ca table_ca 25/02/2016 18:43 Page 2
“Targeted advertising is a
red herring,”
- Adam Davies, Cisco.
will see some common metrics emerge but
with a lot of these OTT services I’m worried
fragmentation will continue to slow us down.
Even with cable that’s been around for years
we’re often surprised how little feedback loop
there is; it is often said they know what
people are watching and when – but 90 per
cent of the STBs are legacy and don’t have
real time data coming back. It is often not a
technology issue, it’s an implementation
issue,” comments Rosenstein.
“The status quo issue is in play,” says
Miller-Jones. “The linear TV advertising
model is well known and accepted and
regulated. To change that to the Internet
model is a huge change.”
“The industry has been wedded to the
spot ad and part of the problem is technology
and competition drove multi-screen ahead
without advertising being factored in, and the
model was set then. We have to recreate the
kind of interactive audit trail you’ve got for
web advertising for OTT TV,” says Trow.
“I think it’s right that to some extent the
technology has got ahead of the business
model,” agrees Kirby.
“We’ve got to go toward the business – i.e.
come up with metrics that ad buyers
recognise and can work with. Also we
shouldn’t overlook the concern in the creative
community – if you’ve got to start slicing and
dicing ads to meet 400 different
demographics, how do you do that,
where are the tools? You’ve got to be
able to re-purpose that content but in a
cost-effective way,” says Davies.
“I think we have a lot of metrics that
are easily captured and well understood
in OTT there just isn’t the read-across to
what’s been used and understood in
broadcast, but we have the data. Often
the question is ‘does the ad inventory
exist’ both for different demographics and
for international markets,” notes MillerJones.
“We have to make the creatives in the
ad industry and technologists work together
and that’s interesting because they are two
different types of people,” asserts ConnanLostanlen.
“I’m sure many an agency would be saying
‘hang-on, while we’re talking about Internetdelivered TV, what about ad blocking?’,” says
Trow. “People have become used to
freely-available content and then you’re
trying to introduce advertising, and
some platforms are competing to block
advertising content - it’s another
constraint.”
Another challenge for OTT is user
choice – each service via its own app is
hard to navigate, but even within each
service there’s often an overwhelming
amount of content.
“There is no silver bullet as far as
the UI goes,” admits Rosenstein.
“Every market and culture is different.
The current big trend is to some extent
following what Netflix has done where
it’s all about carousels and personalising
them, providing context to each carousel –
that’s important because people want to
know why they’re being recommended a
piece of content, otherwise it kind of creeps
them out. Some providers have fully
embraced this and are seeing upticks of four
or five times for their VoD, but others have
stuck with generic recommendation because
of privacy worries and possible user
push back.”
“I think the carousel approach and
recommendations works particularly for
tablets where a more hands-on use is
natural,” comments Kirby. “I think if
you push recommendation too
aggressively that backfires,” says Trow,
“particularly on the EPG, that does
create resistance.”
“Actually, I think there are some
good implementations on the EPG,”
says Davies, “keeping it simple and just
flagging what might interest the
particular viewer.”
“I think ultimately it will be some
"To some extent the
technology has got ahead of
the business model."
- James Kirby, Edgeware
kind of tablet driving the TV as the remote,”
comments Connan-Lostanlen.
“We see it’s really important to provide
the user with different paths to chose;
sometimes you want recommendations,
sometimes you’re searching for something
specific, sometimes you want to know what
everyone else is watching. We think the EPG
is going to have to die because it is very
restrictive in the way it lets you browse your
library,” declares Rosenstein.
From a viewer’s perspective it is
important that OTT looks no different (i.e. no
worse) than broadcast. How will OTT handle
UHD?
“The main issue is where the content is
originating from and what network it is going
over. This is where local content and service
providers have the advantage over Netflix or
Prime over unmanaged networks where they
are always at the mercy of the weakest part of
“If you push
recommendation
aggressively, that backfires.”
- Ian Trow, Harmonic
the network,” says Kirby.
“Virtualised cloud provided services
change use bandwidth models drastically,”
says Connan-Lostanlen. “You only transcode
just when you need it, for instance. It will
smooth out the peaks and variations much
more.”
“Changing or reducing the formats for TV
delivery will help. Cloud technologies will be
very important. With 4K you will need to be
closer to the subscriber to guarantee the bit
rate and we see on demand services like
Netflix having problems with this. We say our
Multipipe technology solves this problem,”
declare