Netgem operates the netgem.tv multiscreen entertainment platform as a B2B2C offering, with several European telcos using this as their television service under their own brand. Netgem.tv is used in 600,000 households. The company has partnered with Gamestream, which provides white label B2B cloud gaming solutions to telcos that include high performance, low-latency streaming games and other video games including HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED and Garfield Lasagna Party. Gamestream provides a catalogue that includes hundreds of game licenses for a family audience, with new games added every month.

The new TV-and-games offer supports multi-player gaming and enables fan communities across both TV and mobile screens. Netgem claims it will transform these screens into interactive hubs for family entertainment.

Ivan Lebeau, Co-Founder and President of Gamestream, declares: “With Netgem, we are shaping the entertainment of tomorrow. Our unified offer meets real challenges for telecom operators – increasing revenue per subscriber thanks to innovative services, while capturing their attention by building their loyalty to the entire content ecosystem.”

Mathias Hautefort, CEO of the Netgem Group, comments: “Young generations are looking for new TV experiences. This is a strategic problem for content channels and operators who have invested considerable sums in the creation of TV subscriber bases and invested in [set-top] boxes sitting in customers’ homes. With this new proposition, supporting a more immersive television experience, we will contribute to making TV a place of sharing again, supporting entertainment for the whole family.”

“As a user myself, I still sometimes end up in the situation where on a Saturday evening, I can’t find anything to watch,” Brigita Brjuhhanov, TV Product Owner at Elisa Estonia, told  Connected TV World Summit two weeks ago. “And that shouldn’t happen. We should never have to search for half an hour, or an hour, to find what we want to watch.” She added: “It’s our responsibility to have happy eyeballs in front of the TV and not the ones feeling frustrated.”

While it may be tempting to blame discovery on the viewer and their indecisiveness, the panel firmly asserted that it was the role of content and service  providers to make discovery as painless as possible. And this starts with ensuring that platforms are optimised for every device and environment.

“The reality is that we need to be where the eyeballs are to make our business models work. So, we can’t assume everyone has a particular device. It’s about understanding that the consumer probably isn’t going to change their input source,” Gary Woolf, EVP Strategic Development at All3Media International, explained.

Even once a user is on a platform, the sheer volume of content can be hard to negotiate. “There’s an abundance of content and greater choice creates a challenge,” said Matthias Puschmann, TV Platform Partnerships EMEA at Google. “Our first priority is making the content available or helping our partners to provide the content to users, but then also putting them in position to understand what’s happening on a user’s device, and then presenting the content in a way that resonates.”

Platforms have always looked to keep users engaged by delivering recommendations, and while “curated recommendations are still relevant” according to Brjuhhanov, providers cannot rest on their laurels and must ‘be bold’ with creating recommendation engines. But if these backfire “you can lose the audience’s trust,” she asserted.

A key part of being able to recommend content, and making it searchable, is having complete and accurate metadata. “A problem we have as an industry is one of legacy,” said Woolf. He described the issues he had recently when bringing an old TV series  onto a streaming platform: “Not only are you cleaning up these episodes and getting them digitised, but the level of metadata that was recorded 40 years ago is nowhere near what is required. So immediately you need an army of people to create this metadata.”

Brjuhhanov agreed, stating that this issue also affects content in lesser used languages. “Having a ‘smaller’ language, and creating the metadata for that, I think it’s a challenge. And we don’t have an easy solution for that.”

Every provider wants their content to be discovered easily by all viewers. But at the end of the day, as Brjuhhanov pointed out, “We all want to be a button on the remote, but in the end we’ll run out of buttons.” Woolf pointed towards FAST (free ad-supported linear streaming channels) as an emerging way to offer consumers a different service in order to stand out. “Sometimes people just want to come home and have content on, and not have their TV ask them what to put on. This is where FAST has developed.”

However, according to Brjuhhanov, grabbing and keeping the attention of customers comes down to content, “and when we talk about what content should be prioritised, it should be what the customer wants to watch. We need to put egos aside.”

The panel was moderated by Bernd Riefler, Founder & CEO at veed analytics.

These key themes were echoed in two sessions at the event: first in a discussion with Matt Jones, Chairman & President of COVESA and Director of Global Technology Strategy at Ford Motor Company, and then in a panel discussion featuring Pierre Donath, Chief Product Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at 3SS, Robert Dube, Head of Product TOGGO at Super RTL, and Amanda Phillips, Regional Client Lead Europe at WPP | Ford. Dr Bernd Riefler, Founder and CEO, veed analytics, chaired the discussion.

