angacom_anga 28/05/2015 18:14 Page 9
Telcos have key role in OTT battle
report from strategy
consultant Arthur D. Little and
Exane BNP Paribas predicts
that telcos have a key role to play in
the intensifying battle between
traditional media providers (free-toair, pay-TV and radio) and OTT (OverThe-Top) content services such as
Netflix and Spotify, by offering
services to both established and
emerging media, with the growing
demand for super-fast broadband
kick-starting revenues once more. The
report - How to ride the OTT wave looks at the likely market scenarios
over the next few years.
Shifts in media consumption driven by
the rise in connected devices such as
A
pay-TV providers will suffer as a
consequence.
However, the report predicts that not
even Netflix will have the scale to compete
with pay-TV leaders such as Sky or Canal+
for the whole range of their content line-ups.
Nevertheless, experts anticipate that the
battle between traditional and emerging
players will continue to inflate overall
content costs.
While there are serious threats to
traditional media, particularly for smaller TV
channels and low-end pay-TV, established
providers could counter OTT competition by
partnering with telcos and launching their
own OTT services, leveraging key assets such
as brand, relationships with content providers,
technical skills, and the intimate and longestablished
relationships
they have
with their
customer
bases.
“While in the short-term, we believe that
traditional players will be ready to meet the
challenge posed by OTTs, a select number of
OTTs could reach the scale necessary to
compete with pay-TV on premium content,”
‘Shifts in media consumption driven by the
rise in connected devices are creating a new
playing field in content delivery.’
smartphones and tablets are creating a new
playing field in content delivery. This has led
to traditional TV and radio providers facing
growing competition from pure play OTTs,
with two-thirds of interviewees believing that
says Bertrand Grau, Principal at Arthur D.
Little in Paris and author of the report.
“However, there is a window of opportunity
for traditional media to partner with telcos to
improve their respective position versus pure
play OTTs.”
Telecoms operators stand to benefit from
the rise in online video usage in a number of
ways:
l Charging premium rates to customers
for faster speeds and/or data traffic
l Monetising their network assets with
global OTTs by charging for guaranteed
quality of delivery
l Generating revenues as direct players in
online video, music and/or pay-TV, or by
partnering with existing players
As such, the report is positive about
revenue generation in the telecom industry:
“For the first time in three years, optimism
has returned to telecom executives across
Europe, with a majority expecting the sector
to return to revenue growth. We expect a
progressive stabilisation by 2016, and then a
return to growth from 2017 – at a rate of
approximately one per cent per year,” says
Antoine Pradayrol, analyst at Exane BNP
Paribas and principal contributor to the
report.
TiVo boosts international with Cubiware buy
TiVo has acquired Warsawbased Cubiware, a provider
of cost-effective software
solutions for emerging
market pay-TV operators.
Cubiware will expand
TiVo's international
presence in 25 countries
and positions TiVo to offer
a broader array of
compelling, cost effective
solutions for Pay-TV
operators across the world.
“Cubiware immediately
accelerates
our global PayTV efforts and
enables us to
more rapidly
reach an even larger portion
of the international market,
which is expected to grow to
more than a billion
subscribers by 2020,” said
Tom Rogers, TiVo's president
16 ADVANCED-TELEVISION.COM
and CEO. “Cubiware's recent
growth reflects its strong
position in markets that are
experiencing rapid pay
television expansion. This
product expansion
complements our current
international TiVo and
DigitalSmiths product lines,
enabling us to deliver a
comprehensive portfolio of
solutions for video
distributors across different
distribution platforms - on
premise, cloud or hybrid
environments. The
combination of TiVo and
Cubiware is exp