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PUBLISHER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Nick Snow [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR Colin Mann [email protected] Opinion CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Chris Forrester [email protected] PUBLISHING ASSISTANT Nik Roseveare [email protected] ART EDITOR Steve Overbury [email protected] CONTRIBUTORS David del Valle - Madrid Pascale Paoli-Lebailly - Paris Branislav Pekic - Rome INSIGHT ASSOCIATES 3Vision ABI Research Ampere Analysis Decipher Media Consultants Digital TV Research Futuresource Consulting MIDiA Research Omdia Parks Associates PP Foresight SNL Kagan Strategy Analytics SALES DIRECTOR Sanjeev Bhavnani [email protected] PUBLISHED BY Advanced Television Limited Unit N202 Vox Studios 1-45 Durham Street London SE11 5JH Tel: [phone] www.advanced-television.com PRINTED BY Micropress Printers Limited Reydon Business Park, Fountain Way, Reydon, Southwold IP18 6DH Tel: [phone] [email protected] © Advanced Television Limited 2020. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. EUROMEDIA Everyone is watching more TV during the Covid crisis. Not as good as it sounds for some: FTA commercial broadcasters are saddled with the irony of record high audiences and record low revenues. But SVoDs have seen subscribers pour in and ratings bump. Meanwhile, pay-TV providers, powered as they are by the engine of live sports, have stalled as they are forced to serve up archive and cut sub fees as they try to grab back some of the treasure they have handed to rights holders. With productions suspended, the content pipeline is drying up and subs are looking harder for something new they might like, or a box set (i.e., collected repeats) they can stand to see again. This will put a premium on user-friendly UIs and effective content discovery. A UI and discovery function that pleases the subscriber is also going to help in fending off the cord cutting and OTT opting out that is going to come as inevitable recession hits across markets. What emerges from our feature is that many good elements are already out there, but very few services include all of them. One provider has good More Like This but a UI you feel must have been deployed by a malicious competitor. Another has the reverse. We also learn that the voice debate continues. Even sceptics now accept that it will play a part in search – the rapid adoption of smart speakers has seen to this. But it has a way to go before it will work well when the user can’t articulate quite a lot about what they want. And, finally, everyone agrees search must go on searching for the ‘Holy Grail’ of universal crossplatform content search. Bon Voyage, as they say. Much progress has been made, though there are still considerable technical challenges, particularly standardisation and quality of metadata. More difficult, though, are the commercial challenges of competition and content rights. ISSN 1477-8092 EUROMEDIA 3