irdetoAccording to Irdeto, multiscreen video services finally seem to pick up, due to increased availability and portability of video, rapid growth in the number of smart devices, and consumer behavioral trends to consume video and interact with multiple devices. Besides, the benefits speak for themselves, since these innovative services provide a “wow” factor, deliver additional user impressions and service “stickiness”, enhanced subscriber experience and additional services revenues, not to mention increased smart devices sales, data usage, content sales and advertising. Therefore, as promised last week, we continue with bringing you deeper insights into Irdeto’s expertise, this time looking at the company’s multiscreen solutions.

At CommunicAsia/BroadcastAsia 2013 last month, Irdeto provided a discussion on what is holding APAC operators back from multi-screen success, presented conjointly by Bengt Jonsson, VP Asia-Pacific, and Ben Gidley, Director, Multiscreen Solutions. Both expect Asia Pacific to be incredibly successful with multiscreen solutions due to the enormous amount of connected devices on the horizon.

However, they recommend considering four key building blocks to making multiscreen work successfully:

  1. Increase customer loyalty with a personalized user experience: While many solutions focus on just “getting on a device,” the real challenge is making a personalized experience across devices that keep consumers wanting more. An intuitive design, coupled with the best of recommendation technology and consistency across devices is key.
  2. Reduce time to market, risk and cost: With the fierce race to offer multiscreen services, operators must remove the risk and delay out of launching new services by using a reference architecture that is pre-built and ready for branding. Cloud-based services can instantly scale and provide the high level of availability and redundancy that most in-house implementations cannot match.
  3. Uncompromising content protection on any device: To ensure the success of the service, an operator must enable consumers to securely access premium content from any device of choice, including “must have” devices of tomorrow. In addition, operators must ensure uncompromising security on any device to satisfy content owners, or they may have risk losing rights to premium content.
  4. Monetizing using different business models: Digital media rarely follows a revenue recipe. Having the freedom to test market preferences and pricing - whether it be a la carte purchase, rental, free, ad-sponsored or bundles - is a powerful tool for operators to fine-tune their offering to compete.

Bengt Jonsson explains that „a successful multiscreen strategy is more than just content distribution on multiple devices, if you want to compete for consumers and revenue. Today, a truly great multiscreen solution will solve your most important business problems and give you the freedom to focus on your core strength - delivering a compelling user and content experience.”

He urges companies to break free from technology that doesn’t scale or adapt, or relies on rigid monetization models, emphasizing that the right technology and partners in place is what will separate those who embark on multiscreen – and those who truly excel at it.

Graham Kill, Irdeto’s CEO, advices broadcasters to think a little bit more like Internet operators, who do a lot of experimentation, pointing out: “Broadcasters are traditionally extremely conservative. They want an absolutely perfect viewing experience, but they need to have a little bit more of an Internet approach and that is the sort of thing that we support. What we can offer is to get much more content on the consumers’ devices, which creates a richer experience. As a result, consumers feel that they are getting a huge amount of value“, mentioning as well that interest in video is at an all-time high.

“A few years ago there were a number of challenges in the way of consuming  high quality video content, such as low Internet bandwidth and a lack of media playback-enabled devices. Today, however, things have changed drastically with consumers demanding more, both in terms of content availability and breadth of accessibility. We‘re very much the strongest in terms of conditional access (CA) in Asia, software and conditional access worldwide, and increasingly for multi-screen solutions for media operators”, Graham said.

In fact, what has been unabated, even in economically challenging times, is the march of broadband, which according to Graham “is because access to information, entertainment, being connected is almost becoming like a basic need. Particularly mobile in this region is an absolute necessity. This enables so many new business models and ways of getting to the consumer. If you’re an established brand that is trusted, then you are very well set up to take advantage of that and extend your services to mobile.”

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Indeed, Irdeto makes clear that multiscreen services have more to consider that just content distribution, stating that “consumers need to find the content when they want to watch it, which requires personalization and recommendation technology” not to mention that ease of use and quality of service play a major role as well.

By Daniela La Marca