For more than two decades, pay-TV operators have experienced a long period of sustained growth. What was the key driver? The answer is simple: Sports.

Ivan Verbesselt, SVP Marketing at NAGRA, highlights the key trends pay-TV operators should look out for in the coming months and years.

The pay TV industry is currently undergoing a major transformation. The rise of the OTT model, the fast changes in consumer behavior and new forms of piracy are creating both opportunities and challenges.

In today’s digital world the threat is no longer the amateur offerings we’ve seen in the past. Today, we must take on the sophisticated and tech-savvy business that is commercial piracy. David Würgler, Senior Director of Anti-Piracy Litigation explains.

High-value franchise movies and television series, such as Avengers or Game of Thrones, enjoy incredible consumer awareness worldwide and drive up the piracy figures to record levels over time.

We’ve now reached a fragmentation tipping point and there has to be a re-bundling at some point. Could the answer lie in super-aggregation?

To start making real strides in the battle against piracy in the region – and indeed any region – rights owners must forge a closer partnership with all stakeholders to communicate the long-term impact of piracy.

With all the speculation about the future of the pay-TV industry, it can be easy to forget about the most important element in the equation – the content that subscribers watch.

In the post-OTT era, leveraging cloud technology is essential to the next generation of content security.

This is the second and final installment of our 2019 trends blog series addressing the topics that will be most relevant to the pay-TV market in in the coming year.

In this special blog series, we introduce the top trends, topics and considerations that pay-TV service providers need to address as they move into 2019.

From shifting consumer behaviour to the rapidly evolving threat of piracy, pay-TV operators across Asia have been forced into a radical top-down rethink of their business models recently.

At a time when humans are becoming more reliant on AI - for instance  mobile phones speech recognition, real-time speech translation, computer vision in self-driving cars — trust and transparency have become key issues to be addressed.

If you were not able to attend this year’s show, here are the top takeaways you need to know.

For pay-TV service providers, delivering premium services directly to consumer devices and leveraging back-end cloud infrastructure provides numerous benefits.

A lot can be done to increase OTT apps stickiness. With new content usages come new behaviors which must be addressed with changes in the way the content is offered.

In the digitally disrupted U.S. pay TV market, we know that innovation is one of the most important priorities to staying competitive in the evolving TV landscape. However, this is a broad solution leaving many to ask the question - “When it comes to innovation, where do I start?”

As we move into the new year, pay-TV service providers are in a unique position to create a truly unified TV experience that proactively blurs the lines between pay-TV and OTT. In essence, they can become the central gateway to all content that consumers love.