Cover Story
presentation offerings and
recommendation features help
viewers easily connect to the
shows and movies they’ll enjoy
most - from the most popular
new titles and back catalogue
content all the way down the
long tail to lesser known hidden
gems and indie offerings.”
COMPLEX. “The complex
world of content presentation
and driving content
consumption is an art,” suggests
NAGRA’s Smith-Chaigneau.
“There are almost too many
UIs available in the market.
People get used to one style of
navigation; they then switch
services to be immediately lost
or frustrated. We now have a
sort of UI-UX uniformity across
almost all of these AVoD/SVoD
service providers. Is that a big hit? It all depends
on who owns which part of the equation.”
“Even globally-successful OTT video
subscription operators continue to develop their
content recommendation and presentation
engines,” advises Omdia’s Signorelli. “In its key
markets, Amazon has proven that aggregating
content from different services and different
business models and providing it in one interface
can boost sales across the board by allowing
consumers to easily find and procure more
similar content.”
“The biggest hit is providing a clear answer
to the ‘why’,” says Teravolt’s Fröhlich. “Every
feature and recommendation needs to be backed
up with a clear idea. Users need to understand
why they are being shown a particular lane and
why the recommendations they are getting
make sense. Quality beats quantity here: if the
fourth or fifth recommendation in a lane are
not relevant, it’s better to remove them entirely,
instead of having the user wonder why they are
seeing these recommendations. A big miss is not
respecting the hardware. If a service includes too
many animations, it can happen that the client
can’t get rendered by the hardware.”
COMPETITION. “The biggest ‘miss’ is the
lack of personalisation in the user experience
and putting the same content in front of all
viewers without taking their individual likes and
dislikes into account,” suggests Think Analytics’
Docherty. “Comprehensive AI/ML predictive
algorithms are essential for any service provider
seeking to provide a quality service in an ever
more competitive market. The competition now
is no longer traditional TV companies, but the
FAANG group who, since their inception, have
embraced AI/ML technologies. They understand
their customers.”
“In the world of content discovery, it should
be taken as a given that the experience will be
visually rich, immersive and extraordinary,”
“The complex
world of content
presentation and
driving content
consumption
is an art.” -
Anthony Smith-
Chaigneau,
NAGRA
contends Charles Dawes, senior
director, international marketing
at Xperi. “The inclusion of highlyvisual
poster art and atmospheric
elements like trailers, whilst not
completely replacing text, have
stepped up the experience for consumers as they
browse through an interface. But some of the
biggest differentiators introduced in recent years
move beyond the visual experience. One such
feature is voice led discovery. This has proved
to be ‘hit’ that can dramatically simplify the way
people find, watch and enjoy content.”
“Another hit is the real aggregation of
content from all available sources including
linear, recorded (local and cloud) and streaming
services. The latest TiVo Video Trends report
is showing people who subscribe to pay-TV are
using an average of 6.9 video services. Those that
have ‘cut-the-cord’ are using 4.9 services. This
proliferation of services continues to create a
sense of ‘content-chaos’ for consumers that TiVo
has a long heritage for solving with solutions
like our OnePass, which was introduced in
2015, through to our latest product the TiVo
Stream 4K that brings together content on an
Android TV based dongle. A third area would
be how the underlying use of data – clickstream
or interaction – is making recommendations
more personal alongside driving how businesses
are able to identify and address behaviours
like churn before they happen. The biggest
misses we’ve seen are when these services aren’t
implemented properly. A voice service that
doesn’t understand you or only provides a basic
search isn’t going to be used. An aggregation
experience that doesn’t include key content
doesn’t cut it and recommendations that aren’t
agile, and suggest programming you’ve
already seen, will frustrate the customer
into not trusting them.”
According to Vionlabs’ Bergström,
the biggest misses are around assuming
that everybody is similar and there is
something that’s considered ‘good’.
“Good is subjective and in the eye of
the beholder and we must understand
content better, and link it to viewer tastes
down to an individual level.” Secondly, “thinking
that it’s all about pushing another carousel of
content in front of the customer. We, as humans,
want structure and convenience, not chaos and
abundance.” For Bergström, the biggest hits
are: Personalised channels: Understanding
that moving to OTT doesn’t mean that linear is
dead. “Combining the personalisation of OTT
with the lean-back convenience of linear is the
future; and sentiment matching of ads in AVoD.
At Vionlabs, we are true believers in AVoD.
To be able to do sentiment matching between
ads and the content being consumed will make
the AVoD experience less intrusive and benefit
everyone from viewers and AVoD-providers to
advertisers.”
OPTIONS. As to how providers can improve
the service and experience, Friedman says that
with the media industry becoming more flexible
and cloud-based, there are more options for
modular solutions than ever before. “Providers
that want to make a splash will need to look
carefully into their technology stack and see
what components need a refresh. Sometimes
they may find that a few tweaks, together with
metadata enhancements, can help them upgrade
their service offerings.”
“Clearly, if you are Netflix, you can
personalise within your customer base, if you are
an aggregator putting Netflix on your platform,
you can’t do that level of personalisation,”
suggests Bisson. “I think
that another aspect of
personalisation is ‘chance’
discovery, so solving the issue
of giving everyone more of
the same, which is the problem
we see on social media,
where people refer to it
as an echo chamber.
Chance discovery is
something that linear
TV is perhaps a better
platform for than an
on-demand interface.
It’s another area tech
and platforms need to
work on, to allow that
“UI and discovery
can make or
break a customer
experience.” - Max
Signorelli, Omdia
12 EUROMEDIA