This live webcast explores the future of aggregation – and how platform operators and streaming services that curate content can differentiate themselves in the battle to acquire and keep users. It considers the value of Originals and exclusive content – and how platforms and streaming services that lack exclusive content can set themselves apart in the 2020s, and what their value-add is for consumers.

You will hear about the evolving relationship between content curators and aggregators and their content partners – including the onboarding of apps and the benefits that Pay TV operators can bring to streaming app providers beyond ‘carriage’, from carrier billing through to marketing and advertising partnerships.

Our panellists consider the opportunities for aggregators and content curators to segment the Pay TV market and address a larger total audience, serving genre super-fans through to light and casual viewers. Extended aggregation opportunities are investigated – like music streaming and exercise apps – and we ask: can platform providers become more central in the digital consumer home?

The panellists are:

• Brigita Brjuhhanov, TV Product Owner/Team Lead, Elisa
• Joe Nilsson, Chief Commercial Officer, SportsTribal
• Tim Pearson, Vice President, Solution Marketing, NAGRA
• Mary Ann Halford, Partner, Altman Solon
• Moderator, John Moulding, Editor-in-Chief, Videonet

This webcast is live and will include audience questions. It is free and you can register here.

Elisa is one of the most important small/medium Pay TV providers in Europe, demonstrating how operators can cement their position in homes with its next-generation TV platform, Elamus, which was launched last August.

SportsTribal is a new FAST (free ad supported streaming TV) platform devoted to sports, featuring 35 channels that span billiards to combat sports, giving rights holders another distribution option beyond Pay TV and direct-to-consumer apps. This service is an app itself, appearing on Smart TV platforms.

NAGRA is a long-time leader in multiplatform television delivery and UX development (in addition to content protection, data-driven business analytics and cybersecurity. The company has extensive experience helping Pay TV providers (and indeed sport rights holders and streamers) creating platforms and services designed to attract consumers.

Altman Solon is one of the world’s largest global strategy consulting firms with an exclusive focus on the Telecommunications, Media, and Technology (TMT) sectors and among its many subject specialists has helped global media companies and dynamic new players adapt to the disruption of OTT/streaming video and the new strategies for creating, marketing, and delivering video content.

Other themes that will be addressed during this one-hour live video discussion include:

• The potential of CE platforms (from Samsung and LG to Amazon, Google and Apple) as content curators and aggregators.
• Best practice in content discovery and navigation – how to get consumers to the content they will love faster and more reliably.
• Content that attracts and keeps users on aggregated services and the relative merits of international vs local and hyper-local.
• Device strategies to reach the total subscription TV market, from high-end home gateways to streamer boxes and direct-to-TV (operator-as-an-app) approaches.
• Where content will come from as major international studios sell more of their output to their own D2C streaming service (life without your own studio).
• The potential for streaming services to grow their app ‘universe’ with third-party content relationships, and how third-party content is curated and presented.
• How smaller operators remain competitive in television services, ensuring sophisticated aggregation, personalisation, content discovery and navigation experiences.

Register here

The importance of Startover, ‘Catch Up’ and Replay TV demand a first-rate user experience, but this ambition has been compromised by a reliance on using EPG start/end times as the basis for where a programme begins. The goal is to create an optimal user experience, avoiding the possibility of viewers watching incomplete commercial breaks, missing the start of the programme they seek or, even worse, inadvertently watching a spoiler.

This webcast investigates how Liberty Global has tackled this problem head-on, ensuring that programmes have the correct start- and end-times in place – significantly improving the on-demand experience and increasing users’ satisfaction and engagement. You will hear about the EPG correction technology behind this advance, how the solution was implemented using a single, existing API with minimal internal integration resource, and what the immediate impact has been for viewers.

