Connected TV World Summit is next week (London, March 16-17), providing a deep-dive into the strategies that are helping leading Pay TV operators, broadcasters and other content owners transform their businesses in order to counter OTT competition, expand their own reach and grow revenues. On the morning of Day One, Nick Herm, Director of Strategy at Sky will be discussing how Sky is targeting both low and high-end ARPU segments with its increasingly broad product offering, and Christian Kurz, Senior Vice President of Research & Insights at Viacom International Media Networks is revealing what the company learned from its TV RE[DEFINED] study about the role TV plays in our lives, and how media companies need to redefine their relationship with viewers.
Jette Nygaard-Andersen, EVP & CEO Central European operations and CEO Broadcasting Product and Technology for MTG will explain how the pan-European broadcast group is following the eyeballs of the next generation. He will be providing details of MTG’s digital transformation initiatives.
On the morning of Day Two, Simon Daglish, Deputy Managing Director, Commercial at ITV will be quizzed about ITV’s creative and commercial transformation, covering its multiplaform strategy, the role of ITV Hub, viewer data and programmatic advertising. Nick North, Director of Audiences for the BBC, Nicolas Delloye, Head of Digital at Canal+ and Robert Amlung, Head of Digital at ZDF are among the panellists discussing how you make broadcast TV fit for the digital (OTT/streaming media) era.
We will spend 90 minutes analysing advanced content strategies on the afternoon of Day One. Subjects include direct-to-consumer opportunities for content owners, how content owners respond to global buying from companies like Netflix, and the future of premium drama and non-scripted content. 3Vision, the leading international content consultancy, leads the discussions and you will hear the views of Bob Leighton, SVP Programming at Liberty Global, Gary Woolf, EVP Commercial Development for All3Media, Jakob Mejlhede Andersen, Executive Vice President of Programming and Content Development at MTG, Dan Gopel, EVP of Distribution & Global Digital Partners for EMEA at ITV, and Patrick Robert, VP, International TV Sales at eOne (a leading independent content rights owner), among others.
At this two-day conference you can learn about the opportunity for platform operators to diversify their businesses and their revenue base using data insights and advertising technology. Paul Haddad, SVP & GM, Advanced Data Analytics at Cablevision Media Sales, will explain how a Pay TV operator can help advertisers and programmers find and reach ‘lost’ linear TV audiences, partly thanks to the use of STB measurement. His colleague, Ben Tatta, President of Cablevision Media Sales, will show how a cable operator can turn data into a media insights business. John Paul, MD for Advanced Advertising & Data at Liberty Global will outline the role of a Pay TV operator as the enabler for advanced advertising and rich media insights. Nikki Mendonça, President for EMEA at the advertising agency OMD – and so a leading buyer of TV advertising – will explain what precisely advertisers now want from the television industry, providing the context for the strategies being implemented by these pioneering platform operators.
This event is a great opportunity to explore the longer-term future of TV. There is an innovation workshop on AI, VR and AR (artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality), for example. Deliberately hands-on, delegates can experience how technology devised by the gaming industry could enhance the television experience and change visual storytelling. You will here how AI is being used to predict hit shows – and whether it could be used to make them! Andy Gower, Head of Interactive TV Research at BT, Dr Randolph Nikutta, Leader Interactive High End Media at Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories and Glen Mulcahy, Innovation Lead for RTÉ Technology, are among the speakers. They are discussing the production and viewing technologies that will be needed for VR and AR, and how these technologies can be used to enhance news and entertainment programming.
The session titled ‘Making TV fun again before Apple does’ explores the long-term vision for the television UEX and UI – including the concept of a one-button capability, where there is only ‘on’ or ‘off’ and ‘on’ is the perfect, personalised and data-anticipated presentation of everything you want to see, when you want to see it, taking into account factors like your mood. Arian Koster, Senior Product Owner for TV at KPN, Christophe Rufin, Director for Cloud, TV & Entertainment Ecosystems at Orange, Gert Marien, Incubation Manager for Telco Cloud & Media at Proximus and Dr Randolph Nikutta from Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories are among the contributors. More near-term, but with much still to be determined, is the market for UHD/4K and HDR. These concepts are addressed in the Immersive Television Showcase.
There is a packed and diverse agenda at this event, including a look at ‘Women in Media Tech’. This asks why we need women in tech, why tackling gender imbalance is a priority and how to engage men when it comes to improving diversity in technology companies. On Day One there is a breakfast briefing hosted by Verimatrix about using data analytics to gain competitive advantage, then a lunch workshop hosted by Ampere Analysis and Magine TV about the future of direct-to-consumer TV.
On the morning of Day Two you can hear how proposals by the European Commission to reform copyright rules for the digital era could have a major impact on the portability of connected content across the EU. Duncan Calow, Partner at the global law firm DLA Piper and William Bush, Executive Director at the Premier League, are among the speakers. We also take a look at the strategies of ‘challenger’ companies like Netflix and there is a panel discussion on the impact of the ‘streamers’ now they are becoming mainstream.
You can see the full agenda for Connected TV World Summit here. If you want to attend, you can register here.
