Simon Trudelle, Senior Director, Product Marketing, NAGRA
The pay-TV industry faces significant disruption from a rapidly evolving and increasingly competitive landscape, particularly in Asia-Pacific where growing competition from OTT service providers and easier access to pirate services is squeezing pay-TV revenue. In fact, piracy has become such a large problem that some even believe it to be a long-term threat to the industry’s sustainability.
Android TV is also splitting opinion. While widely seen as a tool to reduce costs and accelerate time to market when on-boarding new content services or adding new user experience features like voice search, it’s also viewed by some executives at larger operators as a risk, as they fear that too much control is ceded to the internet giant.
At NAGRA, we believe the key to overcoming such challenges is through more innovation and collaboration in technology and business models. In 2018, the Pay-TV Innovation Forum identified three top priorities in Asia-Pacific that need to be addressed through innovation and collaboration if service providers are to maintain growth:
- Invest in the next generation of paid-for video services: Pay-TV providers need to offer a more diverse selection of packages and services at a wider range of price-points and across different devices, leveraging existing pay-TV infrastructure and fixed and mobile broadband networks. Providers must also address the growing demand for flexible content pricing and packaging, low-cost offerings, global and local content, and personalised user experiences across multiple devices. This will enable pay-TV providers to compete against new entrants, reinforce their role as the central aggregators of choice, and offer content in an integrated and user-friendly experience.
- Re-think the relationship between pay-TV service providers and content owners: With content owners increasingly selling their assets direct to consumers and without exclusivity, the challenge for pay-TV is to defend its value proposition and differentiation based on content. To do that, pay-TV providers and content owners need to re-think how they work together to support a more diverse range of products and services, including more flexibility and a willingness to share risks and rewards.
- Combat streaming piracy: The industry recognises more needs to be done to combat piracy, and there are opportunities to work together to develop new approaches to monitor, track and stop the distribution of illegal content. By increasing investment in effective technological solutions, supporting anti-piracy initiatives, lobbying to improve legal frameworks and government enforcement, the industry can tackle the pirates, especially when done so alongside developing more affordable, appealing and user-friendly legitimate video services.
The Asia-Pacific TV industry is primed for change. The challenge for pay-TV service providers is in not only facing new trials, but how they can also leverage current and emerging opportunities together in order to affect positive results in the region.
To learn more, download the Asia-Pacific findings brief and visit https://dtv.nagra.com/paytvif for additional insight from the Pay-TV Innovation Forum, including the 2018 findings from North America and EMEA.