Speakers

• Chris van der Linden, Director Entertainment Platforms, Liberty Global
• Roland Sars, CEO & Co-Founder, Media Distillery
• Simon Miller, Managing Director, Gracenote International, Nielsen
• Regina Poniridis, Consultant & Research Analyst, Caretta Research
• Moderator: John Moulding, Editor-in-Chief, Videonet

Watch on-demand

This webcast:

• Reviews the dynamics that are driving consumption of on-demand viewing, looking at the market in general and across Liberty Global services.
• Reviews the ‘legacy’ model where Replay TV assets are recorded from linear feeds (with EPG schedules providing the guidance on where to start and stop recording).
• Explains why EPG schedules are not fully reliable – including the reasons programmes are delayed or extended and how operations departments try to rectify errors today.
• Outlines how an automated EPG correction system works, focusing on the technical and practical benefits obtainable via the integrated solution from Media Distillery & Nielsen’s Gracenote.
• Offers lessons from the Liberty Global implementation: what to plan for, pitfalls to avoid, how a Replay TV UX upgrade is brought to life, audience insights, and the potential for multi-territory scaling
• Reviews other next-generation content discovery features that can increase engagement with on-demand content, including episode-specific and personalised VOD imagery.
• Considers the provision of Replay TV in the wider context of how Pay TV providers become the trusted guide to content that consumers love across multiple sources including streaming.
• Considers how the industry can streamline and scale the implementation of a broader content discovery feature set, with reference to the ‘discovery-as-a-platform’ operations model.

Watch on-demand

The rapid growth of streaming TV consumption makes it imperative that networks, studios and MVPDs have a ‘grown up’ connected TV offering – one that allows them to compete for every eyeball and ad dollar that migrates into the premium digital video environment. This means:

• Holding onto audiences, and attracting new viewers, by ensuring a consumer-friendly ad experience with modest ad loads, frequency capping and relevant ads.
• Enabling ad insertion (and targeting) at huge scale with total reliability, so that mega-events including sport and breaking news can be fully monetized.
• Maximizing the value of inventory by carefully managing direct sales with multiple programmatic demand sources.
• Effectively using audience data to achieve better targeting and a personalized ad viewing experience, even in a cookie-less world.

The pandemic accelerated all digital behaviours, including TV viewing. Mass-scale connected TV was tomorrow’s opportunity and challenge, but tomorrow arrived early. Join us live to hear how networks, studios and distributors can rethink the ad-supported TV model and ready themselves for connected TV primetime.

Register here.

This webcast explores:

• What a holistic ad performance and revenue strategy looks like, and how you find the sweet spot where ‘audience + avails = best possible yield outcome’, and how you avoid the one extra ad that loses you money, as viewers ‘tune out’.
• The potential for greater integration and synergies between SSAI and audience data and targeting capabilities –and how this could be implemented.
• How to manage ad frequency in a multi ad server (direct, programmatic, affiliate) environment and so ensure ad repetition does not degrade the ‘premium’ TV experience.
• The next steps in dynamic ad insertion, including the benefits of server-side ad insertion and client-side ad insertion, and how these can be used successfully in a hybrid model.
• The potential for a multi-DAI vendor strategy (similar to multi-CDN strategies) and how this could influence ad delivery performance and costs.
• How to manage multiple inventory owners within the same video session using an understanding of who has the ‘right to sell’, plus the ad routing and decisioning processes that support sales business rules.
• The special considerations when streaming ad-supported content into MVPD set-top boxes.
• How to monitor and diagnose the causes of ad errors, and so increase ad delivery reliability.
• How organizations are managing ad insertion for very large scale events, including the implications for ad insertion infrastructure

1500 GMT / 1600 CET / 1000 EST

With the rapid growth in streaming consumption, there is a need for advertising revenues to follow audiences. In order to be successful, publishers must build the confidence of media buyers to invest in premium streaming TV inventory.

This webcast explores how streaming providers (e.g. broadcasters, networks, virtual MVPDs, TVE operators, AVODs and studio D2Cs) can surface first-party data to establish household identity, demonstrate cross-screen reach and frequency, and provide more valuable measurement and insights to advertisers.

We will discuss the challenges associated with data standardisation, interoperability, audience segmentation, advertiser and publisher audience data matching, co-viewing insights, exposure-to-outcomes attribution, and universal reach and frequency mapping. The panelists will also explore the benefits of increased data transparency across players in the ecosystem.

