TV Everywhere April | Page 5

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TV Everywhere
DIGITAL MEDIA INTELLIGENCE
PUBLISHER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Nick Snow [e-mail]
MANAGING EDITOR
Colin Mann [e-mail]
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Chris Forrester [e-mail]
PUBLISHING ASSISTANT
Nik Roseveare [e-mail]
ART EDITOR
Steve Overbury [e-mail]
COLUMNISTS
Larry Gerbrandt
CONTRIBUTORS
Robert Briel - Amsterdam
Dieter Brockmeyer - Frankfurt
Gail Chiasson - Toronto
David del Valle - Madrid
Chris Dziadul
Pascale Paoli-Lebailly - Paris
Philip Hunter
Joe O’Halloran
Farah Jifri
Branislav Pekic - Rome
SALES DIRECTOR
Sanjeev Bhavnani [e-mail]
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Broadcasters could be forgiven for wishing the
digital train would occasionally slow down or at
least rest a little longer in one station before
moving on.
For many years, of course, it was very
straightforward – a signal was sent, by a variety of
means, to a TV where it was watched or recorded,
and that was it. Then came the Internet. Not
designed for TV, of course, and perhaps that’s why
broadcasters were slow to embrace it until new
challengers made it clear that they had no choice.
The challenges of working with IP, though, remain
‘non trivial’ – especially when the train moves on to
UHD. But, as ever, a combination of truly
impressive compression and much less impressive
increases in broadband speed come to the rescue.
Still, while sending TV over the Internet isn’t easy,
at least recovering information about the devices
receiving it and, thereby, the viewers is easy –
that’s data, after all, and that’s what the Internet
was invented for. So data collection, management
and exploitation should be the easy part of OTT,
and it must be well developed and highly
profitable?
Not really, it turns out. As our Big Data roundtable
discussed (reported here on page 16 and available
to watch on advanced-television.com), the
challenges are immense and not always
technological. While OTT specialists are employing
data collection to inform their content strategy and
to begin to effect some personalisation, and some
others are at least beginning to target their
advertising, many players are simply not equipped
to collect the data, let alone analyse it and deploy it
effectively.
But it seems certain that the building of techniques
and experience in this area will be rapid and
profound in the next few years. That will bring its
own challenges; data privacy is a sensitive
consumer issue and regulators are rightly intent on
rules that will be challenging for compliance and
onerous if it fails. Add to that the illusive balance
between the viewer’s demand for free or ‘freemium’
offerings against the push back of the freak-out
factor if they start to feel stalked, and one sees that
while the Big Data destination is very attractive, it
is likely to be a road hard travelled.

ISSN 1477-8092

TV Everywhere 5