TiVo announced its ‘Powered by TiVo’ offer and move into the Smart TV market ahead of IBC last year and is confident that television brands and OEMs are looking for ‘independent’ alternatives to the likes of Android, Roku and indeed Samsung, which has made the Tizen OS available to third-parties. The company previously announced a deal with Vestel to cover television brands such as Vestel, Daewoo, Regal, Hitachi, Telefunken and JVC.

Sharp is launching a whole line of Smart TVs featuring the TiVo OS/platform. TiVo says the deal demonstrates demand for alternative OS options, as it predicted, and the move confirms TiVo’s expansion beyond traditional Pay TV hardware.

“We chose TiVo’s OS not only because of the superior product but also because we wanted to offer a user experience of Sharp elements with more variety and freedom,” says Nick Chen, Head of Europe, Vice President of TV-System business unit, Sharp Corporation. “We are excited to give users significantly more control on how to discover and consume content across live TV, news, sports, movies and more.”

Jon Kirchner, Chief Executive Officer at Xperi (which owns TiVo), says, “Sharp’s selection of Powered by TiVo is further proof that we are meeting a crucial need for Smart TV brands. The accelerated adoption of our independent media platform by consumer electronic brands, as well as by BMW in the car, lays a strong foundation for the future growth and success of our platform ecosystem.”

TiVo will be showcasing its independent media platform at IFA 2023 in Berlin starting September 1. You can read our original analysis here about TiVo’s move into the Smart TV market and why the company believes there is an opening for an independent Smart TV OS.

Our view then, which is unchanged, is that TiVo’s excellent UX, honed over decades in the Pay TV market, can boost the quality of the UX in the value-brand television set market, and should be viewed as a significant development for that reason, given the benefit to all television stakeholders if the UX bar can be raised in every room, in every connected TV home.

This video also shows TiVo discussing Powered by TiVo at Connected TV World Summit in March this year, when the company explained how it helps CE makers monetise their television sets, post-sale.

“There is a real advantage in acquiring content in the bundle model because we have some predictability in the volumes we will deliver. It’s then easier to negotiate segregation with providers. Once we know what we can commit to, we can trade volume for wholesale discounts. It allows us to deliver value upstream to providers, who can count on a certain revenue, which in turn enables us to deliver value downstream, to our subscribers. It’s a win-win deal.”

Explaining consumer needs (and what Pay TV providers must deliver for them), Adam Nightingale, Chief Commercial Officer at 3SS, summarised it in one word: simplicity. “TV is entertainment, where you go to stay informed or to distract yourself, and it’s crucial to make it easy. Ironically, we build huge user experiences but we don’t want people to use them – we want to get viewers watching TV as quickly as possible.”

Nightingale also emphasised the importance of personalisation in a bid to appeal to younger users. “It’s important to understand what kind of user experience appeals to the individual, and make sure what they’re seeing on TV is relevant for them. There is no one size-fits-all.

“Aggregation is key, and non-traditional content sources, such as TikTok, YouTube or local content are all important; but making sure you have them in the right format, in front of people they most appeal to, is what matters. Then comes super-personalisation: understanding, monitoring and tweaking what works and what doesn’t. It’s a never-ending editorial task, but having the means to manage user experience at a fairly granular level will be increasingly important if you want to remain relevant.”

Nancy Goldberg, EVP and Chief Marketing and Sales Officer at NAGRA Kudelski Group, also pointed to the power of personalisation, including as a way to combat the attraction of pirate services. “Piracy means users can find content easily for free, so keeping them [consumers, on Pay TV] will be harder. We must give them added flexibility, value, experience. There can’t just be one thing everybody wants; it must be hyper-personalised. The adage, give them what they want, whenever they want, couldn’t be truer today.”

Andy Waltenspiel, Managing Director, Waltenspiel Management Consulting, moderated the Connected TV World Summit panel, ‘Pay TV in the 2020s – keeping subscribers and channels onboard’. You can see the discussion here.

Docherty argues that Think360 – ThinkAnalytics’ personalised content discovery platform – can enable service providers to both predict churn and prevent it. He says that the company is tackling churn from two angles: through content discovery, service providers can prevent churn by showcasing and recommending the right content to viewers, ensuring they keep returning to the service.

“On the other side, we can predict who is likely to churn and help operators understand why so they can take appropriate actions. We’ve got a lot of valuable data on audience behaviour and content intelligence, and use that as input into AI/ML processes to predict churn.”

According to Docherty, the company can then determine why any particular viewer is likely to churn. This allows service providers to make changes to prevent future subscriber loss. The company says its customers typically see viewing time per subscriber increase by up to 60%, and the number of channels watched increasing up to 35%.

