaming players need to think ‘hybridity’ and work on commercial
content than ever, investing in original content so it’s absolutely tailoredpropositions that’ll meet their viewers’ expectations while opening ato their users’ expectations. But if they keep adding content, how theirdoor to new opportunities.
platform isn’t going to be a mess, a mix of anything and everything, totheir audience’s eyes?
*source: The State of OTT Revenues 2021, Applicaster
At Bedrock, we leverage new technologies such as AI to create a tailoredNews analysis

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

News analysis
How Disney overtook Netflix as the world’s biggest streamer

Disney’s ability to overtake Netflix has been defined by its clear direct-to-consumer vision
combined with its IP and financial resources, reports Jonathan Easton.
Disney is now the largest streaming operator in the world.
The company revealed in late July that it had a total of 221.1 million
streaming customers globally across Disney+ (including Disney+
Hotstar), Hulu, ESPN+ and Star. The figure eclipses – albeit narrowly– Netflix’s total of 220.67 million, after the company recorded its
second consecutive quarter of churn.
While Disney is technically the largest operator, it is worth noting
the figure may be slightly misleading. In the US – Disney’s largest
market – the company operates a trio of streaming services, and if
a user is subscribed to more than one of them either as standalone
subscriptions or via the ‘Disney bundle’ they will count as multiple
numbers towards that 221 million total.
Caveats aside, it is still impressive that Disney has achieved thislevel of success when its D2C streaming efforts didn’t really kickoff in earnest until 2019 when it took over full control of Hulu andlaunched Disney+ in an initial three markets.
The power shift was viewed by some as an inevitability; Digital
TV Europe’s sister research house Omdia previously predicted that
Disney+ alone would overtake Netflix for subscribers within the next
five years and this may well become the case should the respective
company’s trajectories remain the same.
As it stands at the end of Disney’s Q3 2022, Disney+ (including
the Asian market-oriented Disney+ Hotstar) was at a total of 152.1
million. If the streamer has grown as large as it is within three years,
Omdia’s estimation that Disney+ will add 144 million subscribers
between 2021-27 to take its total to 274 million should ring true.

20

The report predicted meanwhile that Netflix will only add 31
million subscribers between 2021 and 2027, while in the same
period losing four million subs in the US.
So this all begs the question of why and how Disney has managed
to achieve the impossible by supplanting the name that put SVOD
services on the map.

A diverse content offering and definedcontent portfolio
Disney has made no secret of the fact that it has relied on established
IP in order to grow its flagship streaming product.
Disney+ has become home to event television with a seemingly
endless flow of Star Wars and Marvel series, along with major
movies like the Robert Zemeckis-directed live-action Pinocchio andthe sequel to ‘90s cult halloween movie Hocus Pocus.
While it gets few points for pure originality and has been criticised
as something of a nostalgia trip, Disney’s strategy for Disney+ from acontent perspective has paid off.
Beyond the more family-friendly fare of Disney+, the USexclusive Hulu has one of the most broad streaming offerings on
the market and caters to a more adult audience. The streamer has
also significantly benefited from the US$71 billion acquisition of 21stCentury Fox, with movies and series that previously would have goneto cinema or linear now being exclusive to the platform.

www.digitaltveurope.com

News analysis

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Disney+’s Andor (opposite) is the latest show from the company’s
production line of Star Wars and Marvel shows, while Netflix’s eagerlyanticipated Sandman adaptation (right) is the streamer’s latest hit.
The most recent example of this is Predator franchise spin-off Prey.
The 20th Century Studios film, which started production in 2018
before the Disney-Fox takeover, was taken directly to SVOD, and as
a result Prey has become Hulu’s biggest-ever streaming launch (evenovertaking The Kardashians) while also being the most-watched film
premiere on Star+ in Latin America and on Disney+’s Star hub.
This is all without mentioning Disney’s ever-expanding sports
rights portfolio both domestically and internationally. The company
continues to invest heavily in rights for ESPN+, and the streamer isin the running to pick up the NFL’s prestigious Sunday Ticket rights.
The Fox acquisition has also benefited Disney here, with its
acquisition of Star India also giving it the rights to the prestigious
Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket rights in the country. Such is
the importance of the IPL, that the company paused the rollout ofDisney+ Hotstar in India when the Covid-19 pandemic led to thecompetition’s postponement. In June DisneyStar retained a rights
package to the IPL, but it will share them with Viacom18.
All of these examples point towards a company that is laser focusedon growing its D2C business and knows exactly what it is doing with it.

Netflix stumbles with an identity crisis
While Disney’s success in streaming has come from establishing key
USPs across its portfolio, the ‘Netflix decade’ was largely defined by a
combination of novelty and naivety.
When it exploded onto the mainstream in the early 2010s, Netflix
was the streaming service. Which is to say that if you wanted to
stream a show or movie there was a good chance that it would be on
Netflix. It didn’t really need a brand identity beyond the big red N.
This was a moment in time before streaming operators evenconsidered producing original content for their platforms. If you told
an average person a decade ago that the most-expensive TV show
ever produced would be made by the website where you buy your cat
food you’d probably be laughed out of the building.
Netflix can almost single-handedly be credited with transforming
the industry in this way. 2013’s big-budget and star-studded House ofCards came with a huge ad campaign, and was one of the key factors
in changing the mindset that a ‘web series’ can be just as prestigious
as anything on HBO or AMC.
Three years later, the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things would go on
to become a genuine worldwide sensation which carries on to thisday and set the bar for what a streaming series can achieve in cultural
impact. The company has subsequently had a number of comparably
sized hit series with the likes of Squid Game, Money Heist, Bridgertonand, most recently, The Sandman.
But while the past decade saw Netflix set the gold standard
as a video streaming operator, the company has lost millions ofsubscribers in 2022. Part of this is to do with the oft-discussed ‘pull
forward’ effect of the Covid-19 pandemic, while the company also lostmillions when it pulled out of Russia. Attributing Netflix’s losses justto those factors however somewhat misses the bigger picture.

21

During its peak growth, there was also a degree of arrogance from
Netflix’s co-CEO Reed Hastings, who said that the company’s biggest
rivals were not its streaming competitors, but other forms of media.
He wrote in 2019: “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than
HBO.”
But since Disney acquired Fox and made it clear that it was out
for Netflix’s crown, the Los Gatos-based streamer was in a race
against time to bolster its offering with originals. This was largely tocompensate for studios like Disney, Warner Bros. NBCUniversal andParamount taking back rights in order to launch their own streamers.
Netflix essentially became a victim of its own success. It quietly
built a monopoly in a D2C market to which major Hollywood players
were slow to react. And by the time it was that dominant force, its
users were repeatedly coming back to Netflix not to rewatch Stranger
Things or 13 Reasons Why, but for the staples of comfort television like
The Office and Friends.
This is a gap which Netflix has repeatedly tried and failed to fill,
and instead the company is reliant on an unsustainable model ofadding new content with little sense of quality control.
This increasing dependence on original content production has
seen Netflix’s subscription costs steadily increase to the point where
its initial selling point of ‘all the movies and series you want to watch
for a low monthly cost’ rings hollow in 2022.
Netflix has also branched out into video games in an effort tosalvage its momentum, but a damning Apptopia report showed that
only 1% of its subscribers are actually playing its games. The earlyAugust report noted that Netflix’s games available on mobile havebeen downloaded a total of 23.3 million times with an average of 1.7
million daily users.
Such is the comedown that Netflix is going through that it has laid
off hundreds of staff, with the company being exposed for failing toprepare for the hard graft that would come after its initial period ofaccelerated growth.
Netflix is not on the brink of collapse, and there isn’t a company
aside from Disney that has the resources, portfolio and wherewithal
to reach the heights of the streamer which is still the most-subscribedto individual streaming service in the world.
Disney’s surge to the top of the streaming tree would not havebeen possible without Netflix, and it has clearly learned lessons
from its rival in regards to what does and doesn’t work fromcontent, technological and strategic perspectives. Disney’s growth instreaming under CEO Bob Chapek stands in contrast to a company
which is struggling to define itself in this era of market maturity.

www.digitaltveurope.com

Content discovery

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Making content stand out
from the streaming crowd
In 2022, end-users are presented with a glut of content at any possible moment. As suchplatform operators need to do more than ever if they want their shows and movies to makean impact, reports Anna Tobin.

There is so much video content being pushed
out into the ether that without a finely
tuned search, discovery and personalised
recommendation facility, it is almost
impossible for viewers to quickly surface thecontent they want to engage with. And, if viewers aren’tsatisfied they will churn leaving content providers with amarket share headache.
As the Nielsen State of Play report, published April 2022,
stated: “The groundswell of over-the-top (OTT) platforms
and content now provides more choice than consumers
can keep track of. It’s clear that media companies will need

22

Nielsen’s Stateof Play reportargued “the video
streaming industy
as reached atipping point."

streaming-first mindsets going forward, but they will alsoneed to understand consumer behaviour and sentiment
to deliver what audiences are looking for – and keep themengaged amid an ever-growing range of choice.”Peter Docherty, founder and CTO of ThinkAnalytics,
outlines the scope of the problem: “If you look at an OTT
service, people may have 100,000 different programmes
available to them to watch. One of our customers may
even offer up to two million pieces of content. So the main
challenge is to get people watching before they get bored ofsearching.”
It’s pointless having attractive assets if you can’t attractwww.digitaltveurope.com

Content discovery

anyone to them, adds Jose Luis Vazquez, CEO at Mirada.
“You can have thousands of assets in your library that you
have invested heavily in, but if you can’t get that asset infront of the right users it becomes worthless.”

