The app would also provide the means to subscribe and unsubscribe to the third-party hosted streaming services, with the Pay TV provider being the universal subscriptions manager – a core future Pay TV operator function that Bandeira believes should also appear in all Deutsche Telekom’s consumer touchpoints.

“This is a clear part of our vision,” he revealed at Connected TV World Summit this spring. You can read where this multiscreen super-aggregator app fits into the wider Deutsche Telekom Pay TV and CPE roadmap in our separate report, here.

Related content:

Deutsche Telekom reveals its CPE roadmap: virtual STBs or its own version of Sky Glass, and away from standard Smart TV apps

Deutsche Telekom presents its vision for long-term Pay TV operator success

Cyta encouraging operator-as-an-app usage by selling Smart TVs on two-year instalment plan

“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.

“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.

The first approach is a greater focus on scripted content, with Towler arguing that BVOD (broadcaster VOD/streaming) services are underweight in this department when compared to SVODs (both for current catalogues and upcoming commissions).

She presented figures showing the proportion of UK SVOD and BVOD content catalogues that are scripted. Taken in January 2023 (from the Ampere service Ampere Analytics) these reveal that ITV has the highest proportion of scripted content among UK broadcaster streaming services, at 53%, but this is still lower than all the major SVODs.

The UK SVOD with the lowest proportion of scripted content is NOW, at 57%, while Disney+ leads with 84%. The Ampere Analysis figures show that My5 (the Channel 5 BVOD offer) has 23% scripted content, with All4 (from Channel 4) at 33% and BBC iPlayer at 45%.

Towler’s advice is that while scripted content is more expensive, it has higher engagement and better longevity. To support this, she offered the London audience a graph showing the average relative popularity of scripted vs unscripted titles in the months following release, using an Ampere Analysis Popularity Score that is a measure of relative consumer search activity levels on third-party sources such as Google and Wikipedia. This showed that scripted content begins life significantly more ‘popular’ than unscripted content and then increases that relative advantage dramatically in the months that follow.

The popularity data came from ‘Ampere Analytics, Ampere Commissioning’ (a service within Ampere Analysis) and covered the top 25 scripted titles and top 25 unscripted titles released by BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 for seasons released since 2018.

At launch, scripted content was around five times as popular as unscripted (based on the search activity), but at three months this was closer to 8x as popular, and at nine months it was in the region of 12 times as popular as unscripted.

With the cost of scripted content in mind, Towler demonstrated how the rate of growth for global content spend is slowing, but noted that co-commissions can be used to increase output. This is the second of her strategies to increase broadcaster share of digital viewing time.

She gave figures for the % of broadcaster scripted series that are co-commissions on a quarter-by-quarter basis. These showed regular fluctuations but a general downward trend.

For example, the highest peak for broadcaster scripted series co-commissions since Q2 2022 has been 11%, whereas there were peaks of 17% in Q2 2020 and 14% in Q1 2021. The most recent trough was 8% in Q3 2022, whereas previous troughs were 12% (e.g. Q3/Q4 2020) and 10% (e.g. Q3 2021 and Q1 2022).

Co-commissions are often among broadcasters’ most popular recent shows, Towler told the Connected TV World Summit gathering (once again using Ampere’s Popularity Score, and so based on relative consumer third-party search activity).

A diagram outlined the proportion of Top 50 popular titles in 2022 (in the UK) that were co-commissions (using the Top 50 across BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 – with the data again from ‘Ampere Analytics, Ampere Commissioning’). For all shows in the Top 50 during 2022, one-fifth were co-commissions. If you count only the newer content – the Top 50 shows in 2022 that were also released after 2020 – two-thirds were co-commissions.

“Co-commissions offer a cost-effective opportunity to increase the volume of premium scripted content in broadcasters’ slates,” Towler concluded.

Towler’s third suggestion is that broadcasters should take advantage of the fact that non-exclusive licensing is set to increase – meaning more studio titles will be available to license. She used HBO Max in the USA as an example, where the proportion of the catalogue that is exclusive was 80% in August 2022 but 75% in January 2023.

