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EUROMEDIA
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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\