Refining content descriptions
Part of the battle to win over eyeballs is down to how
accurately you describe your content, says Martin Prins,
head of product at Media Distillery. “Content descriptions
are often too generic and not sufficiently descriptive ofwhat the content is. Each time a user selects an item ofcontent and it’s not what they want there’s disappointment.
And consumers will only tolerate a certain amount of
disappointment before they consider churning.”
It does’t help that many TV services do not create
individual user profiles and even if they do, users often
don’t use them. In this situation, says Pierre Donath, CPO
and CMO at 3SS, “The TV service provider can’t know
which individual in the household is making the content
selection and pre-senting relevant recommendations can bea guessing game.”It’s also difficult to assess how many assets a viewer
must consume in order to create an accurate profile. Thisis also dependent on whether that profile related to what
users willingly watched or what the system pushed in
front of them, says Vazquez at Mirada. “Are you what you
have been watching? That’s the big question no one has
the answer to yet.”

Searching out the variables
Search and recommendation is crucial to user experience,but to optimise results this must take into account a
number of variables, such as search time of day and which
device the content is to be delivered to. “It’s unlikely thatyou are willing to watch the same content on the big TV,
as you would if you were travelling on a train, so you need
to be able to differentiate those aspects,” says Vazquez at
Mirada.
There needs to be an effective visual element to searchtoo, adds Trent Wheeler, SVP, product at Gracenote. “Onetrend involves presenting programme imagery withinuser interfaces that captures the specific aspects of content
that attract individual viewers. For example, if a service’s
content recommendation algorithm is suggesting a TV
show to a viewer because of their affinity for the theme of‘love stories,’ then the image shown to them should visuallycommunicate romance. What makes this possible is a
granular understanding of all aspects of content throughdeep and descriptive programme metadata.
“Through personalised visual merchandising, video
services can actually move the needle on key consumption
metrics. In a recent test of a solution called Gracenote

23

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Super-aggregators candeliver value through searchand discovery functionalitythat breaks down walls
between siloed streaming
catalogues and linear TV.
Trent Wheeler, Gracenote

Personalised imagery, a leading US streaming service experienced an 11.2% increase in time spent watching titles
versus non-targeted images and a 7.7% lift in the numberof titles watched. When video services are vying to keep
viewers engaged with content on their platforms, these arecompelling results.”

Understanding the metadata
Drilling down, it’s clear that good content intelligence really
understands the metadata. This identifies the themes,characters, sports and sports teams and even directorsthat viewers like and this can be used with a variety ofrecommendation techniques.
“To deliver highly personalised entertainment
experiences, understanding content at a granular levelis now more important than ever,” says Wheeler atGracenote. “Gracenote addresses this need through its
Video Descriptors offering, which assigns structured
metadata tags to TV shows and movies based on different
dimensions, such as mood, theme, setting, character orsource material. By capturing what content is about andrelating those attributes to other programmes, the metadata
solution enables nuanced dis-covery and recommendations
capabilities that surface the programming that will bestresonate with individual viewers.”
Content makers are also keen to work with operators to
get their content greater visibility on programme guides.
And, Wheeler says that Gracenote’s recently launched
ID Distribution System facilitates this. “It helps content
sources manage and optimise both first-party and thirdparty Gracenote metadata and its distribution to video
services around the globe, making it easier to connect
viewers with programming and UIs of downstream distributors,” he explains.

Measuring success
It’s all very well having the tools for content discovery, but
it’s just as important to work out which work best when,adds Doherty at ThinkAnalytics. “You must be able tomeasure and see what’s working and what’s not working. To do this, you need more than a generic businessintelligence plat-form, you need an insight platform that’s
set up to give you key metrics and KPIs that will help you

www.digitaltveurope.com

Content discovery

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

derive huge benefits from getting a better understandingof content. If a viewer rapidly gets accurate, granularknowledge about an item of content, about say, Roger
Federer’s latest tournament, rather than just tennis or
sports, the discovery experience is improved and this can beachieved without tracking the viewer.”This is why metadata and the AI that analyses that data
is so important. It could tell you, for example, that a user isplanning a trip to Paris and, therefore, they may be open tocontent involving Paris.

The rise of the content superaggregators

make better business decisions. You also need to be able to
A/B test to see which particular carousels work best. You
need to be constantly testing, because you can always make
improvements.”
With regulations – such as GDPR in the EU and similar
in other territories – content providers are restrictedin the data that they can collect on users and use formeasurements. But as Prins at Media Distillery points out,
you can do a lot to support the user and provide a better
experience, without breaching data privacy. “Viewers canGracenote video
descriptors assign
metadata tags
to TV shows andmovies basedon different
dimensions, suchas mood, setting
or source material

Metadata is what underpins all content discovery, reaffirms
Mirjam Laux, VP international platform of Roku, addingthat ultimately, metadata works better when you canshare it. “At the moment, metadata is owned by individual
platforms and streaming services, but there is willingness
within the industry to collaborate and find a solution.
Ultimately, we all want to improve the viewing experiencefor consumers and grow the overall streaming universe.
“Platforms like ours must work hard and together withpublishers to surface the right and relevant entertainment
for consumers to watch at the right time to ensure thesearch experience is seamless and up-to-date.”
Equally, viewers want to be able to discover all of theircontent in one place. They no longer have any loyalty tochannels and they don’t think about what’s on catch-up,

Optimising voice control
Voice control is also playing a growing part in content discovery. And
to optimise your voice search discovery you must take advantage of its
increasingly sophisticated features, says Peter Docherty, founder and CTOof ThinkAnalytics.
“It’s not just about using the natural language processing (NLP)
to understand what the person says, it’s using this in combination
with content intelligence to un-derstand the intent behind the voicecommand. What are they really looking for? What did they mean?
Then you have to be able to translate that into something that canbe delivered. They might ask are there any good come-dy movies on
tonight? But maybe your content intelligence has picked up they likeslap stick comedies, but not dark comedies, for example.”
Mirjam Laux, VP international platform at Roku adds that voicecontrol speeds up the search process and it will increasingly become
the go-to search facility as younger users are much more comfortablewith it. “We are seeing an increased use of voice control for content
discovery, particularly among digital natives,” she says. And, of course
as voice control is reliant on machine learning, the more it is used thebetter it gets.
“The user experience for people with strong regional accents can be24

pretty poor right now, but it’s getting better all the time,” says Kjeld Beijer,
product marketing and product partnerships manager at 24i. “We’realso seeing services, such as Google Voice Assistant, making more use ofvoice pattern profiling that identifies not only the words spoken, but thein-dividual speaking those words. So, if a parent asks a question like ‘showme something funny’ they may get a very different answer to if their childasks the same question, even if the words used are exactly the same.”Video services must gather more ‘world knowledge’ to actually
understand what users are asking via voice queries, sums up Trent
Wheeler, SVP, product at Gracenote. “People naturally use more words
when talking than writing - especially with a remote control. With
text-based search, metadata on programming that’s currently airing oravailable may be sufficient. But with voice-based search, services require
more metadata to understand what the end user may be asking for. This
includes knowledge of alternative programme names, abbreviations,colloquialisms and more captured in programme metadata.
“When datasets are truly comprehensive, better search results and,
there-fore, more satisfying user experiences will naturally follow. This is
the point at which voice control for video content will begin to approachits full potential.”

www.digitaltveurope.com

Sponsored content

Keeping your subscribers happy when
you’re not another Netflix yet?
When a company cannot afford to create a video streaming solution from scratch, how can it keep users
engaged but not see its expenditure go through the roof?
Accelerate TTM with a modular frontend strategy
Instead of spending months on designing and building apps fromthe ground up to cover all your supported devices from iOS, Android,
and web to Smart TVs and STBs, there is a faster rollout alternative. A
modular framework acts as a construction kit for a frontend experience– a rich assortment of features, like interactive electronic program guides,
parental controls, ‘continue watching’, VoD, catch-up options, etc. – thatis implemented to quickly set up those features that interest a particularcompany. So what is the right approach capable of reducing development
costs and TTM, and saving you from unexpected complexity andperformance issues in the long run?
One business logic – multiple platforms covered
Regardless of the number of platforms to be covered, before the frontend
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be written. Here lies the way to reduce costs – the creation of a unified
business logic that is then used across all platforms.
Once a common code that’s valid for all devices is written, mobile, web,
set-top box and smart TV UIs are integrated into this business logic forfurther interactions with the backend.
Nikita Ragozin, Oxagile, React Native specialist says: “We’ve
tested several development scenarios on similar projects, and after
experiencing the ins and outs of different approaches, voted to use
React Native to distribute frontend OTT apps across the platforms anddevices a customer wants. JavaScript expertise allows for designing thesolutions for all platforms including Smart TVs and STBs, which played an
important role in making the decision.”