[The context, of course, is that when major international studios launched their direct-to-consumer ‘+’ services there was a general shift towards studios feeding their own streaming services with their own content – sometimes at the expense of third-party licensing. If studios are licensing more to third-parties again, broadcasters can boost their BVOD offer with the titles that become available.]

Towler also suggested that broadcasters can license their own content to (non-broadcaster) AVOD and FAST services to reach new audiences.

The fourth item on the ‘to-do’ list is to release more digital-first premieres, which Towler described as “key for transitioning viewers to the online platform.” Based on first-run series released in 2022, ITV is leading the way among UK broadcasters for BVOD premieres, with 7% of those first-runs going to the streaming service first. For Channel 4 the figure was 6%, with the BBC at 3%.

As well as getting linear viewers into streaming, first-run digital premieres will help draw in new audiences, she noted. Towler also advised that weekly releases on VOD help retain users and prolong engagement, compared to full-series drops.

The final part of Towler’s five-point plan is a focus on younger viewers. She had a graph showing that Netflix Originals skew younger than content on SVOD in general, and pointed out that these are backed by an aggressive social media strategy “that is key for engaging younger groups.”

Broadcasters could learn from Netflix in this regard. “A successful social media strategy across Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat can help engage this demographic,” Towler advised.

Whole sessions are devoted to answering these questions, and others explore how broadcasters can increase their share of digital viewing time, and what the expansion of SAVOD (Subscription with Advertising VOD, exemplified by Netflix Basic with Ads) and FAST means for the TV advertising market. Early confirmed speakers across the agenda include:

• Pedro Bandeira, Vice President Product and New Business, Europe, Deutsche Telekom
• Aušra Sidaravičienė, Group Chief Technical Officer, TV3 Group
• John Jelley, Senior Vice President, Product and UX, Peacock & International, D2C at NBCUniversal Media
• Ken Morse, Director of Application Delivery, Sky
• Pierre-Adrian Irlé, Head of Play Suisse, SRG SSR
• Jason Briggs, President and General Manager, RDK
• Mehmet Eroglu, Chief Commercial Officer, Foxxum
• Gary Woolf, EVP Strategic Development, All3Media International
• Marcos Milanez, EU General Manager, Rakuten TV
• Ivars Lubāns, Head of Product, Go3, TV3 Group
• Akhila Khanna, VP, Partnerships and Business Development, UK, Paramount.

You can see an up-to-date list of publicly announced speakers here.

There is a session titled ‘Driving D2C and SVOD growth’, focusing on how channel groups, studios and SVOD providers maximise their potential audience reach, convert app availability into paying customers, maintain attention in an increasingly competitive marketplace, guarantee win-win relationships with CE/OS/STB device platform providers, and expand market share during a cost-of-living crisis.

As part of a four-session advertising stream on Tuesday March 21, leaders who are driving the advanced advertising transformation will explore how we maximise the value of free connected TV, and how we make TV a better product for advertisers (spanning the latest thinking on making cross-platform buying easier, improving cross-platform measurement, and attributing TV exposure to business outcomes, among other things.

A session is devoted to ‘Preparing for a larger addressable TV universe’, exploring the challenges (as well as opportunities) as the number of addressable-enabled platforms and homes increases – acknowledging the fact that free-to-air platforms are increasingly ready to join the party, adding to Pay TV and streaming footprints.

The ‘Win-wins in the Television OS marketplace’ session focuses on how TV-OS providers, television set OEMs and content owners work together to increase total household reach, audience engagement and ongoing revenue opportunities for streaming TV. This includes  a look at the Pay TV operator Smart TV model (pioneered by Sky Glass), the role of independent OS/UX providers, and how global OS/UX providers in the CTV/Smart TV space differentiate themselves.

Connected TV World Summit is renowned for delivering smart new thinking and research, and many of the world’s leading analysts are gathering to explore these mission-critical issues:

• ‘The subscription economy in an inflationary era’ – Tim Mulligan, Executive Vice President and Research Director, MIDiA Research
• ‘Content and windowing strategies in the D2C market’ – Jack Davison, Executive Vice President, 3Vision
• ‘The impact of Netflix and TikTok in video advertising’ – Maria Rua Aguete, Senior Director, Media and Entertainment, Omdia
• ‘How broadcasters increase their share-of-time in digital’ – Lottie Towler, Research Manager, Ampere Analysis
• ‘The future of free-to-air aggregation’ – Richard Broughton, Executive Director, Ampere Analysis
• ‘Decarbonising TMT’ – Alice Enders, Director of Research, Enders Analysis
• ‘Technology choices shaping the sports experience of the future’ – Tom Morrod, Research Director & Co-Founder, Caretta Research
• ‘Media & Entertainment opportunities in the metaverse’ – Joseph Teasdale, Head of Tech, Enders Analysis.