Docherty argues that in a cost-of-living crisis it is more important than ever to engage viewers through content discovery and effective recommendations. He remarks: “All the operators are under pressure – whether from the cost-of-living crisis or just in general. Pay TV operators want to minimise churn and stop people bleeding over to OTT services. With SVOD type platforms someone can unsubscribe at a touch of a button and a month later they’re not there anymore. SVOD services need to demonstrate value for money to subscribers just as much Pay TV operators do.”

In the case of AVOD services, he emphasises that its vital to engage viewers immediately because users may access the service to watch one show they have heard about, and then never return if they are not presented additional content they might also be interested in.

AVOD service providers can also ‘hyper-target’ audience segments for advertising through Think360.

He elaborates: “We take our data and then – through ML processes – automatically segment your viewers into 160 IAB audience segments. That allows you to hyper-target ads campaigns and offer those audiences to advertisers.”

Docherty also spoke about the A/B testing features of Think360 and ThinkAnalytics’ recent collaboration with 3SS, a software provider for STBs and multiscreen entertainment. The collaboration will allow operators to conduct rapid A/B testing of any aspect of their service’s UX “using real-time granular data capture for ultra-personalised viewer experiences”.

“Companies which are data driven are the ones that are going to succeed because they’re looking at what is working and what is not working in the real world, and really listening to their viewers while acting on it quickly.”

He believes a significant benefit of conducting A/B testing through Think360 is that service providers can improve user experience without large infrastructure changes, firmware changes or a dedicated IT project. He says: “From a webpage console you can construct an A/B test in five minutes, publish it and then have all the insights and analytics to measure the outcomes.”

This live webcast explores the future of aggregation – and how platform operators and streaming services that curate content can differentiate themselves in the battle to acquire and keep users. It considers the value of Originals and exclusive content – and how platforms and streaming services that lack exclusive content can set themselves apart in the 2020s, and what their value-add is for consumers.

You will hear about the evolving relationship between content curators and aggregators and their content partners – including the onboarding of apps and the benefits that Pay TV operators can bring to streaming app providers beyond ‘carriage’, from carrier billing through to marketing and advertising partnerships.

Our panellists consider the opportunities for aggregators and content curators to segment the Pay TV market and address a larger total audience, serving genre super-fans through to light and casual viewers. Extended aggregation opportunities are investigated – like music streaming and exercise apps – and we ask: can platform providers become more central in the digital consumer home?

The panellists are:

• Brigita Brjuhhanov, TV Product Owner/Team Lead, Elisa
• Joe Nilsson, Chief Commercial Officer, SportsTribal
• Tim Pearson, Vice President, Solution Marketing, NAGRA
• Mary Ann Halford, Partner, Altman Solon
• Moderator, John Moulding, Editor-in-Chief, Videonet

This webcast is live and will include audience questions. It is free and you can register here.

Elisa is one of the most important small/medium Pay TV providers in Europe, demonstrating how operators can cement their position in homes with its next-generation TV platform, Elamus, which was launched last August.

SportsTribal is a new FAST (free ad supported streaming TV) platform devoted to sports, featuring 35 channels that span billiards to combat sports, giving rights holders another distribution option beyond Pay TV and direct-to-consumer apps. This service is an app itself, appearing on Smart TV platforms.

NAGRA is a long-time leader in multiplatform television delivery and UX development (in addition to content protection, data-driven business analytics and cybersecurity. The company has extensive experience helping Pay TV providers (and indeed sport rights holders and streamers) creating platforms and services designed to attract consumers.

Altman Solon is one of the world’s largest global strategy consulting firms with an exclusive focus on the Telecommunications, Media, and Technology (TMT) sectors and among its many subject specialists has helped global media companies and dynamic new players adapt to the disruption of OTT/streaming video and the new strategies for creating, marketing, and delivering video content.

Other themes that will be addressed during this one-hour live video discussion include:

• The potential of CE platforms (from Samsung and LG to Amazon, Google and Apple) as content curators and aggregators.
• Best practice in content discovery and navigation – how to get consumers to the content they will love faster and more reliably.
• Content that attracts and keeps users on aggregated services and the relative merits of international vs local and hyper-local.
• Device strategies to reach the total subscription TV market, from high-end home gateways to streamer boxes and direct-to-TV (operator-as-an-app) approaches.
• Where content will come from as major international studios sell more of their output to their own D2C streaming service (life without your own studio).
• The potential for streaming services to grow their app ‘universe’ with third-party content relationships, and how third-party content is curated and presented.
• How smaller operators remain competitive in television services, ensuring sophisticated aggregation, personalisation, content discovery and navigation experiences.

Register here

The illusion of the perfect video service

Our industry is immature. And as with most industries that are still in their infancy, people tend to generalise and make assumptions about customers and how they behave. As the industry matures, we will also develop a deeper understanding of users; how they behave differently, appreciate different things, and respond to different messages.