UI with React Native: hidden dangers
Does it pay off to use React Native forks?
As a copy of React Native designed to manage a particular developmenttask, like frontend development for Xbox or FireTV, forks aim to jumpstartthe development process.
Anna Gulevich, Oxagile’s project manager, says: “Our team considered
the idea of utilising a React Native fork for one of our projects. On theface of it, the concept seemed nice – 80% of one and the same code, only
20% of code tuning for the sake of iOS UIs.”
Ragozin says: “However, in the course of evaluating React Native forks,
we got a feeling that some SDKs and frameworks built on top of React
Native are far from being production-ready. It turns out that if there are
any alterations required for the part already implemented with the fork,
it’ll be far easier and quicker to use React Native to improve it.”
Limited support of controllers is what you stumble upon
The controllers embedded in many React Native forks are most commonly
limited in terms of navigation mechanics support.
Generally, the support of controllers, including laser pointers, joysticks,

and Apple TV Remotes, requires quite significant expertise. While
working with forks, development specialists regularly face controllerrelated blockers, having to modify them by themselves.
React Native forks and memory leaks
Writing the code without memory leaks is a multi-level process combining
a whole complex of specific knowledge and a set of tools. While dealing
with React Native forks, chances are high that you will face memory
leakage issues at all levels. Most use cases are often not related to longer
user sessions typical of the TV viewing experience and searching for amemory leak is not critical for many fork contributors. Yet, it’s a must for
performance-driven video apps, and the process sometimes takes up to
12 hours, and that doesn’t include time and effort spent on fixing.
Can proprietary forks be more mature?
Nikita Ragozin says: “There were some attempts to use a proprietary React
Native fork designed to speed up the development on one of our projects
for the client’s specific platform selection. But they were defeated after ourteam faced some issues. To avoid pain, React Native on its own is a soundchoice.”Proprietary engines tend to suffer from a lack of community
support, which makes specific platform customisations and bug fixing
complicated and time-consuming. The source code can’t be viewed or
modified publicly when it comes to proprietary libraries and tools. Thanks
to massive community support, working with pure React Native is acompletely different story.
Contributing to economy and efficiency
We’ve seen about threefold development cost savings enabled by
the shared business logic on one of our projects. Creating a worthy
replacement for Netflix isn’t just about time and money perfectly saved,
though – choosing React Native for multiple platforms will let you get any
UI configurations in a flexible, quick, and pain-free way, avoiding manypotential perils lying in wait.

Content discovery

or live. They just want to watch something that they areinterested in, in that moment. What they want is a universal
home search screen, and this is where super-aggregatorscome in.
“Super-aggregators have opportunities to deliver value
through universal search and discovery functionality thatbreaks down walls between siloed streaming catalogues andlinear TV,” says Wheeler at Gracenote. “Additionally, withviews across all content catalogues, they have opportunities
to de-liver increased personalisation and, as a result, drive
advertising revenue for their overall ecosystems.”
Content aggregators need to build strong partnerships
with their various content providers so that they can haveaccess to that metadata, but this is easier said than done.
A truly functional universal search and recommendation
facility is the holy grail that everyone is working towards andtechnology is not the obstacle here, says Kjeld Beijer, productmarketing and product partnerships manager at 24i.
“We know that consumers want this and that it’s in thebest interests of content aggregators to give it to them,so they can solidify their role at the heart of in-homeentertainment,” he says. “At 24i, we have a cloud-based
Unified Search feature in our middleware that is being
used by operators, such as Waoo in Denmark, to unify
search across the different aspects of its platform. If it
has agreements with the third parties on its platform, we
also include content from those third parties in the search
results. But we know that services like Netflix and Disney+aren’t always willing to do those deals – they will sharemetadata with selected partners, but not with everyone,
because they prefer to own the complete customer journey.
They don’t want to just become a collection of content
landing pages where people come from someone else’s UX.
“That’s one of the reasons I think it’s hard to see a point
in time where we’ll have a truly universal search andrecommendations facility. There would need to be so many
agreements in place between fierce rivals who aren’t goingto want to give up control of their customer journey. The
same can be said for a single metadata standard or a single
platform that aggregates all the streaming content fromevery different service provider – many streaming services
just don’t see that it’s in their interests to cooperate.”
Pierre Donath at 3SS is a little more optimistic, he says:“The APIs exist that can allow the required profiles to bebuilt. Content rights are, of course, the bigger challenge.
Exclusivity of content will be tough, but I believe rights
holders will become less restrictive over time in response
to competitors who favour a more flexible approach tocontent availability. Who gets access to data is at the heartof this topic.”
Stefan Blickensdoerfer, CTO at 3SS, adds: “If they makeit easy and, critically, cheaper to access and consume thecontent ‘stuck’ in different content providers’ silos, thiscan be a win-win. Aggregators can earn through reve-nue
sharing and innovative monetisation models and content
owners gain subscribers and viewers.

26

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

“Obviously, if everyone aggregates the same content,
again this creates direct, head-to-head competition,
and, therefore, the players need to find their niche, andcompetitive edge. They can do this through better, morecreative bundling and pricing, and/or by making theservice available on more devices, giving the consumer
increased choice. Combining the video service with otherservices is a powerful strategy. Here, operators are inpole position, because they have an existing relationshipwith the customer and can bundle with broadband,
TV and mobile-data access.” This gives operators theopportunity to create super bundles and provide users
with a single bill for all of their services.
Increasing fragmentation is forcing fierce rivals to work
together, adds Beijer at 24i. “We’re seeing more of the larger
pay TV operators boosting their ARPU by bundling services
like Netflix as part of their offering, giving con-sumers the

Above: Chinese
STB maker
Skyworth Digital
partnered with
3SS to create aAndroid TV STB
platform.

convenience of a single bill, and sometimes significant
discounts, as well as a single interface and aggregatedcontent discovery experience. Broadcasters want to go OTT
to have a direct relationship with their audience, but theyalso want to stay part of the pay TV ecosystem, because it
offers them a route to more eyeballs. And the hardware
manufacturers want both broadcasters and pay TV
operators to continue publishing apps on their app stores.
It’s a symbiotic relationship.
“When we’re talking about aggregation, it’s also
important not to overlook the bundling that’s also going onin the pure OTT arena, as smaller SVOD services teamup to take on their bigger rivals by creating added-value
packages. A good example is CuriosityStream’s ‘Smart
Bundle,’ which com-bines its own content with that of rival
SVOD services Tastemade+, SommTV, Topic, One Day
University and Nebula. I suspect we’ll see more of that kindof partnership as smaller services compete with the bigger
fish in the streaming market.”To conclude, there is no simple answer to getting theright content in front of the right people at the right time,
but technology is the enabler here, not the obstacle. This isa challenge for the industry to come together and solve.

www.digitaltveurope.com

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Streaming technology

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Streaming live and at scale
In a world where video live-streaming is increasingly becoming the norm for watching
sports, there are many key factors which can make the difference between a successful
service that surpasses traditional linear TV and disaster, Adrian Pennington reports.

The streaming habit is ingrained; the technology
to produce and distribute D2C via cloud and
OTT has matured, and traditional media
businesses are becoming streaming-firstorganisations. While most streaming content
is available through on VOD services and live events havemostly remained on traditional broadcast channels this ischanging fast.
OTT services like DAZN and Amazon Prime havepurchased domestic rights for major sports leagues in
Europe and North America. Major mergers such as the
swoop for pay TV broadcaster BT Sport by Eurosport-owner
Warner Bros. Discovery are paving the way for more live
events to be streamed online.
To compete with broadcast and meet customers’

28

expectations, direct-to-consumer operators must reachmillions of viewers with impeccable video quality at thelowest latency possible, as well as add value throughexperiences such as betting, social-watching and multi-cam.
“Everything is possible if you drop tons of money,
but that is not a wise business strategy,” says Gwendal
Simon, distinguished CDN architect, Synamedia. “Agile,scalable, and efficient CDNs capable of dealing with highly
fluctuating peaks and valleys of demand are key. Intelligent
CDNs pushing traffic to the edge of the network, offloading
origin servers, and reducing network traffic are a must.”
Sports rights are increasing in value, which only raises
the pressure on streamers to get it right. The numberof major sporting events available online is set to drive
revenue for global broadcast rights beyond US$85 billion by

www.digitaltveurope.com

Streaming technology

the end of 2024, according to a recent Rethink TV report.
That report also claims rights growth could galvanise
the popularity of smaller sports properties. In part this isbecause production, contribution and distribution can bedone over the internet or via the cloud in a far more costefficient fashion than ever before.
Unlike VOD streaming though, where traffic is
distributed over time, live streaming connections happen
simultaneously, provoking peaks of traffic on the networkthat in generally exceed previous maximums.
“Without a solution to scale, all operators would have toreview their investments and plan to address new capacity
needs,” says Damien Sterkers, video solutions marketing
director at Broadpeak. “Today, this already represents a
serious technical and financial challenge, and it will geteven less sustainable as streaming continues to growexponentially.”
Respondents for this story emphasised that operational
scale is critical, especially when limited on resources.
“At some point, the streaming provider will not only needto grow in their domestic market but acquire customers
outside of their domestic market,” says Rémi Beaudoin,
CSO, Ateme. “However, going outside of their domestic
market also means having to scale up their audience andtheir operation and thus they’ll face some new issues andchallenges.
Streaming at scale is a top priority for service providers.
According to Alain Pellen, senior market manager, OTT
and IPTV, Harmonic, DAZN is finding it challenging todeliver HD to fewer than one million subscribers in Italy
and is working on improving the streaming experience so it
is on par with Sky on DTH.
The crux of the matter is that, when it comes to largescale high-profile live events in particular, the viewer
experience must be indistinguishable whether people areattending in person or streaming from their sofa.
“While the operational complexities should never be
underestimated, the technology stack required to support
such events has largely been figured out but is constantly
evolving,” says Marty Roberts, VP of media analytics at
Brightcove. “As streaming becomes a more significant
part of how brands and businesses connect withaudiences, the challenges and solutions must be exploredand faced head on.”The basic requirements
The secret to ‘broadcast quality’ is actually quite simple:
it involves distributing a single version of a content to all
viewers (one-to-many) and securing enough fixed network
resources.
Streaming relies on numerous individual copies of
the content (one-to-one), which are likely to constrain the
network during peaks and cause quality issues such as
freezing, decreases in video resolution, and latency.