‘Delivering an experience: STB & Operator App’ is a session that explores two parallel and closely entwined technology roadmaps: the next-generation TV experience delivered via a set-top box, and operator/aggregator services enabled directly on a television without an STB, whether in the form of ‘Operator as an App’ on a third-party television brand or embedded into an operator-produced television set (as with the pioneering Sky Glass model).

In ‘Cementing the consumer love affair with TV’, 90 minutes are devoted to best practice and global innovation in content discovery. Ampere Analysis is leading a special session dedicated to the future of televised sport, focusing on rights and distribution strategy, while there are parallel sessions devoted to beating the sports streaming pirates and building the sports streaming networks of the future.

Connected TV World Summit has moved to a new venue: Convene, 22 Bishopsgate – London’s second tallest building, next to the Gherkin and minutes from Tower 42. For the first time, the organisers (disclaimer – Videonet is owned by Adwanted Group, which produces Connected TV World Summit) are hosting some Masterclasses, making use of ultra-modern networking and meeting spaces to dig deeper into narrow-focus topics, led by experts in the field.

Nathalie Lethbridge, Founder and Principal Advisor, Atonik Digital, leads the FAST Masterclass, and the consulting/research firm MTM leads the Customer Retention and Acquisition Masterclass. There is a special breakfast devoted to how we decarbonise the television value-chain while ensuring the industry ends the process as large as it started.

The organisers are predicting 100+ senior-level speakers and 600+ (unique) delegates over the two days.

You can find more details about Connected TV World Summit 2023, here.

The registration for this event can be found here.

Connected TV World Summit is produced by Adwanted Events (formerly called Mediatel Events). Adwanted Events also delivers The Future of TV Advertising Global (also with Sydney and Canada editions), The Future of Media, The Future of Brands and The Future of Audio, among others.

Instead Vodafone Group, which counts 22 million TV households across 11 European markets, believes it will stand out by providing homes with a mix of broadcast linear TV and the streaming services they want, in a unified experience that is built upon bespoke and individualised discovery for each household, itself driven by smart metadata integrations, plus complementary partnerships with direct-to-consumer streaming services that range from simple reselling to carrier billing to customer care. And Wierig added that centralised negotiations with content providers should enable discounting for Vodafone customers.

Reiterating the commitment to television, the executive pointed to the strategic reorganisation of Vodafone Group to create a harmonised, pan-European approach to television product and innovation. Wierig heads the new Group Entertainment department, created 2.5 years ago, that is creating this more holistic entertainment strategy, backed by a global product management team and featuring centralised negotiations with content providers.

Speaking at Connected TV World Summit in May, Wierig said Vodafone avoids any possibility of becoming a ‘dumb pipe’ by extending its connectivity DNA and customer footprint to new product categories spanning entertainment, smart-tech, home ecosystems and payment solutions. And in entertainment, it is the complementary nature of the partnerships with streaming TV services that is driving innovation. “We support the direct-to-consumer strategies of content providers by giving them access to our connectivity customer base and our strong marketing and sales performance. We work closely with them to help them penetrate our customer base with their content and services.”

Wierig said that yes, Vodafone is a super-aggregator, but he emphasised that this means the aggregation of both broadcast TV and “the very valuable and relevant content from the OTT streamers.” It is not just about aggregating apps. He pointed to a 60% viewing share for linear TV today – and believes it will remain at this level. “That means our clear goal is to bring relevant content to our Vodafone homes as a hybrid solution – a best-of-breed and ‘best-of-blend’ across linear TV, with its associated TV Anytime and TV Anywhere, plus the best OTT services.”