Though the idea of sitting back and watching TV in a car may seem a long way off for most people, the space is ready to explode, and there is an abundance of in-vehicle entertainment systems already in existence. “There are many new car brands coming to the market and they have to come up with a clear differentiation,” Donath expanded. “And I think they are looking towards entertainment as one differentiator.”

Phillips agreed, noting how car manufacturers are looking beyond selling “just metal, and instead thinking about a whole user experience”. But some panellists were concerned that this could lead to further market fragmentation which could negatively affect user experience. “It’s a new cake, and everyone wants a piece of that cake,” Dube said. “But the problem is that many companies don’t look from a user perspective. They see the new business opportunity and go for it, and then the product does not serve user needs. I really fear that customers will face some issues within the next ten years.”

As part of COVESA – the Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance – Ford’s Jones is at the forefront of creating standardisation in the sector, and he said collaboration between both traditional OEMs, new vehicle manufacturers and tech companies can help create a high-quality universal entertainment user experience. “We need content aggregators, content producers, the people that understand how to create a compelling set of interactions and user experiences participating actively within COVESA.”

On the subject of content, Phillips speculated that automotive companies will look towards local providers, especially as they build out content that fits around the specific setting of the car. “This is a revolution of dead time,” she asserted. “​​If you have either ten minutes or 20 minutes available, it would be great if we could actually select content based on that. So, there’s an opportunity to really look at content, both the partnerships, and also curation and creation … for specific use cases.”

Dube agreed that specialised content types could be created for a car setting and that access to the unique data points within vehicles can help content creators to tailor their output for this new environment.

Donath added: “The car has unique data like speed of drive, time until destination is reached, and these can be used to personalise or adapt the experience. So, if I am taking a journey for five hours, I will get a completely different set of recommendations than if I was just taking a 10-minute trip to the office. This is something that is very unique.”

Advertisers can also take advantage of these new inputs, creating something that is palatable and satisfying rather than distracting, Phillips stated.

With 1.5 billion cars on the roads, the opportunity is there for in-car entertainment to elevate the car to a second living room, but all panellists agreed that user experience must be seamless and effective if it is to become, as Phillips put it, “an extension of our life”.

The rapid growth of streaming TV consumption makes it imperative that networks, studios and MVPDs have a ‘grown up’ connected TV offering – one that allows them to compete for every eyeball and ad dollar that migrates into the premium digital video environment. This means:

• Holding onto audiences, and attracting new viewers, by ensuring a consumer-friendly ad experience with modest ad loads, frequency capping and relevant ads.
• Enabling ad insertion (and targeting) at huge scale with total reliability, so that mega-events including sport and breaking news can be fully monetized.
• Maximizing the value of inventory by carefully managing direct sales with multiple programmatic demand sources.
• Effectively using audience data to achieve better targeting and a personalized ad viewing experience, even in a cookie-less world.

The pandemic accelerated all digital behaviours, including TV viewing. Mass-scale connected TV was tomorrow’s opportunity and challenge, but tomorrow arrived early. Join us live to hear how networks, studios and distributors can rethink the ad-supported TV model and ready themselves for connected TV primetime.

Register here.

This webcast explores:

• What a holistic ad performance and revenue strategy looks like, and how you find the sweet spot where ‘audience + avails = best possible yield outcome’, and how you avoid the one extra ad that loses you money, as viewers ‘tune out’.
• The potential for greater integration and synergies between SSAI and audience data and targeting capabilities –and how this could be implemented.
• How to manage ad frequency in a multi ad server (direct, programmatic, affiliate) environment and so ensure ad repetition does not degrade the ‘premium’ TV experience.
• The next steps in dynamic ad insertion, including the benefits of server-side ad insertion and client-side ad insertion, and how these can be used successfully in a hybrid model.
• The potential for a multi-DAI vendor strategy (similar to multi-CDN strategies) and how this could influence ad delivery performance and costs.
• How to manage multiple inventory owners within the same video session using an understanding of who has the ‘right to sell’, plus the ad routing and decisioning processes that support sales business rules.
• The special considerations when streaming ad-supported content into MVPD set-top boxes.
• How to monitor and diagnose the causes of ad errors, and so increase ad delivery reliability.
• How organizations are managing ad insertion for very large scale events, including the implications for ad insertion infrastructure