29

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

“The easiest approach to match streaming quality
to broadcast is to use the same one-to-many delivery
principle,” says Sterkers. “This is especially relevant
as popular live events are what ‘over-dimension’ thestreaming infrastructure and cause constraints. Since
popular live events are the moments viewers want to see
the same content, it makes sense to distribute a single
copy rather than unnecessarily replicating individual
copies over and over.”However, if you want to switch from multicast to
unicast this becomes a much more complex proposition
for the provider.

As streaming becomes amore significant part of
how brands connect withaudiences, the challenges
and solutions must be
faced head on
Marty Roberts, Brightcove

The challenge remains the same: to ensure provisionof an experience as good as or better than the broadcast
experience, meaning the lowest latency possible, dynamic
ad insertion, a smooth experience and good-to-excellent
visual and audio quality.
“The main challenge is to provide the same level ofquality of experience as before while delivering more
personalised content,” says Beaudoin. “Consumers got used
to a smooth experience with broadcast and multicast andexpect the experience and the functionalities to remain thesame with unicast.”
Unicast, of course, would enable providers to give their
end-user complete control over their TV including thepossibility to fast-rewind, fast-backwards, pause, etc).
“With unicast, we can deliver high-quality, personalised
streams to each user by leveraging the heuristics of theirdevice, bandwidth, and location,” says Jason Friedlander,head of marketing for Edgio (formerly Limelight Networks).
“In many ways, broadcast is becoming inferior to streaming
experience when we talk about quality and personalisation.”
Part of the personalisation and monetisation equation isthe ability to serve targeted ads. Friedlander says targeted
ads generate higher CPMs and provide a better user
experience, “so having a platform that has industry-leading
SSAI technology integrated into the core platform, removes
technical headaches that can come from having to find andimplement various vendors.”

The key challenges
The biggest challenge surrounds major live sports whenmillions of viewers flock to the streaming service to watch

www.digitaltveurope.com

Streaming technology

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

the game simultaneously. The delivery ecosystem must
quickly adjust to the sudden increase in demand without
impacting the user experience.
“The challenge is scalability and dynamic infrastructure
resources allocation,” says Simon. “You may allocate
enough infrastructure resources to offer the most incredible
experience ever, but if those resources sit idle waiting forthe next mass event, the ROI will never work.

on any given day, and that is even more amplified when
streaming a significant live event,” says Friedlander.
With many of the obstacles attached to scaling an eventthat reaches viewers in their millions already solved, thekey challenges now lie in optimisation. Firstly, media
companies need to strike the right balance when it
comes to visual quality. The higher the quality, the more
expensive the bandwidth cost, so the need to ensure
the viewer experience is the best it can be within these
constraints is vital.
“The timely delivery of in-stream advertising is also an
area that requires due care and attention,” says Roberts.
“When it comes to live-streamed events, ads need to appear
at the right cue points in the right sequence, so it’s vitalthat the ad-tech stack can insert the right content quickly.
Technology is not infallible, so it’s important that a team isin place to resolve any critical issues in real-time.”

AI forecasting technologies
guarantee that a consumer
finds a nearby server todeliver the stream at the best
possible quality
Gwendal Simon, Synamedia“This means allocating those resources dynamicallywhile the event is happening, monetising the experienceand then moving those resources to other tasks.
Maximising the infrastructure resource utilisation is not
simple, it requires a sophisticated understanding of traffic
predictions, demand for bandwidth, streaming, processing,and content storage. This is where insights and AI allow theedge of the network to reach peak utilisation for extended
periods of time.”
On the content delivery side, traditional CDNs have
limitations, and service providers are looking at alternativetechnologies to improve the streaming experience,
including multi-CDN, private CDN, multicast ABR on
ISP network, deep caching (MEC) and Open Caching as
specified by Streaming Video Alliance.
Whatever the chosen technology it must be reliable. It
must be fault tolerant and always available. “An outage oreven failure of a critical feature from ad insertion to the
CDN can be catastrophic to a content owner’s business

30

Overcoming the issues

Harmonic’s
VOS360 SaaS
platform wasused to deliver
this year’s Super
Bowl with a peakof 5.6 million
simultaneous
sessions.

According to Ateme, the ability to develop an elastic content
delivery network – which controls where the popular
contents are fetched, and how you can scale up and downwhen there are peaks – is critical. “You need to have control
over the CDN that can again go up and down depending on
the demand. Having a fixed configuration, a fixed CDN or
a rigid approach won’t allow you to have good performanceat scale.”
ABR technologies – including DASH and HLS –and distributed infrastructure using CDNs are the key
ingredients in the recipe to overcome these hurdles. Smartalgorithms enable these technologies to scale fast while
minimising energy consumption and give the content
provider full control.
“The key is to use cloud technologies to scale encoders
and packagers so that the video is prepared withoutcompromising quality,” says Simon. “AI forecasting
technologies guarantee that a consumer finds a nearby
server to deliver the stream at the best possible quality.”
Broadpeak talks up the potency of Multicast ABR(mABR) for permitting one-to-many distribution on the
network, down to a device such as a home gateway or
set-top box in the viewer’s home. mABR has been usedsuccessfully by many operators, including in Italy when
Serie A football matches were exclusively available via
streaming.
“With one-to-many distribution, the load on the network
no longer increases with the number of viewers, allowing
virtually unlimited quality levels,” explains Sterkers. “Forexample, streaming live sports to millions of viewers
with an increased 4K resolution is generally consideredunrealistic in one-to-one mode. mABR enables it pretty
seamlessly, since only a single copy is distributed. mABR
can solve current scalability issues and may become an
important enabler for future streaming enhancements.”

www.digitaltveurope.com

Sponsored content

Q&A: Przemysław Frasunek, Redge Technologies
The CEO of Redge Technologies talks to DTVE about the company strategy and development perspectives after Play Group’s acquisition.

Play Group has acquired 92.5% of the shares of Redge Technologies– the leading OTT technology provider in Poland. What does thatthat mean for the Polish company? What was the rationale for theacquisition?
Play Group is the leading provider of telecommunication services
in Europe, which acquired Play and UPC Polska. On the other hand,Redge Technologies has been cooperating with Play since 2007
working on PLAY NOW, Play’s video service. Delivering a technically
excellent product strengthened our position as a reliable partner. The
acquisition is a natural stage in the development of our cooperation,
On what terms will you cooperate after the acquisition?
We remain autonomous as a separate organisation. We will continue
to develop our products and support our customers in mostinnovative OTT projects. The strategy, brand, management team,
office, sales organisation and operations will remain the same. From
our perspective, our partner has now become our protector , someone
who invests in our creativity and places trust in our solutions.
Is there a synergy effect in the cooperation of Redge Technologies
with the Play Group? If so, in what specific fields?
We have become part of the international telco group whose valuesalign with ours. I think it’s a win-win, it’s a benefit for both parties. The
synergy with Play gives us a boost in the telecommunications area. We
have been developing Redge Media CDN since 2007. Now we havea strong partner allowing us to quickly expand CDN infrastructure toWestern Europe. We get better exposure in the international market
because of support from the international telco group.
What are your current endeavors?
This was a very intense and successful first half of the year for Redge
Technologies. First and foremost, we managed to extend our contract
with TVN Warner Bros. Discovery group. Our SDP platform won a
public tender from TVP, the Polish national broadcaster. We expanded
our CDN presence into Czechia. Last, but not least we won a very
competitive tender from one of the leading broadcast groups in the
MENA region.

What is the strategy for the coming years?
Redge Technologies strategy remains the same since 2020 andis based on three pillars. The first is what we are doing now, i.e.,
implementation and integration for large broadcasters or operators,
where it is necessary to build an end-to-end OTT solution.
The second pillar of the strategy is the development of our UX 3.0.
vertical solutions dedicated to smaller entities with attractive content.
We see the potential of verticals such as sports, news and culture. We
are also dynamically developing PPV services and in this area, we havesuccesses supported by experience. In June, we broadcast an MMA
tournament that took place in Slovakia.
The third pillar is a video cloud. We are aiming at providing whole
video processing and delivery chain in an API-based, self-provisioning
model. We strongly believe in the edge computing paradigm. Our
CDN solution was engineered with this architecture in mind. We areable to deliver personalised streams, with server-side ad insertion andunique forensic watermarking.
I didn’t mention our separate product line, Redge Guardian,
providing carrier-grade, multi-terabit deep packet inspection. It fits
into our edge computing strategy, as well as into the telco ecosystem.
Thanks to it, we are providing DDoS mitigation service for high-profile
government customers. Redge Guardian may play an important role inupcoming 5G SA deployments.
I believe that our edge-based strategy makes us future-proof.
What is your technology outlook for the next five years?
I strongly believe in a cloud-edge continuum with dynamic resourcesmanagement and seamless workload migration between centralised
cloud infrastructure and an edge cloud. My dream is to make cloudcomputing more standard and compatible between vendors. 5G is
one of the key growth drivers for edge computing, allowing European
telcos to enter the cloud computing market and start competing with
big techs. As Europe, we should be technologically sovereign.

