Simon Trudelle, Senior Product Marketing Manager at NAGRA, answered the following industry questions prior to the 2015 CONNECTIONS Europe event, which tool place place 10-11 November in Amsterdam:

What challenges does Europe face with rolling out new smart home & connected entertainment services?

For the European Pay-TV industry, the next key challenge is for service providers to go beyond exclusive content distribution and better market the value of the advanced services they provide, such as multiscreen on-demand TV and personalization of the overall user experience.  Doing this, they will face the rise of the Internet Giants, with a need to either partner or be at par with their technology offerings.  Europe’s multiple linguistic markets and regional regulations results in a more fragmented market that will require smart investment strategies.

This implies making the right technical choices to leverage delivery networks as well as flexible and cloud based headend and backend infrastructure to provide the best TV experience in all circumstances. 

Finally, in terms of business growth through new offerings, European service providers need to further consider the opportunity to leverage their customer relationships and expertise, such as delivering secured CPE media solutions, to capture a share of the fast growing smart home and smart life markets as they emerge.

What is the biggest challenge your company faces in the next 3 – 6 months?

Our industry is becoming mature in most geographical areas in Europe and around the world. Yet consumer trends and overall demand for new services are accelerating, especially in the areas of OTT TV and smart home services, as devices becomes more powerful and affordable.

So we are working on providing our pay-TV service provider customers with new products and solutions to help them continue to grow and meet these market demands while optimizing costs with converged backend solutions running on cloud-based infrastructure. Focused, business-driven innovation will continue to be a key driver for us in the months to come.

How will companies leverage the growth in the market in the next 12 months? What is the impact of the Internet Giants (Google, Amazon) getting involved in the market?

In developed markets, consumers’ appetite for premium video content on every screen is increasing as more and more people - and not just millenniums with a smartphone – are trying out the apps and finding value.  Expanding the “range of possibles” to leverage existing infrastructure is where value resides, translating into higher customer satisfaction, impulse purchases or upsell opportunities, and churn reduction.  So growth takes another, less meteoric and glamorous yet more long-term focused and rooted angle.  Recent industry consolidation moves are the result of this market evolution.

A good use case example is Telefonica Spain, a NAGRA customer, that acquired Prisa TV earlier this year.  By rolling out Prisa TV’s successful Yomvi multiscreen OTT TV service to its 4 million IPTV subscribers over the coming months, it is increasing the value of its triple and quadruple play offerings, securing customer relationships with added value features while also better serving the 18-35 year-old customer segment with flexible TV offerings that contribute to both the top and bottom lines.

What is the impact of the Internet Giants (Google, Amazon) getting involved in the market?

These players are driving product and service innovation, developing new market spaces and educating consumers on the benefits of new technologies and applications, while also putting significant competitive pressure on incumbent service providers.

At NAGRA, we have taken the pragmatic, forward-looking approach to enable our pay-TV customers to more easily partner with Internet Giants when appropriate (our Netflix or YouTube partnerships, helping service providers bring these apps on STB is an example), and also deliver the technology to help our customers develop their own competitive studio-approved multiscreen OTT TV solutions (our MediaLive, OpenTV 5 and anyCAST products and E2E solutions).  This allows our customers to take from the best of both worlds while fully staying in control of their destiny.  

Simon spoke on the panel session “OTT & Pay-TV Integration: Cloud-based CE & Hybrid Devices” on 11 November at 13:15.

For more information on the themes and sessions at the 2015 CONNECTIONS Europe conference, visit www.connectionseurope.com. 

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