Magine TV focuses on win-win to attract broadcasters to its aggregated multichannel OTT platform

Magine TV (rebranded from Magine), the OTT linear and catch-up multiscreen service that aggregates different broadcasters and channels into a freemium offering in Sweden and Germany, believes it has established the win-win relationship that will attract and retain top content owners to the platform. The company has had notable success in attracting the ‘terrestrial’ broadcasters from these two territories and scored a major win earlier this year when it became the first third-party OTT service on which ProSiebenSat.1 channels can be distributed.

There are three main benefits for broadcasters, according to Jon Gisby, EVP Business Development at Magine TV: Increased reach (across all devices), the ability to further monetize existing rights windows and perhaps most interestingly, “access to very rich data that is authenticated down to an individual viewer profile”. Gisby says this combination of benefits is very exciting.

“From a broadcaster’s proposition, it only works if we stroke the cat the right way!” he explains. “So we work with rights the broadcasters have and we only do things that make sense for them and their business models.” Examples of this include preventing start-over viewing or fast-forwarding through advertising as required.

Magine TV has certainly impressed in Germany where it launched in March with over 60 national and international channel partners. This included ARD, ZDF, RTL, RTL II, VOX and ProSieben, Sat.1, among others. It is the line-up of the major broadcasters, still so popular with viewers, that led the company to describe itself as a genuine online alternative to traditional free-to-air television, albeit one that is available across all screens including smartphone, tablet, Smart TV and computer.

Kamal Bherwani, Chairman of Magine TV, has called the service an ‘omni-channel TV experience’ and said of the German launch, “The day when a complete TV service with all major broadcasters can be offered over the Internet has arrived.” This, in itself, is an interesting development. There have been some efforts to aggregate different broadcaster streaming services into one place through a programme guide so they are presented like a traditional TV service, a concept that means consumers can avoid opening and closing individual apps. Magine TV is the example of this service type that is currently gaining the most admiration and attention.

With a linear channel line-up and a backwards-facing programme guide that leads to seven day catch-up viewing for different channels, this service echoes the set-top box based hybrid broadcast broadband (HBB) experience seen on platforms like YouView in terms of what a user sees. The difference is that this is not hybrid (using broadcast signals for linear and IP for catch-up) but fully OTT. Magine TV offers a free service with pay channel bundles that you can add, with 30 day contracts, in what it describes as a freemium business model.

Magine TV has the same mindset as the platform operators running HBB services, namely that linear TV remains the heart of the television experience, complemented rather than displaced by on-demand. Jon Gisby recently referred to the now famous January 2011 speech Ed Richards of Ofcom made to the Oxford Media Convention when he said, “TV is becoming the cockroach of the Internet apocalypse….whatever the Internet revolution throws at it, TV survives and survives and survives. Its resilience is conspicuous at a time of turbulent change. For all the advances made by an increasingly pervasive and media-rich Internet, the content and the service that still leads the way is old-fashioned linear television.”

Gisby explains that when Magine TV was building its service, and envisioning what a television service should look in the absence of all legacy constraints, it decided that linear TV must still be at the centre of everything. He even claimed at the Connected TV Summit this summer that two-thirds of viewing hours deserve to be watched live or nearly live, pointing to the obvious ones like sport and news but also suggesting that first run drama, current affairs, chat shows and most daytime shows are linear experiences. “The daytime show is background noise for people, like radio,” he argued.

[As an aside, Netflix has decided that the chat show does not need to be a linear experience anymore. As you can read in this story, the company is trying to reinvent this genre to appeal to what it believes is the on-demand generation.]

Returning to the theme of data, Gisby says big data is also a big challenge. “There are enormous amounts of data made available from personal authentication. There is the potential for data analytics that helps to personalize the product and that becomes very powerful.”

In May, Magine TV appointed Dr Ambuj Goyal, a 32-year IBM veteran and data analysis expert, to its Board. He was General Manager of Information Management and Business Analytics at IBM, helping companies find efficient ways to store, manage and extract value from information. Kamal Bherwani (Magine TV Chairman) said of that appointment: “It is important for us to engage with broadcasters, advertisers and consumers as comprehensively as possible, and to ensure that we utilize technology and data in order to provide the best next-generation experience.”

As a recently launched OTT service (it made its debut in Sweden, in March 2013), Magine TV makes use of cloud computing and infrastructure and Gisby highlights a few of the benefits it derives from that. The first is rapid development cycles (Magine can update its services daily and sometimes does) and another is scalability, including the ability to scale in real-time in response to demand for services.  He said that overall the cloud means Magine TV is enormously flexible and can operate at low cost.

Editor’s comment

Out of the three key benefits Magine TV has listed for content partners, the access to rich data is the most interesting right now. Data strategies are rising to the top of the agenda for broadcasters and platform operators, who are aware of the need to know more about viewers, partly to help them personalize services (e.g. recommendations) but partly to prepare them for new advertising opportunities, most notably for dynamic addressable advertising insertion.

Also, while most broadcasters are reluctant to make premium online advertising inventory available for programmatic based selling at this point, there are plenty of supporters of programmatic (automated, data driven and auction-based) trading who believe that programmatic, in one form or another, will gain ground in premium online video ad sales.

There is a school of thought that commercial broadcasters must attain precise insights into what their own inventory is worth, based on demand for it and the people who are watching and their behaviours. If these insights are available in real-time, they can be used to counter buyer-side data analytics that are often used in programmatic trading to dictate the value of inventory. It means broadcasters can establish their own input into real-time automated buy/sell decisions that will be accepted (so the theory goes) by the buying side (e.g. brands or agencies working through demand side buying platforms).

Whatever the motivations are at any broadcaster, the fact is that data is now big news, and online platforms are a source of rich behavioural data if nothing else. If you can tie an IP address to some demographic information as well as behavioural information (as Channel 4 does thanks to its viewer registration programme at its 4oD catch-up service), you can start to learn more about the type of people that watch certain shows, all of it valuable to the content owner and potentially to advertisers.

Some Pay TV operators are building up their database of knowledge thanks to set-top box reporting, where the STBs monitor all channel changes and how long people watch programmes and adverts. They already have access to billing and geographic information to help their profiling. Their TV Everywhere services are also a source of data, of course. The free-to-air market must not get left behind. The UK media consulting firm Decipher observed that the key point about the Freetime companion app in the UK (which accompanies the Freetime HBB STB/DVR offering from Freesat, the free-to-air satellite platform) is its data capture.

In this article the company says the really significant thing that Freesat has done with its companion app is ask customers to log-in. “More importantly, they have matched a box ID to a name, postal address and email address, so for the first time we have the beginnings of a customer database in the free-to-air part of the industry,” the company explained in a January blog. “Not only that, but it appears to be a system whose ability to harness data on viewing choices and TV behaviour can be grown over time.”