“Everybody is aiming at doing super-aggregation,” says Marco Frattolin, Head of Operator Products at Vewd – an OTT software solution provider, “You see TV manufacturers launching new interfaces that are supposed to bring all the content together for the end user. You see TV manufacturers adding free channels to their TVs. In terms of super-aggregation, I think Pay TV operators are really well positioned – if you compare their position with other players like TV manufacturers or OTT apps – to become the best super-aggregator. They’re in an excellent position but they need to leverage it. They need to evolve their strategy and technology to actually take advantage and reap the benefits.”
Last year, Vewd launched the Operator TV in collaboration with European TV manufacturer Vestel. The Software-as-a-Solution based, customisable Smart TV product allows Pay TV operators to extend their branding and control over the device’s user interface. Frattolin believes that Pay TV operators can expect to improve their customer reach when combining the Operator TV with an all-IP service, a model which might be appealing for customer segments who were not considering Pay TV subscriptions in the first place.
He said: “You think operators should replace STBs with TV – that makes sense – but it’s also about addressing more customers that don’t have a set-top-box and don’t want to have one in the first place, or don’t want a second box. It might be attractive as a second point of consumption.”
Frattolin argues that the Operator TV gives Pay TV operators a high degree of flexibility with regards to how they choose to deliver services and go to market with their products. Similar to the contract model of mobile operators, he envisions customers being given the option to rent TVs, paying their Pay TV subscriptions on a monthly payment plan with the option of changing their device every two years. You can read how Sky in the UK is pioneering a similar approach, where the television is bought outright, including using instalments.
He comments that a significant selling point for consumers is the integrated experience they receive, and the simplicity of having just one device and therefore avoiding the clutter of additional boxes or dongles, or the complications of multiple interfaces and compatibility errors.
Emphasising the importance of distributing risk and cost with regards to developing and manufacturing their own Smart TVs, Frattolin argues that Vewd’s collaboration with Vestel allows Pay TV services to take advantage of the mass manufacturing capabilities and the standard hardware products manufactured by the latter. He says, “[Vestel] has greater economies of scale compared with STB vendors, and even more than operators designing their own boxes”.
Frattolin highlights three different approaches Pay TV operators could take to extend control over the consumers’ Smart TV experience. He characterises the first approach – offering a Pay TV service app in the TV’s app store –as not being a solution at all, because the operator has no control over the UI. Operators favouring an app would also sacrifice prominence, as they face competition for visibility in the app store.
The second and third approaches use two different types of OpApp (Operator Applications) – privileged OpApps and operator specific OpApps respectively, both of which harness the HbbTV hybrid broadcast/broadband specs. A privileged OpApp approach does allow operators to take over some of the UI and has more permissions than a normal app – however operator control is still limited. Another complication is that privileged OpApps are meant to be downloaded in the field (and therefore do not need to be pre-installed on the device).
Frattolin noted that there are large markets – such as the United States – where Smart TVs tend not to support the underlying HbbTV technology which enables OpApps to be downloaded and used. This issue is avoided when deploying an operator specific OpApp, as this type of OpApp is specified to be pre-installed in devices. According to Frattolin, the operator specific OpApp allows operators to take control over the complete UI.
“The operator specific OpApp can give access to all the Smart TV features. Operators can control everything from settings, first time installation, to source input – all the kind of things which are important for the Operator TV.”
Pay TV services can determine the degree of customisation they want with Operator TV. On one end of the spectrum, the product is offered as a turnkey solution, with the level of customisation low. This involves branding and light customisation on the main menu. On the other end of the spectrum, Vewd can unpack the turnkey solution and control different components to incorporate the operator’s own UI design, and operators can use Vewd’s toolkit to build their own UI within the Operator TV infrastructure.
Speaking about the launch of Sky Glass (the Sky created and branded television set) and the separate Comcast branded Hisense Smart TV, XClass TV (using a Comcast OS/UX) Frattolin is confident that the TV landscape is now ready for operator controlled Smart TVs.
He says: “The concept of operators customising a TV and selling it is not new. There were some previous experiments in Eastern Europe but they weren’t successful because the industry, the technology and the public were not ready. If you go back five years, you had to support a lot of proprietary technology, making the TV too expensive, or if you didn’t have that technology you lowered the quality of your service – and then it wasn’t appealing anymore for the user”.
Although he does not believe Pay TV operators will become the dominant Smart TV manufacturers, Frattolin notes that we are “in times of great change”. He expects more operator TVs similar to Sky Glass to be launched over the next two years, and while STBs won’t disappear in the near future, it is likely we will see a mix of technologies and approaches as a way to extend Pay TV control over devices.
Pay TV operator device and household reach strategies will be explored in detail at Connected TV World Summit in London this May, when discussions will include operator-branded televisions and the direct-to-TV ‘operator as an app’ model, plus the developments in STB platforms from RDK to Android TV Operator Tier. For more details email: team@mediatelevents.com
