Gabriel Cosgrave, General Manager for EMEA, Australia and New Zealand at TiVo promises that the company will allow its OEM (Original Equipment Manufactuers) and operator partners to share the monetisation benefits of TiVo OS, the company’s operating system for connected TVs.
He said: “There won’t ever be just one single platform – there are too many people that see the value of OS, and see the fact that you can monetise end-to-end OS. The question is: how much of the benefits of monetisation are you going to allow your partners to get?
“Some people will take all the data, sell it, and make money from it. Some will take the ad sales and maybe give a small portion of it back [to their partners]. But some – like ourselves – will say ‘we’re all in this together’. If we have a large footprint, we can bring ad sales, data sales etc., and we’re willing to share that back with the ecosystem.”
Cosgrave believes that this model of a relationship with OEMs and operators might illicit “some reaction from the big tech giants” who tend to take the former approach. He remarked: “They might say ‘okay the game is up’ but they are big enough to still do that for a few years.”
As more services come to CTV platforms, Cosgrave thinks it vital that users are able to find content which might be buried in individuals apps or services, whether linear, AVOD, or SVOD. As a result, search and recommendation becomes extremely important. He says that while super-aggregation of content has been a focus for operators for the last few years, what is required now is to move towards ‘super-unification’.
He comments: “Super-unification is when you have a universal search or unified way of finding content in one place. That’s what TiVo OS is bringing to TV. Our UX is basically cross-content source searching and recommendations.”
He notes that the company’s TV footprint currently is over 100 million households worldwide. According to Cosgrave, this scale is important for getting more engagement from content partners. He elaborates: “When they know we have that scale, they want to work with us. Some of the challenges for individual operators is that they can’t bring scale to convince large content providers to play ball, so you get mixed sourcing of content depending on how big you are.”
Cosgrave characterises European markets as being fragmented in terms of content sources and languages. He believes that TiVo OS can facilitate the super-unification of European content through its access to 70 million metadata assets. According to Cosgrave, TiVo can perform deep linking of this metadata which “makes search and recommendations way more powerful.”
He highlights that TiVo’s search and recomendations engine gives the choice to differentiate users based on profiling of individual users within a household, or blending recommendations within a single household.
He believes that, while smart TV OEMs and operators can build their own operating systems in-house, the speed at which third-party innovation is occurring could make that a less optimal approach. He says: “We’re in discussion with a lot of TV OEMs and operators, and many are saying ‘that’s not really our area of expertise’ because you have to build a platform which is very consumer friendly for finding content, but also enables monetisation. That’s not something you can do easily in-house.”
While Cosgrave predicts that operators will still deploy STBs for the foreseeable future (particularly as they tend to be bundled in with broadband packages), he thinks that when the CTV world becomes “fully IP” there will be less of a reason to switch over to STBs, and the devices will experience a slowdown in innovation.