For more information see www.redge.com

Streaming technology

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Harmonic promotes Content Aware Encoding (CAE) to
improve streaming quality of experience. The technology
has been deployed by over 100 service providers for morethan 10,000 channels in live applications from which
service providers can realise bandwidth savings of up to
40%, the vendor claims.
To support targeted ads and blackout management, ascalable playlist manipulator is needed, Harmonic says.
When it comes to scalability, this is a challenge for thecomplete infrastructure, including CDN delivery, origin,server-side ad insertion and NPVR recording.
“Cloud-based solutions are a perfect match for extreme
scaling challenges,” says Pellen, pointing to the VOS360
SaaS platform used to deliver this year’s Super Bowl witha peak of 5.6 million simultaneous sessions.
“We recognise there are silos between the on-net traffic
managed by a dedicated infrastructure and the off-net
traffic managed by third-party CDNs. In a world where all
traffic will be unicast, there is a need to rationalise delivery
networks using the ISP’s private cloud to deliver content
to devices inside the ISP network.”
Pellen also acknowledges that the largest sports
events require geo-redundant cloud and multi-cloud
solutions, along with other redundancy capabilities, suchas seamless fail-over, “to ensure viewers don’t miss a
moment.”Brightcove points to learnings such as its Audience
Insights that Roberts says enable businesses “to create

data-driven strategies that can have a remarkable impact
on improving monetisation.”
He says: “Beyond this, we believe there are areas ofinnovation beyond multi-bitrate streaming. We see an
evolution to multi-codec switching, even mid-stream,
enabling a truly seamless viewer experience.”
In June this year Limelight acquired Edgecast fromYahoo and rebranded as Edgio, retaining over a decades
worth of knowledge inside the company.

Cloud-based solutions are aperfect match for extreme
scaling challenge
Alain Pellen, Harmonic“Using these insights, we built a platform thatorchestrates thousands of distinct decisions per second
for every viewer that presses play to deliver high-quality
and ultra-personalised streams,” Friedlander says.
“Finding a reliable technology partner that allows you
to operationally scale, means you can innovate andevolve with your audience with only a fraction of theresources.”

Latency, ULL and Tiered Latency
Low latency is now a hygiene issue for a sports OTT business.
“People expect to receive a stream that is on par with the broadcast,”
says Rémi Beaudoin, CSO, Ateme. “The most important is to ensure yourservice can achieve low latency, meaning you may need to change
your compression system and/or your CDN system to meet theserequirements. In particular, low latency compression, DASH or HLS
packaging, and possibly bitrate, as all of these are the compression anddelivery mechanisms that allow a customer to reach and power a low
latency streaming service.”
Jason Friedlander, head of marketing for Edgio has a slightly different
view. “While latency is important, our customers care more about
monetisation. They want streams relatively close to broadcast but will notsacrifice quality or monetisation opportunities. We have had customers
experiment with real-time technologies, like webRTC, but our focus is on
HLS and its low latency features.”
Delays in streaming can be frustrating at the best of times. Whenan event is available through multiple distribution avenues, such as
traditional pay TV and online, companies can encounter the “Twitter
problem.” Do individuals learn about the goal, highlight, or winning
contestant before the online stream catches up? In this instance, subtwo second latency strikes the right balance between maintaining themonetisation model and ‘syncing’ the audience to keep everyone in the
moment.

32“Ultra-low latency is defined as sub-1 second,” says Marty Roberts, VP of
media analytics at Brightcove. “This is primarily driven by sports betting,where there is a concern that latency creates an arbitrage opportunity.
The tech stack for this is a little less mature, so monetisation via in-stream
advertising isn’t yet possible - but we may see this evolve soon.”
Unicast delivery can also for tiered latency, to accommodate the different
latency needs for say a live concert or news vs a football match. Tiered
latency delivers broadcast-equivalent latency as well as allowing services
such as adaptive quality and time-shifted viewing.
Gwendal Simon, distinguished CDN architect, Synamedia, explains
the use case further. Some viewers chat while they watch a game, others
want to zap from one camera angle to another. For these use cases,
synchronisation is key. This is achieved using HESP, an innovative packaging
technology which offers accurate group synchronisation with low latency –typically about two seconds.
Some consumers want to bet on the next action in the game. To prevent
cheating from people physically watching the event, we have to guarantee
sub-second glass-to-glass latency. This is possible with WebRTC technology.
“Each of these technologies - DASH/HLS, HESP, WebRTC - needs thedevelopment of a new pipeline to ingest, process, and distribute thecontent,” he says. “The beauty comes when one unique infrastructure
implements the delivery at scale by automatically adjusting the hardware
and software resources to the population’s requirements.”

www.digitaltveurope.com

Sponsored content

Q&A: Steve Locke & Romain Eude,
Synamedia
Steve Lock, Senior Director, Video Platforms, and Romain Eude, Director of Product Development, Synamedia talk about the company’s
acquisition of Utelly, its integration into Synamedia Go and how service providers can make super-aggregation a truly compelling
experience for consumers.
What is the background to Synamedia’s acquisition of Utelly andhow will it integrate into Synamedia Go?
SL: We saw that content discovery and allowing companies to be able
to maximise the value of partnerships they have – and pulling all this
together – is critical. Utelly goes a long way to solving these problems,
dealing with the complexities and challenges of content discovery
across multiple services. Utelly also has other capabilities including
integrating podcasts and music streaming and so on. The acquisition
took us a lot further forward into that market than if we’d tried to dosomething on our own. We are quickly integrating the technology into
our Go Aggregate and Go Recommend packages within Synamedia
Go. We will demo those capabilities at IBC.
What in your view makes for compelling super-aggregation ofmultiple content services?
RE: You can bring all these services together but there is a danger thatyou might actually make the experience a bit worse for the consumer.
Taking a step back, we can see that content discovery is key and theindustry must put content first rather than stacking different providers
on top of each other. And content means not only video but podcasts
and audio including movie soundtracks. For super-aggregation towork you need to have the metadata to connect everything at thebase of a magical pyramid. Higher up that pyramid you get to find thenuggets that make for a truly enjoyable experience. But we need tobuild the right foundations to get to that point.
What challenges do service providers and their content partners
face in working together and developing a meaningful offering?
RE: Good metadata is the oil that makes everything work and getting
access to good metadata is challenging. You can invest in a great UX
but having access to good content descriptors is essential if you wantpeople to stay with your service. As you add services to the offering,
the problem doesn’t get easier. It’s important to have a future-proofed
solution. And then even if you have great metadata, you have content
providers with their own interests and commercial rules that comeinto play. So you need to get the technology and commercial interestsof different partners to work well together and then you can unlock
the benefits of content discovery for the consumer.
How can service providers and content providers more meaningfully
integrate services and platform?
RE: When content providers think about aggregation, they need toconsider the all the elements including content rights as well as thesourcing of metadata. Service providers need to anticipate what
happens when multiple providers are aggregated together. For
example, be prepared for different content partners competing forthe best position on the screen. But then they need to think about
how different services work seamlessly with each other which takes
us back to the principle of putting content first. That is where we canhelp because we have put solving these problems front and centre.
Sourcing metadata is not something that can be done once andforgotten about. It needs to be constantly refreshed and updated.
SL: As a technology company we can solve the technical problems
and remove the business challenges. Service providers need toacquire rights and balance different interests. With Go.Aggregate wecan accommodate the commercial rights already in place and takeaway the complexities around enriching the metadata and keeping
it up to date.
Is super-aggregation ultimately a true differentiator for fixed andmobile service providers?
SL: It isn’t easy to give a single answer to that question for all markets
and regions of the world. Super-aggregation in some regions is now a
must-have and it isn’t necessarily a differentiator. What becomes more
important is offering a compelling experience and that’s why we havefocused on content discovery. As a super-aggregator you may havethe relationships in place and carry all the services consumers need,
but what is the viewing experience?
RE: if you think about mobile networks, people have been using
those networks to stream a lot of video and it represents solid
revenue for operators. Now those operators are thinking about
how they can stimulate usage and provide added value for end
users, going from being a utility to offering content discovery andbundling - becoming virtual TV operators. Selling voice and data
is not enough anymore. Last year, as a standalone company, we
also worked on an EU project with public broadcasters who had TV,
radio and podcasts and wanted to create a real super-aggregatedexperience. This confirmed that going beyond video is meaningful,so we made our platform an enabler of cross-media aggregation.
You can bring TV series, movies, podcasts, games, and books – allsorts of creative works – together and connect them. That is really
starting to have traction.

Technology news

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Tech
in focus

News and analysis of the technology behind digital video.