Many OTT providers mistakenly believe that by copying what has already been done by the market leaders, they will create a “perfect video service” and hence also achieve maximum customer satisfaction. As a result, they often end up with something bland and generic, which fails to truly engage users and entice them to come back. I believe that it’s possible to both deliver better consumer experiences and enhance communication to improve engagement, retention, and ultimately revenues from a video service. In a recent market survey commissioned by Accedo, a whopping 85% of industry executives say that they are either likely or very likely to experiment with the user experience in a bid to harvest intelligence on usability and engagement.

Making use of data to understand your customers

So, most video executives seem to agree that there is a need to experiment in order to improve engagement. However, according to the same market survey, only 27% of respondents say that they’re currently using data to decide how to adapt the user experience. My conclusion is that there is certainly a lot of experimentation going on, but the evaluation of success is based on overall usage (or more qualitative user group studies) instead of the underlying user data. I also guess that UX adaptations are often reliant on the Product Team’s opinion rather than on real customer insights.

I understand why this is the case. These teams are passionate about their services and want to create the best user experience possible. However, they will always attempt to do so from their own perspective. They will make decisions on design and optimisations, based on what they like and how they will use the service, rather than the customers they are trying to reach and monetise. Sometimes these two perspectives will be fully aligned, but more often than not, the result will be missing key behavioural aspects from the end user.

Understanding that consumers don’t behave consistently

Most e-commerce experiences are infrequent. Consumers visit an e-merchant on a weekly, monthly, or in some cases even annual basis based on a specific need that they are looking to fulfill. This means that these companies have to quickly capture the attention of users, leveraging their entire tool kit to convince them to make a purchase.

For a video service provider this is different. They need to find a way to simultaneously help a first-time user understand what’s available, while convincing a frequent user to prolong their latest binge-watching experience. To make things even more complex, that same frequent user may sometimes not be interested in watching the next episode of a series, looking instead to browse and discover other content available on the platform. In any case, the objective for the video service provider will always be to increase consumer engagement and satisfaction. The more engaged a customer is, the smaller is the risk of churn.

The key to tackling this lies in understanding and leveraging behavioural data. While every consumer is different, combining user data with behavioural data will make it easier for video service providers to plan and execute experimentation. They can turn behavioral trends into actual adaptations of the user experience, consulting the data to see which initiatives lead to actual increases in engagement.

Measuring success over time

The key to success is user engagement. This does not necessarily mean the number of visits per month or even the amount of minutes watched, but how the consumers enjoy the overall experience of the video service. Each video service will need to consider the right metrics to measure their users’ engagement. Over time, you can create a metric for engagement that works for you, by analysing the data and tying things back to the end goals for your business, whether that’s subscriptions, advertising revenues, or something else. Once you know that, you will also understand what’s driving your engagement and you can start working on how to improve it.

You will surely need to update and tweak your engagement metric over time. Your service evolves both from a content and a feature perspective, but also from a user standpoint. Maybe the engagement drivers for early adopters are different from those of the mass market?

To conclude, I believe that the OTT video industry has only just begun its journey to really understand user behaviour and how to drive engagement. Together with our partner Jump, Accedo is working to create the right connection between insights and actions that will help video services succeed in a data-driven world.

“I’m looking to create a unique consumer experience where consumers believe that the value exchange, where they see advertising in return for content, is worth it. Without that they will opt-out of advertising [by paying for ad-free environments.]. Working with partners, there is lots of opportunity to reinvent what the advertising product looks like.”

She cited a practical example: less advertising once it becomes clear that the viewer is embarking on a binge-viewing session. Indulge that, she advised media owners. “Advertising, when it is done well, is a service to the consumer and if we don’t provide that service, people will not participate in our advertising, and none of us want that.”

Reed needs frequency capping so viewers do not get a negative view of the brand because they are inundated with their ads – and NBCU is delivering on that wish, at least on its own media assets. Molen said: “That was a big thing. We heard back from consumers as well as marketers, who were saying that if we watch lots of streaming, we are seeing the same commercial over and over. We built frequency capping to make sure viewers experience different ads.”

Both these executives are big fans of the pause ad, now available on Peacock, with Molen calling it a “big and beautiful ad for marketers” and Reed embracing the opportunity it presents “for beautiful brands with beautiful stories to tell.” The L’Oreal marketer said: “You literally have a billboard inside someone’s home – a big, beautiful canvas.”

NBCU has brought another ad innovation to market in the streaming environment, called Spotlight. With this, a buyer gets their ad inserted as the first commercial in the first standard ad break for every viewer on the streaming service, regardless of what they are watching (so including virtual linear channels and long-form VOD). Spotlight is only available for primetime. This is an attempt to bring the fast reach build of linear TV into the streaming environment as audiences grow.

You can find out more about The Future of TV Advertising U.S., and link to the video recordings of the event, here.