Ajey Anand, Chief Commercial Officer, NORIGIN MEDIA and speaker at CONNECTIONS Europe provides insights on new developments in smart home and entertainment services. Ajey will participate on the 4:15 pm Session, TV Apps and the New Customer Experience, on November 12.
The panel, moderated by Brett Sappington, Director, Research, Parks Associates, includes the following participants
Ajey Anand, Chief Commercial Officer, NORIGIN MEDIA
Thomas Cape, CEO, Capablue
Ralf Jacob, Head of Interactive Business Development, Viacom International Media Networks
Colas Overkott, CEO, VISIWARE
Jan Van Ottele, Co-Founder, ZappoTV, Inc.
1) What do you feel is the biggest obstacle to growth in entertainment services and/or smart home services?
Within the new explosion of OTT TV & VoD services in all European countries, content rights is the biggest obstacle. People are used to watching all the need with one service provider. With the varied type of regional, sporting and international content rights being divided amongst too many players, the end user is having to choose different OTT subscriptions for all content needs. This is fine for the time being, but people will tire from paying 10 EUR subscriptions each to 3 separate OTT services, at least. This model encourages piracy at best at worst case, it kills the the thirst for such services.
2) What features should service providers focus on to convince consumers to sign up for new services?
Stable technology to deliver existing features found on your home TV / STB on the OTT devices like smartphones, Tablets, PCs. It should also have a good integration between all these devices so the end-user has a choice to use them all seamlessly. The features should be kept simple until that has been achieved with no hitches. The passive TV audience is already getting active by the moment by clicking away on these devices. Its important for service providers to have the right levels of interactivity and not much more or less than needed. the remote Controlling PVR is the first of such features which should be coupled now with actual viewing of TV content on any of the devices.
3) How is your company helping to excel growth in the connected home in Europe?
NORIGIN MEDIA have been around for 10 years now and are one of the few companies who have supplied the complete E2E TV streaming services for Broadcasters and Carriers. From capturing Live or VOD content, hosting and encoding, distributing as well as Client Apps across devices, we have understood, and now chosen to specialise in the Hosted Headend and Multi-Screen Apps business. We are ´productising´ our previously delivered services offerings, as we would like to standardise the fragmentation of technology. This will help service providers hop over one of the hurdles within the industry.
Our native apps across all OTT device screens use HTML5 within them as common implementation which allows us to sustainably maintain services where technology evolves faster than life. The common product is developed meeting needs of all our customers to a level higher than just acceptable. We think its more important to launch a TV service keeping a medium/ long term in mind rather than shoddy launches to meet the initial go-live deadline.
4) What is one key issue that people can’t stop talking about regarding entertainment or smart home services?
Ever since Ive been in the industry (streaming TV on smartphones and OTT devices), I have always heard how quality of such services is important. Coming from the ´actual´broadcast industry, I think quality of OTT services is well below mediocre now and has a long way to go. The term broadcast-grade has lost its true meaning in the current OTT TV & VOD services, and I can see a huge amount of improvement in the last few years. This needs to be solved sooner than later.