Vodafone Deutschland starts HbbTV Association updates
standardising TV frequencies Conformance Test Suite
Vodafone Deutschland is standardising the frequencies used by its
TV and radio channels across its footprint to improve the uniformity
and efficiency of its offering.
Up to 350 TV and radio channels will receive a new frequency. The
conversion process for Vodafone’s 13 million TV customers will be phasedon a step-by-step basis.
The process kicked off on August 29 in Nuremberg, with subscribers
informed that they may need to retune their set-tops to continue toreceive a full range of channels.
Set-tops from Vodafone, Unitymedia and Sky and some integrated TV
sets will find the new frequencies automatically.
Following the switch in Nuremberg, the change will be rolled out toother regions and is expected to be complete by the middle of next year.
The move follows a process of creating a uniform pay TV offeringand a switchover process in North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse and BadenWürttemburg, the three regions where Vodafone acquired networks from
Liberty Global’s Unitymedia division.
Lars Riedel, head of TV and entertainment at Vodafone (below), said:“Since we always change over at night and most TV devices automatically
carry out a channel search, many of our customers will not even notice thechangeover. The uniform frequency spectrum gives us greater technicalfreedom and increases the performance of the network. As a result, ourcustomers can continue to benefit from our wide range of entertainment
offerings for GigaTV and higher data rates in the future.”34

The HbbTV Association has announced the release of a newversion of the HbbTV Conformance Test Suite.
Developed by the HbbTV Testing Group, v2022-2 is the second
major release of the Test Suite in 2022. It contains 3,000 test cases,
including a mixture of tests that have been approved for the first time,
and tests that were updated after feedback from users of the Test Suite.
The launch comes after a testing event held by the Testing Groupat the beginning of July. At the event, which saw the participationof 12 companies, the group gathered evidence required for the test
approval.
The HbbTV Conformance Test Suite provides device manufacturers
with a tool to verify product compliance with the latest HbbTV
specifications. It is available through one of the registered HbbTV test
centres and for HbbTV members to use in their own facilities.
Vincent Grivet, chair of the HbbTV Association, said: “The constantadjustment to market requirements and addition of further features
is key to the strong industry acceptance of the HbbTV specifications
among broadcasters, platform operators and hardware manufacturers
as the standard for improving the TV experience and enabling newmonetisation opportunities such as Targeted Advertising. The
release of the new HbbTV Conformance Test Suite version ensuresthat existing and new features quickly and smoothly reach HbbTVcompliant TV sets and STBs..”
The group has added seven members in recent months: ATET(France), Digita Oy (Finland), Ocean Blue Software (OBS, UK), Rundfunk
Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb, Germany), Skyworth Group & Shenzhen
Chuangwei-RGB Electronics (China), Synamedia (UK) and ZEASN
Europe (Netherlands).

www.digitaltveurope.com

Technology news

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

AWS launches UAE region
Amazon Web Services (AWS),
the IT services subsidiary of the
Washington online retail giant,
has announced the launch of a
new server region in the United
Arab Emirates (UAE).
The launch represents AWS’s
second region launch in the Middle
East, and will serve developers,
enterprises, governments and morearound the Gulf.
Amazon said that the launch
will support an average of nearly 6,000 full-time jobs annually at externalvendors with a planned US$5 billion investment in the local economy
through 2036. The company also said that the AWS Middle East (UAE)Region will add an estimated US$11 billion over the next 15 years to the
UAE’s gross domestic product (GDP).
The new launch brings AWS to 87 availability zones across 27
geographic regions, with announced plans to launch 21 more availability
zones and seven more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New
Zealand, Spain, and Switzerland
Prasad Kalyanaraman (pictured), vice president of Infrastructure
Services at AWS, said: “AWS is committed to helping customers in the
UAE deploy the most advanced cloud technologies and achieve thehighest levels of security, availability, and resiliency. With the launch of the
AWS Middle East (UAE) Region, we are making it possible for even morecustomers to harness the power of the cloud to drive innovation acrossthe UAE, while also investing in the local economy through job creation,
training for highly sought-after technology skills, and education resources
to further advance the UAE’s strategic priorities.”

BT launches streaming-only
option for Freeview channels
UK telco BT’s TV Box Pro customers can now access the bulk of theoperator’s TV service without the need for a terrestrial antenna via a
streaming-only mode on its advanced set-top.
BT is also launching the BT TV Box Mini, a new multiroom compact TV
box, which lets customers watch TV in an extra room of the house,
BT TV Box Pro is BT’s latest set-top box, which includes BT TV’s traditional
hybrid functionality but also enables streaming-only mode, removing theneed for a terrestrial antenna for linear channels. When customers set up
the box for the first time, they’ll now be given the option in the set-up
journey to either connect via internet mode or aerial mode.
The streaming option will give access to the main Freeview channels
from the UK’s public service broadcasters, and a range of other channels,
but will not include all the channels currently available over the air on
Freeview.
Existing BT TV Box Pro customer will receive an automatic software
update allowing them to reset their connectivity settings if required in the
future.
In addition to the all-new internet mode, BT TV Box Pro provides BT TV
customers with a range of features including 4K HDR, Dolby Atmos, and 1TBof storage, which is double the capacity of the previous BT TV box, with up
to 600 hours of recordings.
The box comes with four tuners, allowing customers who continue to
use its hybrid functionality to record up to three shows and watch a fourth
simultaneously in antenna/aerial mode, and record up to four channels
at once. Alternatively, in internet mode customers can record up to twochannels at once.
The device also comes with a Bluetooth remote, Integrated search andenables pause, rewind, and record functionality.

In brief...
Norigin Media integrates Mux
Data
TV Apps solution provider Norigin
Media has integrated video
infrastructure platform Mux’s Mux
Data into its TV App framework.
Mux Data has been integrated via
Norigin Media´s Tracking Manager
and React-based TV App framework
to help organise analytics forcollection by broadcaster streaming
TV services, giving them reliable
Quality of Experience measurements
across devices, according to the pair.
Norwegian National Broadcaster´sstreaming TV flagship TV2 Play isamong those to use this integration.

35

Simply.TV acquires EPG specialist
GVIDI
Danish TV metadata provider Simply.
TV has announced the acquisitionof EPG specialist GVIDI. This marks
the first acquisition made by Simply.
TV, and will add approximately 25
customers currency served by GVIDI
via its Basic EPG, GVIDI EPG, GVIDIMovie and GVIDI Discovery products.
United Group picks Nagra for
digital watermarking
South-eastern European service
provider United Group’s United
Cloud ‘innovation centre’ has chosen
technology outfit Nagra’s NexGuard

Watermarking to further ensure
OTT content protection for all
United Group’s assets.. As part of theprovider’s OTT content protection
expansion, Nagra’s NexGuard
watermarking is intended to ensure
United Group’s protection of all typesof content assets. The deployment
includes server-side watermarking
deployed on their private cloud,enabling United Group to shut down
piracy at the source and in real time,
according to Nagra.
TF1 taps Smart Ad-Break from
SynchronizedFrench broadcaster TF1 has tapped

ad tech specialist Synchronized, tointegrate the latter’s Smart Ad-Breakservice, which automates andoptimises ad placement. The Smart
Ad-breaks service enables content
owners to automatically identify the
optimum placement for ad breaks ina video, whilst maintaining content
integrity and the user experience
according to Synchronised. The
service, which is already in live
production on MyTF1 and TF1’s
linear channels, sits alongside
Synchronized Smart Thumbnail
offering which automates thumbnail
creation. Both services enable TF1 toautomate its editorial workflow.

www.digitaltveurope.com

Technology news

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

Xperi launches ‘first-of-its-kind’ TiVo smart TV OS
Xperi has announced the launch of its smart TV operating system.
TiVo OS is described by Xperi as a ‘first-of-its-kind neutral platform’ thatis aimed at giving OEMs more control over the user experience while
aggregating content from VOD and linear services. It achieves this via auniversal discovery system which Xperi said makes TiVo OS the “ultimate
independent smart TV system”.
Jon Kirchner, CEO, Xperi, said: “We estimate that nearly 40% of the smart
TV market is searching for a truly independent platform like ours, and a
supportive industry partner with deep domain expertise.
“Today, nearly 30 million households worldwide are powered by TiVothrough an array of CTV and other partners. We are pleased to have signed
our first smart TV partnership for TiVo OS, our embedded operating system
and media platform for smart TVs, underlying progress toward our goal of
becoming a leading independent TV OS platform supplier.”
Kirchner told DTVE that the connected TV and smart TV space was one ofthree key growth areas in video that the company is targeting, alongside IPTV,
particularly in North American, and for connected car entertainment.
In the smart TV space, Kirchner said that Xperi was targeting TV
manufacturers that did not have the scale and resources to develop their own
proprietary platform, like Samsung or LG, but which nevertheless would liketo offer an enhanced and regularly updated range of services.
“I think we’re in a unique position to personalise the content discovery
experience in the TV,” said Kirchner.
“That means streamng and live TV personalised to the user rather thancontinuously trying to shift users onto proprietary programming that someof the other platform operators have curated in their own interests, notnecessarily in the interests of users. We beleive our independent offering will
represent something new and innovative with a different level of personalised
experience that is unbiased.”
Kirchner’s comments were amplified by Geir Skaaden, chief products andservices officer at Xperi. He said: “There is a set of TV manufacturers outside of
the few that have the resources to build their own platforms that are looking
for solutions not only to control the brand experience but to provide a strong
end product consumers that drives a better overall user experience.”
The first manufacturer to deploy the OS will be Vestel, one of the top three
European TV makers. Its Powered by TiVo Smart TVs are expected to ship in
2023 as part of a multi-year, multi-country, multi-million-unit agreement.

In brief...
BT Sport deploys Red Bee Media
automated subtitling tech
UK sports broadcaster BT Sport
has announced a new partnershipwith UK-based video technology
specialist Red Bee Media to makelive content more accessible withthe company’s automated subtitlingservice. The broadcaster will
deploy ARC (Automatic Real-time
Captioning) in a move designed toincrease the amount of subtitledsports content that it provides
viewers with by approximately
200 extra hours of viewing time
per month. As a result BT Sport
will become the first major
UK broadcaster to deploy thetechnology, with ARC supporting awide range of live sports coveragefor the broadcaster alongside
Red Bee Media’s existing humanenabled subtitling service.

