Simon Trudelle, Senior Product Marketing Director, NAGRA and speaker at CONNECTIONS Europe provides insights on new developments in smart home and entertainment services. Simon will participate on the 3:45 pm Session, Content and Service Strategies to Capture the OTT Consumer, on November 13.
The panel, moderated by Brett Sappington, Director, Research, Parks Associates, includes the following participants
Ben Gidley, Director, Multiscreen Solutions, Irdeto
Ola Steinsrud, Vice President New Markets and Content, Magine
Simon Trudelle, Senior Product Marketing Director, NAGRA
Peter Taylor, Affiliate VP, Fox International Channels
Ido Wiesenberg, Co-Founder and VP BD, Tvinci
1) What do you feel is the biggest obstacle to growth in entertainment services and/or smart home services?
The main challenge pay-TV service providers face is fragmentation: multiple content rights for multiple delivery networks, multiple content-protection technologies on different screens and multiple software operating platforms for devices that lead to different viewing experiences. This fragmentation in turns leads to lower adoption rates from consumers who are then tempted to look elsewhere to get content. And it also brings some reluctance from service providers to more actively promote new services.
There are industry solutions available to help address this and service providers of all size have approached us to help them make the Connected Home a reality. Yet to do this successfully, it is key to smartly leverage open industry standards and technologies and work with trusted partners to build a solution that will resolve the fragmentation issues, scale technically and economically and meet evolving consumer needs over time.
2) What features should service providers focus on to convince consumers to sign up for new services?
The delivery of premium entertainment on every screen appears to be the primary need to address for PayTV service providers in advanced markets. Consumers equipped with new devices such as tablets, portable PCs and smartphones are interested to use these new devices as portable, secondary TV sets: watching all their best content to these devices is key. Being able to seamlessly “throw and fetch” content between a portable device and a big screen is also driving adoption, as watching content on the big TV screen remains a key consumer need and value driver. This is especially the case when devices such as tablets provide a rich, personalized content discovery application that can be more convenient to use than the remote control on legacy STBs. Loading premium content to devices such as tablets for offline consumption is also high on the list of use cases that drive adoption and increase value perception from subscribers.
3) How is your company helping to excel growth in the connected home in Europe?
Our recently launched JoinIn reference architecture provides a “blueprint” to help service providers deploy scalable solutions and ensure that their premium content can be viewed by their subscribers on all relevant devices – tablets, smartphones, personal computers and TV sets. JoinIn presents a secure and flexible solution for the seamless delivery and sharing of premium content on every screen in the home. JoinIn is an open reference architecture allowing service providers to monetize the connected home by enabling a wide variety of content viewing scenarios. JoinIn leverages media gateway technology and open standards such DLNA and HTML5, best-of-breed CAS & DRM technologies and best practices to ensure secure device interoperability and content delivery throughout the connected home.
Along those lines, NAGRA is working with European service providers at deploying Home Gateway-based solution that deliver content-rich multiscreen services with broadcast-grade image quality across multiple consumer devices.
4) What is one key issue that people can’t stop talking about regarding entertainment or smart home services?
Simplicity and ease of use. Consumers, even the early-adopters of new technology and services, have little time to waste trying to access the content they want to watch. It just needs to work. Accessing illicit servers is often motivated by the plain reality that it is a more convenient way to access and consume content. PayTV service providers need to make content delivery and sharing a reality in the connected home to own the connected home and protect their core content delivery business. By doing first a good job with video content, they can then leverage their position and consider other exciting new smart home service opportunities that leverage the same infrastructure such as the Home Gateway and Cloud platform.