Our speakers are:

• Damian Pelliccione, Co-Founder & CEO, Revry
• Alex Klausner, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Conviva
• Chris Edwards, Director, Business Development, EMEA, Rakuten Advertising
• Moderator: John Moulding, Editor-in-Chief, Videonet

Register now

This webcast is free to ‘attend’ and you can register here.

No Pay TV provider, streaming service or content owner can thrive in the modern TV landscape without mastering the art of content discovery and extended viewer engagement. Taking consumers beyond ‘now’ to ‘next’, from live into on-demand, and from recent episodes to deep catalogues is essential. This webcast explores the innovations and best practices that can drive total television consumption higher, and with it, subscription and advertising related revenues.

This discussion with Liberty Global, Swisscom TV, ITV, Gracenote and Videonet considers how platforms can become the ‘home service’ for consumers in an increasingly competitive aggregation marketplace. You will hear how content owners ensure their programming is available everywhere – readily surfaced and prominent. Advanced content discovery techniques, and their potential impact, will be explored.

This one-hour discussion also considers:

• The content discovery challenges for all TV stakeholders, including consumers.
• How media companies can work more effectively together to succeed as super-aggregators, VOD services or content creators.
• The KPIs that next-generation content engagement should be measured against, and the ROI justifications for investment.
• How we link fans with live matches and related sports content as streaming services acquire more premium sports rights.
• How every new and old content asset can be linked to other relevant programing and become part of sequential discovery journeys.
• Content discovery practicalities, from universal content IDs to ensuring that parental controls align across broadcast and streaming.
• How we maximise the value of content to the benefit of all stakeholders.

Register now to join:
Susanne Rakels, Senior Manager Innovation, Liberty Global
Fabio Marti, Senior Data Scientist, Swisscom TV,
Steve Forde, Director of Digital Products, ITV
Simon Miller, Managing Director, International, Gracenote
John Moulding, Editor-in-Chief, Videonet
in a live discussion on Wednesday 15th September at 1100 BST / 1200 CEST

IP Video unleashes the power of advertising, enabling addressable ads, pinpoint targeting and higher revenues. But server-side advertising, powered by manifest manipulation, brings with it unique challenges when trying to deliver a “Real TV” experience.

In this webcast, CommScope, Liberty Global and Omdia share their real-world experience with Server-Side Ad Insertion and detail lessons learned from delivering ads to millions of subscribers.

The Webcast will demonstrate how service providers, broadcasters and programmers, often working together, can successfully implement addressable TV advertising within streaming IP video content to fully monetize audiences within Pay TV, TVE apps, vMVPD/Pay Lite, BVOD and D2C environments, including on set-top boxes and connected TV. You will hear about the advantages of a dynamic, intelligent, and configurable server-side IP ad insertion solution based on manifest manipulation to help deliver pristine playback and fully sold ad breaks at scale.

CommScope will outline the five top advertising challenges in IP video, together with their solutions. You will hear:

• How an automated workflow makes it easy and cost-effective to handle the complex and ever-changing device landscape.
• How Dynamic Ad Insertion can be scaled with built-in resiliency for the largest peaks of concurrent usage, like in live sport.
• How to support a range of business models, including the ways Broadcasters and Service Providers can work together to deliver and monetize linear content.
• How to provide measurement that is acceptable to advertisers, and effectively monitor operations to deliver high run rates.
• How to maintain precise timing so dynamically inserted ads seamlessly play for a smooth user experience.

Liberty Global will provide insights and best practices from its implementation of addressable advertising in its IP video service, and how it architected a solution to overcome the challenges of server-side advertising at scale.

Omdia will review the IP video landscape and the market opportunity awaiting both service providers and content owners as more people watch streaming content for longer.