36

Kaon, Green Streams and 3SS
team up for IPTV and OTT
platform
Technology providers Kaon, Green
Streams and 3SS have teamed up
to launch a joint IPTV/OTT service
platform product. The joint offering
is based on their pre-integrated endto-end technology platform and isdesigned for tier two and mediumsized providers to deliver superaggregated video services based onAndroid TV and relevant multiscreen
platforms. The new turnkey platformcomprises Green Streams’ TVaaS
backend platform, Kaon’s Netflixcertified set-top box and 3SS’ frontand UI/UX platform, based on its
3Ready product framework. Green
Streams GmbH was co-founded in
2021 by industry veteran Gernot
Jaeger to deliver an IPTV and OTT
backend platform that integrates

with partners for key components
such as frontend applications,
metadata, recommendation or QoS/QoE analytics.
Polish vMVPD WP Pilot signs up
Redge Technologies for VOD
launchPolish online pay TV service WP Pilot
has tapped homegrown technology
provider Redge Technologies
to add video-on-demand
functionality to its existing online
TV offering. A library of movies,
series, entertainment programmes,
sports content, games, and fairy
tales for children, as well as live TV
timeshifting, are being delivered
to Polish consumers by the RedgeMedia video streaming platform.
As a leading vMPVD, WP Pilot offers
more than 100 linear TV channels
spanning general entertainment,

news, movies, sports and content
dedicated to kids.
Broadpeak launches dynamic
ad insertion as-a-service on
broadpeak.io
Broadpeak has announced a
new Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI)
application on its broadpeak.
io software as a service (SaaS)
platform. The broadpeak.io DAI
as a service utilises server-side adinsertion technology pre-integrated
with all major ad servers on themarket, reducing the time tomarket for targeted ad streaming
services and enabling OTT service
providers to start monetising theircontent quickly. The DAI application
leverages standard IAB interfaces
and protocols such as VAST and
VMAP to streamline targeted ad
distribution.

www.digitaltveurope.com

Sponsored content

Q&A: Gabriel Cosgrave, Xperi
Gabriel Cosgrave, General Manager, EMEA, Australia & New Zealand at Xperi, talks about the evolution of streaming, his company’s
acquisition of Vewd and the need for alternatives to big tech walled garden platforms.
Why does Xperi’s acquisition of Vewd make sense, and what impact
will it have on your presence in the market for streaming technology?
Xperi and Vewd share a common objective: to bring a suite of products
and services to market that simplify streaming complexity by replacing
the sea of apps on smart TVs and offer a more intuitive, personalised
search function while uniting the entire value chain – from content
owners to device makers and SoC partners. Combining Xperi’s productofferings with Vewd’s suite of media platform solutions accelerates the
success of our strategy of offering personalised discovery product
Our products have been integrated and market-tested for many
years via Vewd’s long-standing partnership with TiVo, which is part ofXperi. This acquisition ensures we are well positioned to pursue various
growth opportunities in a rapidly transforming industry and to invest
in new products and capabilities. We are excited about the next phase.
What do you see as the key priorities for streaming providers currently
and how does your set of solutions address these?
With so many video entertainment services available to choose fromand more content becoming available for free, a vast majority of
consumers are ad tolerant. This paradigm shift is likely to continue, withmore services offering free or lower priced options with ads to help
consumers manage costs in such a saturated market. For example, TiVo’s
solutions ensure there is less scrolling and more watching, making theexperience more enjoyable and engaging for subscribers.
Unlike other platforms, Powered by TiVo smart TVs allow user choiceand control, enable subscriber acquisition and retention for content
services, and provide recurring revenue for partners. This differentiates
TiVo OS from big tech platforms that are aggressively working to protect“walled gardens” to extract all economic value from end user data anddrive content engagement that benefits them instead of the consumers
who are looking to reduce the complexity of their viewing experience.
What are the key challenges faced by existing video service providers
and what do they need to do to stay relevant in the streaming age?
Acquiring and retaining new subscribers are key challenges, TiVo
Discovery Solutions delivers personalised recommendations, natural
voice recognition, and insights for a superior entertainment experience,
enabling service providers to maximise engagement and minimise
churn.

When it comes to personalisation technology, MVPDs and OTT service
providers have a choice: they can develop recommendation engines
and other elements of personalisation in-house, or they can turn to athird-party provider. Either way, the most significant driver of revenue
is deploying new services with a fast time to market, bringing relevant
content to viewers, and reducing subscriber churn.
How big a part will content discovery play in how service providers
market and differentiate their offerings and what do they need to do
to deliver a discovery experience that really sets them apart?
In today’s media landscape, with video streaming at an all-time high,consumers are faced with an unprecedented number of options formedia and entertainment services. According to the 2022 Q2 TiVo Video
Trends Report, which will be released later in September, as the numberof available streaming services continues to grow, content discovery is
the number one concern for consumers. Nearly 30% of respondents use
a companion app to track and discover content across different sources.
To win the battle for viewers, service providers need to make content
easy to find and ensure an outstanding QoE for their subscribers. TiVo
Discovery Solutions enable providers to attract and retain subscribers bymaking content easy to find and ensuring an outstanding QoE.
As streaming and traditional TV providers face up to changing
consumer dynamics and macroeconomic challenges, how cantechnology of the type that Xperi specialises in help them improvemonetisation of their content assets?
Xperi’sTiVo solutions make it easy for people to find, watch, and enjoy what
they love in one integrated, extraordinary video experience that brings
entertainment together, driving loyalty and engagement. Powered by
TiVo™ smart TVs offer a global video service and monetisation platformfully aligned with the business objectives of TV OEMs and content
providers, allowing them to control the TV experience. Powered by TiVo
Smart TVs ensure global and local CSP availability, pre-integration with
end-to-end TV ecosystems, and an aggregated platform ad inventory
to maximise revenue. Monetisation occurs through multiple channels
including advertising sales, viewership data, and lower-cost content
offerings for viewers who balance subscription costs with watchingads. TiVo’s independent media platform allows user choice and control,
enabling subscriber acquisition and retention for content services.

Technology news

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

StreamVX: operators need to MediaTek launches Pentonic‘maintain subscriber experience’ 700 chipset for CTVs
Operators need to ‘maintain subscriber experience’ in face of newchallenges, according to a leading OTT and IPTV expert.
The post-pandemic streaming industry faces a significant crunch as
the rise in the number of subscriptions during COVID lockdowns tails off
and switches to customers cutting back on subscriptions due to the costof-living squeeze, meaning there is a need to look to new technologies toimprove the subscriber experience, according to Szymon Karbowski, CEOof TV technology outfit StreamVX.
According to Karbowski, platform operators face a perfect storm ofchallenges, ranging from churn through to the impact of inflation on
customer spend by way of the need to respond to the climate crisis.
In an article for DTVE published online, Karbowski said that service
providers “have to maintain a good subscriber experience” in the face of
these challenges.
He highlighted the need to deploy solutions that can be integrated on
existing hardware, “with features such as skip intro, stopping an episodeand resuming at the same stage sometime later, and identifying a particular
actor’s presence in other series or movies and switching to these videos
and particular scenes to see this actor” as ways to improve the customer
experience.
Karbowski also said operators need to address the growing importanceof AVOD with “targeted advertising, based on location and other data”.
“The subscriber understands the relationship between advertising andreceiving a less expensive service; companies can reduce churn and retain
profitability via an efficient and acceptable advertising model,” he said.
Karbowski also highlighted the need for improve operators’ carbon
footprint, for example by reducing unnecessary storage of content throughmore efficient use of technology.

Taiwanese semiconductor company MediaTek has announced thelaunch of a new chipset for 120Hz 4K smart TVs.
The Pentonic 700 is a smart TV system-on-chip (SoC) which features an AI
processing engine for premium 120Hz 4K TVs, with support for Dolby Vision
IQ, integrated 4K120 MEMC and TCON, and gaming optimisations.
The chipset’s AI processing unit (APU) supports MediaTek’s AI-Super
Resolution, AI-Picture Quality (AI-PQ) Scene Recognition and AI-PQ Object
Recognition technologies for advanced edge smoothing and detailreconstruction.
It can also display content from different sources with Picture-by-Picture(PBP) and Picture-in-Picture (PIP) support with PQ enhancement, withMediaTek giving the example of watching sports while also videochattingwith friends and using other applications on the TV.
Pentonic 700 is also designed with gaming in mind, as it supports variablerefresh rate (VRR) up to 144Hz to give brands the ability to customise TVs
for gaming applications so players can enjoy games without screen tearing
and stuttering – a common issue facing gamers on the bleeding edge oftechnology.
The SoC will power mainstream 4K smart TVs as part of MediaTek’s
broader Pentonic chipset family, offering brands a full range of options
for premium, high-end and mass market TVs. The first TVs powered byPentonic 700 are expected to be released in Q4 2022.
Alex Chen, general manager of the TV Business Unit at MediaTek, said:“MediaTek’s Pentonic series brings more intelligence to smart TVs with ahost of AI-powered picture quality enhancements. “Smart TV brands cancount on Pentonic 700 to deliver incredible experiences whether consumers
are watching videos or sports, gaming, or using their TV as a control centre
for their other smart devices.”

