Cover Story
“One area we believe
holds great promise is more
personalised TV shows and
movie imagery,” reports
Adams. “We’re in a highly
visual world and top-quality
images are critical to driving
the content discovery
experience on the device of
choice. Personalised imagery
will offer multiple images
for a single piece of content
to highlight different cast
members or specific settings
or interactions within a show.
The ability to dynamically
present imagery based on
known viewer affinities for
certain actors, character types,
themes or settings provides
new opportunities to maximise
visual merchandising for
content and improve clickthrough.”
“Personalisation is a tricky one, but it is
reported that 75 per cent of people would like to
have a personalised interface,” notes Smith-
Chaigneau. “Personalisation has been the talk
of TV since circa 2012, and what we do see in
2020 are simple profile sign-ins with profile
avatars. When you are in ‘your’ profile, you do
have a different array of content delivered by
that service. This array is arranged through
knowledge of that person’s consumption
patterns and augmented through like and dislike
buttons found on the UI. The biggest pitfall is
that people are often lazy and do not log-out and
back in, so there is nothing that tells the provider
who is watching the content being consumed.”
HABBITS. “With time, operators have been
gathering increasingly-detailed information
regarding consumer viewing habits and trends,”
observes Signorelli. “This in conjunction with
new algorithms to better understand consumer
affinity for content. As the landscape of video
delivery becomes increasingly diverse, the
interaction of these services with each other
through aggregation platforms will become
increasingly important as consumers seek to
manage and make the most of their service
portfolio.”
“We will get closer to the integration of
contextual factors, but also the understanding of
human behaviour and their tasks,” says Maier.
“The major change in technology will be the
adaption to strategies that no longer target the
immediate need of a user, but the overall values
people have. Especially during the crisis we could
see how values shift and how they can determine
long-term buying decisions or behaviours in,
for example, becoming more focused on local
production and products again.”
“The focus will shift from genre to use cases
and moods,” suggests Fröhlich. “What I want to
“Federated search
and single billing
will be critical
to a unified
experience.”
Adam Davies,
Synamedia
see often depends on my mood,
or the company I’m watching in.
This is where streaming providers
can take personalisation to the
next level.”
INDIVIDUAL. “There
are several areas where
personalisation is going to develop
over the next few years,” suggests
Dawes. “The use of biometrics to
help identify the individual user
or group of users – after all, not
all entertainment consumption is
soulless – will mean that services
become more dynamic and more
accurate at getting the right
content in the right context in
front of the consumer. True use of
AI and Machine Learning across
the ecosystem will continue to
develop from the enhancement
of the metadata that drives the
system through to ensuring
targeted programme recommendations make
sense.”
“Hyper-personalisation based on emotional
understanding will be the next big thing,”
declares Bergström. “Consuming content is an
emotional investment and by understanding
this we can start to tailor every part of the UI to
individual users. The technical capabilities and
the data required to achieve this are available
and now is the time to take this next step.”
PROGRESS. What is the progress
internationally on the integration of global
SVoDs to local pay-TV or new entrant
aggregators? What’s the pattern of progress, if
any, on integrated search?
According to Ampere’s Bisson the big
stumbling block is the role of metadata and
access to customer and subscriber behavioural
data. “If you are Sky, you have access to your
set-top box data; you have Netflix fairly well
integrated on platform but you don’t have full
access to their metadata and customer behaviour
data. Across the aggregation landscape as it
stands today, there are differing levels of access
– from no access to some. Without that, you
can’t fully aggregate and integrate and get a
massively compelling UI and content discovery
engine running across what ultimately are very
diverse interfaces and very diverse
and extensive catalogues of content.
That said, there are ways round it.
You can wrap your own centralised
metadata around titles that are
common to Netflix and Amazon
rather than on rely on their own,
which may differ.”
“Whatever the difficulties,
the unified interface is absolutely
crucial,” Bisson asserts. “If you
think about TV, as we understood
it, before streaming came along,
it was effectively a global navigation and that
navigation was based on a grid system EPG,
which was pretty universal for years across
countries and platforms. As soon as we go
into steaming, we are into very, very different
interfaces for every service. Add to that the
complexity that you’ve gone from linear to
on demand, and content discovery is a real
problem.”
RELATIONSHIPS. “As operators’ businesses
have transitioned to broadband delivery,
and pay-TV service margins have decreased,
they’re expanding how they leverage their
existing customer relationships,” advises
Christensen. “They’re building and managing
broader ecosystems: they’re participating in
the economics of OTT services, expanding
addressable advertising, and developing new
IOT / connectivity services. The question then
becomes, how do they architect themselves
to deliver on those opportunities within the
household?”
“Integrated or universal search which
surfaces available content and drives tune-in
across different video services is here today,”
claims Adams.” Given the fact that 24 per cent
of UK households subscribe to more than two
SVoD services according to BARB data for Q1
2020, this functionality is more important than
ever.”
“Most large pay-TV providers have integrated
the popular SVoD services, and that includes
integrated search,” notes Smith-Chaigneau.
“There are a plethora of ways to get to SVoD
services in a household. The Smart TV is a prime
source, and indeed, when a pay-TV provider
has not integrated them into their system,
the default route appears to be the Smart TV.
However, when integrated, we return to the
opening discussions around content discovery
and ease of access to content. Seamless switching
from pay-TV services to included SVoD services
using one remote and one very well-conceived
user experience with fast and straightforward
navigation to all the content consumers want is a
recipe for success.”
STICKINESS. “Pay-TV operators and telcos
around the world are increasingly embracing
the trend of becoming ‘super aggregators’ of
content - not necessarily exclusive to video
content,” reports Signorelli. “As OTT rises in
“The biggest
hit is providing
a clear
answer to the
‘why’.” Tobias
Fröhlich,
Teravolt
14 EUROMEDIA