Asked by interviewer Ben Keen, Analyst & Advisor, Technology, Media & Telecoms, if more apps would mean less subscription TV linear channel deals, the answer was a firm ‘no’. Wierig made it clear that Vodafone Group is committed to aggregating linear Pay TV channels that it licenses, packages, prices and markets.” But it was clear that more apps onboarding and apps-based viewing will mean holistic packaging and pricing innovation, with bundling viewed as a key value-add. “One of the elements we can bring to the table is centralised negotiations, and the chance of a discount [on the cost of a streaming service].”

Wierig believes Vodafone can help streaming services to grow at a time when consumers may need convincing that they should add a second or third paid service to their streaming stack. He also believes that the introduction of lower-priced, ad-supported tiers by some formerly subscription dominated streaming services will give Pay TV operators more flexibility when creating bundles and placing OTT services into packages.

Content discovery is where Vodafone can add serious value to streaming apps partners and, given that streaming services can be found pretty much everywhere, this is a business imperative if you want to play in the future aggregation marketplace. “The question is how every consumer can find the right content, given that content sources are increasing significantly. So, we look closely into customer segmentation. Our goal is to give every customer – whether a family with kids or a single person household, or a couple – an individualised experience.

So, this is about discovery, and that requires proper metadata integration and unified search across various content offerings. “It is not always easy to convince OTT service providers to be really open [with metadata] but we are getting there, first of all because we are complementary to their D2C approach and we can offer strong marketing and sales, and that is a perfect fit strategically,” Wierig told the London audience.

Vodafone Group is particularly active as a TV provider in Germany, Spain and Portugal, and has enjoyed content exclusivity – as with sports rights – in certain markets. But the Group has concluded that it is generally happy with non-exclusive partnerships. Wierig agreed that this has the affect of de-risking the business, providing a better ‘risk-to-reward’ balance. Shunning exclusive content rights like sport does not mean turning down any exclusives, however, as seen by the recent HBO Max exclusive telco marketing partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery, for example. “It does depend on the opportunity, and where it is needed and it is helpful, and where the risk/reward profile works, it is something we can look at. But in general, we are more on the non-exclusive path.”

Bravo noted: “OTT technology simplifies all the technology standards we have to use in our devices, which has time-to-market benefits. And you can see the amount of investment in set-top boxes by big streaming companies. Until now we had lots of legacy in the broadcast and multicast space. We have created a new television ecosystem – a single product for all our NatCos. Now we must improve OTT capacity and move customers to the new ecosystem.”

Interviewed by Andy Waltenspiel, Managing Director at Waltenspiel Management Consulting, Bravo confirmed that Deutsche Telekom views the set-top box as a key control point and a device it is committed to, even though it is seeking ways to implement its full Pay TV operator experience on other devices. He agreed with comments his boss, Pedro Bandeira (VP Product and New Business, Europe at Deutsche Telekom) made previously (elsewhere) that the TV industry had possibly under-invested in CPE in recent years.

“It is clear the customer experience is connected to what happens in their homes and that applies to all CPE, not only set-top boxes,” Bravo noted. “People thought for many years that telcos were selling X Mb of fibre or xDSL but, to be honest, we were selling Wi-Fi, and for that you need the best devices. I think we need more powerful devices, and you need to control the number of providers that you use – if you have a zoo [of devices] you have lifecycle management issues.”

In January this year Deutsche Telekom launched its MagentaTV One STB, powered by Android TV OS, in Germany to deliver its premium TV experience. This follows the introduction of the Android TV OS powered MagentaTV Stick in 2020. On the partnership with Android, Bravo pointed to the importance of apps aggregation and the ability to scale apps availability. Asked about the decision to choose Android TV over a home-grown OS, he said: “You have to think about the trade-off between control of the user experience and scalability.”

Asked how Deutsche Telekom can differentiate in the super-aggregation function, he pointed to the need for “an excellent user experience for content discovery and the way you implement that with different [consumer/content] touch points.”

Touching upon non-STB device strategy, Bravo acknowledged that Deutsche Telekom was watching Sky Glass with interest. He did not rule out the possibility of DT making its Pay TV experience available through its own television sets, too. “We are tracking this proposition to see if it makes sense,” he told the London audience.