In brief...
TVCoins shakes up FAST withrevenue-sharing white label
platform
White label video streaming
platform TVCoins has launcheda FAST platform with a built-in
viewer incentive programme, andfunctionality that enables content
owners to publish their live andon-demand video with no upfront
investment. TVCoins’ offers whitelabel video streaming apps at no cost
to its customers, relying on an adsupported, revenue share businessmodel. The company aims to attract
customers with a risk-free way ofmoving content catalogues online
and building a D2C brand.

38

Yahoo and Comscore in CTV
partnership
Comscore has struck a partnershipwith Yahoo to provide its DSP
advertisers with greater brandsafety and suitability controls for
CTV campaigns. The Yahoo DSP will
integrate with Comscore Activation,a set of pre-bid inventory filters to
help marketers achieve brand-safe
campaign delivery across CTV
inventory. The tech is powered by
Comscore’s contextual AI engine andintelligent categorisation technology,
which it says allows for a better
understanding of CTV media andcontent. Comscore also utilises the
IAB’s genre categories included in its

Content Taxonomy 3.0 framework,
enabling advertisers using the Yahoo
DSP to filter buys based on TV genres.
VIDAA picks Amagi for FAST
Cloud-based SaaS tech provider
Amagi has struck a content
distribution agreement with CTV
platform operator VIDAA. The
partnership will leverage Amagi’sContent Plus marketplace to give
VIDAA users in the Americas,
Australia, and the UK access to
Amagi’s network of FAST channels
and AVOD assets across a varietyof genres including sports, news,
music, movies, and documentaries.
The VIDAA smart TV OS powers

TV brands including Hisense andToshiba. Its FAST channels service,
VIDAA TV, launched in the US and
Mexico in January.
Tele2 taps 3SS and SEI Robotics
for Android TV dongle offering
Swedish service provider Tele2 hastapped Three Screen Solutions (3SS)and SEI Robotics to launch its new Tv
Hub Mini, a 4K dongle for streaming
TV. Based on the Android TV OS,
subscribers to the new offering
will access content via a custom
3SS-engineered user experience
powered by its 3Ready productin what 3SS says is its first major
operator dongle deployment.

www.digitaltveurope.com

Sponsored content

Q&A: Jörg Meyer, Zattoo
Jörg Meyer, chief commercial officer, Zattoo, explains how small and mediuim-sized network operators in an increasingly competitivemarket can tap into white-label IPTV offerings to compete effectively with larger, well-resourced players.
Why is an up-to-date IPTV platform critical for the success of
network operators?
Deploying an up-to-date IPTV platform is a critical part of ensuring
the success of a modern service provider’s offering. Delivering a
multi-play proposition is a must for any network operator looking
to compete in the market today and tomorrow. And it is importantto realise that TV is an essential part of the mix. Customers expect
internet, telephony and TV from a single source and TV is an importantdriver for customer acquisition and retention. Operators are also
facing intense competition – and competition that is increasing all
the time – on multiple fronts from both national and international
providers, so it is doubly important to offer something distinctive.
And an added-value service like TV is the clearest way to do that.

operators to tap into the benefits of scale, as such platforms are
deployed across multiple service providers, enabling costs to be
kept down. They don’t need to make unnecessary big upfront
technology infrastructure investments. Because of those benefits ofscale, operators can benefit from state-of-the-art functionality that isconstantly updated without the need to maintain large engineering
teams. In fact, they are freed up from focusing on the technology
and can concentrate on marketing to, and servicing, their customers.
Such a platform should offer, among other things, an advanced
set-top box and app-based IPTV and OTT experience. It should bepossible to deliver advanced feature sets including network DVR,
catch up TV and instant restart, and applications for web, mobile andstreaming devices.

What are the key challenges facing network operators in operating
their own IPTV platforms?
Many network operators lack the critical scale that would justify thedevelopment and operation of their own home-built IPTV platform.
Such a platform comes with ever-growing requirements that are toocomplex for many operators to manage. They face increasing demands
not only from their own end customers, but also from their content
partners. They not only need to develop and operate the platform but
to constantly update it to meet new consumer demands and to ensurethat the user experience remains up to date. For many operatorsbuilding their own platform is simply not a sustainable solution.

What should network operators consider when choosing an IPTV
platform?
Choosing the right platform concept requires network operators tomake a few key strategic decisions. Operators should be clear about
the general objective of their IPTV activities and what they wantto achieve with it. They should have a clear understanding of whatskills they want to build up in-house and they have to provide a clear
direction for the business case to their teams, meaning whether the
TV product in itself shall generate a positive contribution margin orwhether it’s financed from the revenues of other product areas where
it contributes to sales. When answering these questions, network
operators need to consider the impact of increasing price pressure
they face from very large operators – typically former incumbents– that control a large part of the market. Of course, these former
incumbents are themselves under increasing pressure from global
OTT players, with subscribers increasingly tempted to cut the cord.
In competitive scenarios such as this, which are becoming more andmore frequent, the ability to deploy a carrier-grade IPTV service canmake a big contribution to maintaining or even expanding the scope
operators possess to price their services flexibly, enabling them tocompete directly with these very large players. Such TV services
are, after all, a significant driver of premium customer experience intelecommunications markets today.

What solutions are available and what do they offer?
The good news is that the market offers solutions in the shape ofcompetitive white label IPTV platforms – meaning platforms thatallow customer-branded IPTV services. Operators now have theoption of delivering a state-of-the-art IPTV service and deliveringsomething distinct without making huge upfront investments of
their own or losing control of their own destiny.
What advantages might a white label platform offer and what are
the essential elements of such a platform?
Relying on a white label platform or TV-as-a-Service enables

Industry moves | People

Digital TV Europe
September 2022

People& places

The latest appointments, promotions and departures in theEuropean digital TV industry

ITVX hires commercial lead
Ahead of the launch of ITVX later thisyear, UK pubcaster ITV has appointed
Lynette Kewley as director ofcommercial and propositions for the
streamer.
The newly created role will sit inboth the streaming and commercial
leadership teams, and will see Kewley
sit alongside chief product officer
Deep Bagchee, director of D2Ctechnology James Murphy and group chief data and AI officer Sangeevan
Bala in Rufus Radcliffe’s streaming division.
Kewley currently serves as ITV’s director of strategic partnerships, a role
she has held since March 2020. The exec is also ITV’s board representative at
YouView, and previously spent two years as head of product partnerships
EMEA for YouTube. She will be responsible for optimising all the key elementsof ITV’s streaming business, and delivering on the broadcaster’s targets todouble digital revenues to at least £750 million.

Netflix has hired a pair of execs from
Snapchat, including the social media
platform’s chief business officer, tooversee its advertising business. Jeremi
Gorman (left) and Peter Naylor who
currently serve as chief business officer
and VP of Americas, at Snap, will serve
as president of worldwide advertising
and VP of advertising sales respectively.
Gorman will report to chief operating
officer and chief product officer GregPeters, while Naylor will report to Gorman.
Gorman previously served as head ofglobal ad sales at Amazon, while Naylor
previously was head of ad sales at Hulu.

RTL Group has appointed a newchief financial officer for RTL
Deutschland. Ingrid Heisserer (left),currently CFO Austria and Germany
at the cosmetics company L’Oréal,
will become the new CFO of RTL
Deutschland, effective December 1.
She succeeds Alexander Glatz, wholeft RTL Deutschland at the end of
August. Separately, Xenia Meuser(above, right), currently SVP attract
and retain and brand and marketingat New Work, will take over as the newchief human resources officer of RTL
Deutschland from October 25.

Other moves...

Disney has raided Google for its newhead of Indian streaming giant Disney+
Hotstar. Sajith Sivanandan (above)
becomes EVP and head of Disney+
Hotstar, reporting into Rebecca
Campbell, chairman of Disney’s
international content and operationsgroup, and K Madhavan, president ofIndia’s Disney Star. Sivanandan’s remit
includes oversight of all Disney+ Hotstar
business in India, including direct
responsibility for the streamer’s businesspriorities and growth. He will also work
closely with international and US-based
Disney+ execs to fuel expansion.

40

Mark Hoffman, the chairman andpresident of NBCUniversal-owned news
broadcaster CNBC, has stepped down.
The executive became CNBC president
in 2005 before ultimately taking overas chairman in 2015. Hoffman was
replaced by KC Sullivan – former
finance chief and current president of
NBCU’s global advertising partnerships
based in London – on September 12.
He will report to Cesar Conde, who was
hired by NBCU in 2020 to oversee NBC
News, MSNBC and CNBC. Hoffman, 65,
will stay on as a consultant through thetransition

Vodafone Deutschland has named Marcel de Groot, chief commercial officer
of Vodafone’s Dutch JV with Liberty Global, VodafoneZiggo, as its new managing
director for consumer business.
Virgin Group has tapped former Virgin Media and Sky Italia CEO Tom Mockridge
to lead its new Italian broadband business Virgin Fibra.
Broadband technology solutions provider OpenVault has announced thepromotion of Keith Broach to executive vice president of global sales.
Australian social video monetisation specialist Totem Global has named Jason
Behan as director of strategic partnerships.
Integrated media technology solutions provider LTN has announced theappointment of Brad Wall, former senior vice president of network and broadcast
operations at Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution, as its new chief
technology officer.
Sports-oriented vMVPD service FuboTV has announced the appointment ofLynette Kaylor as its senior vice president, advertising sales.
The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has announced a pair of
appointments to its television board of directors: Catherine Badalamente,president and CEO of Graham Media Group; and Phil Tahtakran, SVP, head offederal government affairs for NBCUniversal.

www.digitaltveurope.com