By Tim Pearson, Senior Director Solutions Marketing, NAGRA
For NAGRA’s first in-person event in Europe for some 18 months, what better place to re-connect than beautiful Dubrovnik and the rather fantastically organized NEM conference? Commanding fine views over the Adriatic from the venue hotel, it’s abundance of outdoor spaces made this the perfect place for everyone to come back together – and judging by the conversations, I was not alone at this being my first outing for some time.
Partnerships were a key theme of this content market with a view. Partnerships to deliver content, partnerships to reach new eyeballs and partnerships to really understand consumer behavior. The collective aim of such partnerships is to ensure that a highly personalized and engaging proposition can be provided to subscribers as the content market grapples with the best way to offer consumers the service they’re looking for with as little friction as possible. Another theme was the need for organizations to come together to target content piracy as part of a content distribution strategy – as mentioned by Vlad Riashyn, President of Star Media, on the TellyCast podcast NEM special. Protecting the commercial interests of small and local content producers from piracy is key to ensure a regular pipeline of content is available to regional audiences. So it was great to hear it being discussed at length at NEM and have an opportunity to chat to Justin about it on the TellyCast podcast too.
The NAGRA-sponsored panel on the battle for eyeballs looked at the growth of Smart TV ownership and how the power now available within such devices provides operators with new, innovative ways of offering their services to consumers.
One of the challenges of providing an app for a Smart TV is that it can get lost in a seemingly endless library of apps that cover just about anything. This leaves operators with a key question – how to stand out from the crowd and provide the same familiar set-top box experience on the Smart TV? NAGRA’s TVkey solution is designed to address this very problem and offers the subscriber the opportunity to install the operator’s branded user experience during the initial set-up of the Smart TV. The operator takes control of key UX elements such as the guide, channel list and zapper bar to reflect the operator’s look and feel – exactly as a subscriber would see on the set-top box – and can enable a hybrid experience able to bring together traditional broadcast TV and value-added services such as Live OTT, Video On Demand, Catch-Up, Start-Over and Deep-Linking.
The panel also examined the role of aggregation through Smart TVs and more generally the role of how operators and content owners are forming partnerships to reach subscribers in today’s super-aggregated world that offers subscribers the opportunity to access multiple services from one centralized operator branded environment. Sharing of viewer data and content metadata form a key part of any partnership, and the panel discussed the challenges and opportunities this presented. If you missed the discussion with colleagues from A1 Croatia, Discovery and United Cloud, chaired by Ampere’s Guy Bisson, catch up here.
It was great to reconnect with colleagues and meet new people charged with the business of creating content and distributing it to their audiences in the most engaging, efficient and secure ways possible. Despite all the challenges of the past 18 months, the battle for eyeballs remains as alive as ever! If you’d like to learn more about NAGRA’s direct-to-TV solutions or how you can secure content ahead of its distribution with solutions such as our NexGuard forensic watermarking, get in touch here.