REGISTER HERE

This one-hour discussion will also explore:

• Why manifest manipulation is at the heart of an IP streaming service and why it demands a dedicated solution.
• How intelligent manifest manipulation is improving targeted dynamic ad insertion in the real world, and enabling a revenue generating win-win for operator and channel partners.
• Why the advertising industry is increasingly willing to accept the manifest manipulator as a measurement proxy for client devices, when looking for verification of ad delivery.
• How broad device support and the diverse nature of both content and advertising streams drains operations resource in the absence of workflow automation.

This is a live panel discussion and we will be taking audience questions. The webcast will be ‘aired’ on 23rd June and is free to attend.

Speakers

• Keith Wigmore, Director, Technology Division, Liberty Global
• Dave Romrell, Engineering Fellow, Advance Research Group, CommScope
• Marija Masalskis, Senior Principal Analyst – TV, Video and Advertising, Omdia
• Moderator: John Moulding, Editor-in-Chief, Videonet

  You can read more about the speakers at the webcast registration page.

  REGISTER HERE

Wednesday, February 3 at 1600 CET / 1500 GMT / 1000 EST

Duration: 1 hour

Register here

With targeted TV advertising providing one of the most significant new revenue opportunities for both platform operators and broadcasters this decade, this webcast considers how you build the foundations for successful, sustainable and frictionless targeted TV advertising offerings. A key part of the discussion is how platform owners and content providers can work together to enable ad replacement within premium inventory at a scale that advertisers are interested in – and why they should do it.

Proximus, the Belgian IPTV provider that is pioneering addressable TV advertising on mainland Europe, will share its experiences on the road to targeted advertising, explain the value-add an operator brings to this marketplace, and reveal how you establish a win-win relationship with content partners. Proximus will explain its business model, how addressable TV advertising attracts new money to television, and share lessons from its implementation – including how to keep the cost of addressable TV advertising to a minimum.

MediaKind, which provides server-side dynamic advertising insertion for the Proximus addressable TV advertising service, will demonstrate how an operator supports per-user targeting across live, time-shifted and on-demand content, working with all ABR formats. The benefits of server-side advertising insertion – including resistance to ad-blockers and avoiding the need to maintain multiple client applications – will be explored. The company shows how the unification of alternate content and advertising across broadcast and IP networks optimises costs for platform operators and programmers.

Smart AdServer will demonstrate how platform operators and broadcasters can open up their addressable inventory to advertisers, make targeted TV buying easy, and provide marketers with a holistic view of their advertising campaign – ensuring addressable TV does not become a planning silo. The company will demonstrate how you can maximise revenues from addressable TV inventory, exploring the role of programmatic alongside direct sales and the extent to which programmatic can now match broadcast compliance standards.

Listeners will also hear:

• Market trends in targeted TV.
• Opportunities and challenges as we see more HTTP-based media delivery, and the monetisation opportunity for one-to-one advertising in the IP environment.
• How linear and impressions-based advertising business models and related insertion workflows are unifying.
• How to ensure regulatory compliance for the handling of data – making sure this is built into the targeted TV workflow.
• How to enable user-level targeting for one-to-all, non-IP delivery (broadcast linear TV).
• How to provide ad completion rate measurement with impression tracking for advertising insertion on all types of content.
• How programmatic is evolving to serve the TV industry, from guaranteed deals to broadcast-standard compliance.
• Why increased IP delivery is introducing new complexity when it comes to linear rights enforcement (with reference to Blackout and trick-play control, etc.) ­ and how to manage that.

Speakers

• Gert Marien, Innovation Manager – TV, Adverts & Digital Media, Proximus
• Christophe Kind, Director Market Development, Advanced TV Advertising, MediaKind
• Gérald Sauvageon, SVP Sales Video / Addressable TV, Smart AdServer
• Moderator: John Moulding, Editor-in-Chief, Videonet

You can find more details about the speakers on the registration page

Register here

Buyers and sellers finally have a true CTV solution to deliver ads against relevant and safe content based on true video and audio signals. Advertisers can access CTV inventory on any budget by targeting relevant content without compromising on brand safety and quality. Broadcasters can maximise direct campaign revenue with deeper contextual relevance and offer brand safety safeguards with confidence to unlock previously unsold CTV inventory in programmatic environments.

