YouView to deliver more ‘personalised, multi-device experience’
Read the DTVE Article here.
YouView has put in place the building blocks to move to a “highly personalised, multi-devices experience,” and now wants to further develop its platform along these lines, according to Jeff Hunter, chief architect at the UK-based digital platform operator.
Speaking on a panel session at IBC, Hunter said that YouView wanted to make its UX personalised to enable viewers to find content from multiple sources. “It is not sufficient for anyone to operate in their own bubble. You need to get smarter,” he said.
Pay TV providers need to look for insight into what people have viewed and what type of content they might find interesting on the basis of data analytics, Hunter told attendees at the IBC conference.
He said that the proliferation of content sources with differing availability of rights meant people often experiences problems getting access to all the content they want on different devices. There is a need for creativity on the part of platform operators to find ways to get round this problem, offering automatically to bookmark content they want to watch or suggesting alternatives to them, Hunter said.
He said the entry of new online and social media players meant that “gatecrashers are battling for the pay TV market”.
However, he said, the battle is about more than TV. While people spend a lot of time and emotion on content, with TV playing a vital part in social interactions, the insights from TV can deliver a more sophisticated level of understanding of consumers’ needs and interests than just knowing what has been watched. Operators have to expand into different consumer touchpoints such as smart home automation and e-health. Companies are seeking “make themselves omnipresent”, he said.
He said there was a conflict between pay TV operators that want to aggregate content into their own players and the likes of the BBC which wanted to control the distribution of its content through iPlayer. He said YouView had sought to provide aggregated content discovery but left the app to the broadcaster.
Hunter also said that YouView stakeholders are at a threshold of deciding whether to stick with traditional mass-market advertising or to migrate to a targeted advertising model that may result in ads reaching smaller audiences.
Pay-TV rivals vie to become the ‘omni-channel’ of the future
TVBE Article http://www.tvbeurope.com/pay-tv-rivals-vie-become-omni-channel-future/
Pay-TV operators are facing some tough short- and long-term challenges. That was the conclusion of a panel of pay-TV experts speaking at a Platform Futures conference session at the Forum on Thursday (14 September).
Jeff Hunter, chief architect at on-demand and cloud-based TV service YouView, told delegates: “Unfortunately not everyone can be the world’s biggest pay-TV provider. Those that are destined to be successful will need to be simple, relevant, seamless and indispensable.
The key is to understand the user and personalise their experience. You also need to get smarter – driving insights from the data you collect.”
Hunter added: “For pay-TV operators the battle is on to develop deeper insights into the interests of customers – giving touch points for the provision of a much wider range of services. To, in effect, become an ‘omni-channel’. The battle is on for such companies to make themselves ever-present and indispensable to the consumer – so no wonder there is so much competition.”
Companies such as Amazon and Netflix, which have deep pockets for investment in original content and a lot of data at their fingertips about customer preferences would be in a strong position, said Hunter.
Justin Hewelt, global director of brand product and marketing at PayMedia Consulting, said that OTT propositions are evolving and converging in the current marketplace.
“Now we are seeing the emergence of more linear OTT propositions, and propositions targeted at different market segments, such as YouTube TV, aimed at millennials, or Sling, which targets non-traditional segments and cord cutters, and Hulu, focused on changing the OTT model with new, personalised relationships.”
Hewelt added: “We have entered a landscape where consumers expect to access lots of different content from service providers. For the pay platform operators there is a real challenge to work out who your partners are, when to differentiate and when to collaborate.
Pay-TV ops have been working hard to reinvent their products using personalisation and recommendation.
“At the end of the day for pay-TV it’s about locking in customer relationships you have built up over time. The newer landscape is all about building deeper relationships – in a world in which the use of apps and the popularity of no contract services means that users can come and go much more easily.”
