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flannel1112_flannel 10/12/2015 18:18 Page 1 EUROMEDIA DIGITAL MEDIA INTELLIGENCE PUBLISHER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Nick Snow [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR Colin Mann [email protected] CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Chris Forrester [email protected] PUBLISHING ASSISTANT Nik Roseveare [email protected] ART EDITOR Steve Overbury [email protected] COLUMNIST Larry Gerbrandt CONTRIBUTORS Robert Briel - Amsterdam Dieter Brockmeyer - Frankfurt David del Valle - Madrid Chris Dziadul Pascale Paoli-Lebailly - Paris Philip Hunter Joe O’Halloran Farah Jifri Branislav Pekic - Rome SALES DIRECTOR Sanjeev Bhavnani [email protected] PUBLISHED BY Advanced Television Limited Unit N202 Westminster Business Square 1-45 Durham Street London SE11 5JH Tel: [phone] www.advanced-television.com PRINTED BY Headley Brothers Ltd The Invicta Press Queens Road Ashford Kent TN24 8HH, UK Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] [email protected] © Advanced Television Limited 2015. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. ISSN 1477-8092 couple of recent polls have revealed that Quality of Experience is an important factor in satisfaction and subscription renewal with OTT services. You may feel this falls into the ‘You don’t say?’ or even the ‘Do bears use wooded areas as lavatories?’ category of surveys. But behind the obvious are challenging technology questions and equally challenging questions about transparency and responsibility. Other recent news items reveal US and other pay-TV providers continue a decline in net subs. Reaction is split pretty evenly, either: given the price of subscription (and the differential to wellknown OTT players) the marginal fall is really surprisingly small, or: OMG! OTT is an existential threat to pay-TV and the ‘Sky’ (or Dish, Comcast, Rogers, etc) is falling in. Those ever-so-smart stock markets tend to believe the latter for a few days and then realise (all over again) the former is more true. One of the things that keep it true is the QoE vertically integrated service providers can offer and maintain is normally good (let’s not go overboard here) as a result of the integrated control they have over their networks and the vendors and service companies that supply it. OTT providers, by contrast, have very limited control over end-user experience as their content is a stranger in a foreign land passing through borders, gateways, servers, CMS, and last miles over which it has little insight and no control. The end user doesn’t know whether the problem is with the organisation they’ve paid money to or one of the hundreds of others that may separate their connection from that content supplier. And they don’t care. While the contributors to our T&M survey agree users are more forgiving of an OTT service (from th Z\