Find out more about using predictive audiences for your CTV targeting.

 Speakers:

• Rachel Gantz, General Manager, Activation Solutions, Comscore
• Guido Fambach, EVP, EMEA & APAC, Comscore
• Moderator – John Moulding, Editor-in-Chief, Videonet

This webcast includes a 25 minute presentation, with slide-deck, followed by a comprehensive audience Q&A including questions from senior buy-side executives.

You can see/hear it on-demand, free, by registering here.

This virtual panel features industry experts from Orange, AWS, Kaltura, and Broadpeak, who discuss the cloud-based hybrid video plane and wider cloud-based transformation.

Key takeaways from this session include:

• Ways to combine your on-prem delivery network and cloud resources
• What you can do to maximize network capabilities and reduce costs
• Motives for becoming more cloud-centric, where to start a cloud journey and how to handle legacy
• How to utilize data to optimize QoE during peak-hours usage
• Opportunities to reduce costs and improve consumer Quality of Experience across operations and services as a whole
• Ways to extend your data center capabilities for live linear media preparation
• How to ensure always-on service availability with best-of-breed cloud and on-prem solution.

The speakers are:

• Yann Queffelec, Head of TechnicalTransformation of HOME services @ Orange Labs, Orange
• Duncan Chisholm, Senior Director, Solution Architecture, Kaltura
• Xavier Leclercq, VP Business Development, Broadpeak
• Simon Frost, Head of EMEA Media Marketing, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Moderator: John Moulding, Editor-in-Chief, Videonet

You can listen to the (free) webcast on-demand by registering here.

Why and how Proximus, Technicolor, Google and 3SS deployed an Android TV Operator Tier next-generation set-top box platform with world-first functionality and maximum operator control.

This webcast explores the journey that Proximus, one of Europe’s leading IPTV providers, has taken to open up its platform to third-party apps using Android TV Operator Tier. You will hear the rationale behind the decision to become a ‘super-aggregator’ and how the Belgian provider integrates streaming app content into the Pay TV user experience while ensuring its own content remains front-and-centre.

The webcast focuses on the move to Android TV Operator Tier, with its game-changing UX design freedoms and sophisticated Google tool-set, which includes universal search and a roadmap towards Google Assistant and voice control. With Technicolor and 3SS as major project stakeholders on the panel, we review the market-leading innovations found in this Operator Tier deployment, including the Android P enabled auto-download of Google Play Store apps at STB start-up.

The webcast contrasts AOSP with Operator Tier – with real-world insights from an operator that has used both – and addresses the important Operator Tier choice facing operators: whether to use a standard launcher or custom launcher. There is a strong focus on how operators surface their own content in an environment where there are more viewing choices.

Our speakers are:

• Sébastien Leblanc, Head of Consumer Product Managment, Proximus
• Matthias Puschmann, Android TV Partnerships EMEA, Google
• Fabien Battini, Product Manager, Technicolor
• Pierre Donath, Chief Product Officer, 3SS
• John Moulding, Editor-in-Chief, Videonet

Sébastien Leblanc is in charge of the digital product management at Proximus, covering consumers & enterprise (SE & ME).

Matthias Puschmann is Strategic Partner Development Manager at Google looking after Android TV partnerships in EMEA. In this role, he focuses on business development for Google’s Smart TV operating system in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe as well as the Middle East.

Fabien Battini joined Technicolor more than 10 years ago as a software product manager, acting as a technology evangelist for the software solutions for Set Top Boxes, notably Android TV. He is a graduate from the prestigious engineering Grande Ecole SUPELEC.

Pierre Donath has overall responsibility for product development, as well as marketing strategy and communications at 3SS. Leading teams across multiple projects, and working closely with Google, he advises 3SS’ platform customers on product integration and Android TV service strategies.

John Moulding is Editor-in-Chief at Videonet where he has been covering the evolution of multiscreen TV, connected TV and advanced advertising since 2010.

You can sign up to watch this free webcast here.