Tales from the ‘25 Connected TV World Summit in London
Just over a week ago, the CTV industry found its way to London for the annual Connected TV World Summit. In two days and across two different stages, many insights were shared by those working hard to bring video to the masses. In this blog we take a look at some of the interesting insights that were shared, in the talks I attended. These are the Tales from the ’25 Connected TV World Summit in London.
A battle of ecosystems
While the event is called the Connected TV World Summit, many different areas of the industry were represented. Application owners and FAST channel distributors, rights holders, Pay TV operators, Smart & Connected TV device manufacturers. Everyone was there. And it also highlights one of the biggest challenges the industry faces right now: a battle for the viewer’s attention, with all different ecosystems trying to grab the user’s eye.
As demonstrated in the image above, different parts of the ecosystem offer different levels of UX and advertising control. While FAST channels only have control over the actual streams themselves, applications, on the other hand, can already control the way the user interacts with the user interface once they have landed in the app. Moving further to the right, the level of control becomes even stronger, with the STB controlling most of the interface, but of course only when the user has selected the specific HDMI input. And finally there is the screen itself, which generally is the entry point for any user. It’s for good reason that parties like TitanOS and TiVo, both present at the CTV Summit, try their best to get a portion of the market. It allows for the best integrations and offers the most initial eyeballs, even though users do end up in one of the lower levels after a bit.
Several of the presentations and talks focused on aspects of the ecosystem battle. Dan Simmons from Caretta Research showed a rather interesting slide (afraid I can’t share due to potential privileged information), detailing just how similar all of the OTT applications are. Everybody tries to be Netflix, but there is really no differentiating factor between them. All apps look exactly the same, with a header, a menu on the left, and swimlanes full of content. It makes it rather difficult for users to get the content they want. Their suggestion? Move past recommendations for personalisation. With audience specific streams, interactive overlays, or even augmented reality, you might attract users in a different way rather than just watching video content. After all, users still spend way too long finding the content they want to watch. I’m all for finding innovative and interesting ways to get users towards the content they love.
Looking at Pay TV operators for a bit, I really appreciated some of the quotes made during the panel: “Using apps, devices and UX to deepen engagement”. As this talk focuses on exactly that, the battle between ecosystems, I liked a take from Chris van der Linden, Liberty Global. He mentioned that (paraphrasing) you need to make a user interface that is understood by a 16 year old, a 50 year old and a 75 year old, which is an excellent look at the ecosystem as a whole. How do we create experiences that everyone can understand, regardless of their age or technical know-how? It is a difficult job, and something that never really stands still. Alejandro Casal, KPN, did have an answer to how they try to cater to different generations. Their application has a home screen as you see with most applications, but they also still offer a TV Guide (EPG) for older generations that rather use this for their content discovery. Next to that, KPN also offers the ability to switch different subscriptions on and off, on a monthly basis. All of this combined sounds like a very user-centric way of handling your Pay TV business. Offering choice to users where they ask for it, without overwhelming them with too many options. Bundles are definitely back.
The power of regional streaming
The power of regional streamers just goes to show, with a very interesting presentation about ‘Shahid’, an Arabic-targeted OTT platform. I had not heard of Shahid before, even though it boasts having 20M+ subscribers (a combination of SVOD and AVOD), making it one of the bigger out there, and one of if not the biggest Arabic-specific streaming platform. It shows just how big regional streamers can become, with much of the world not even knowing they exist.
What sets Shahid apart from the regulars on every market like Netflix and Disney+, is the fact that they have a much better understanding of the markets they play a big role in. With specific content for different Arabic countries, they make and tailor content specific to that region, and even play into the different aspects currently happening. For example, right now is Ramadan, and has become a very big period for Shahid. With specific offers, and a big library of new content specific for this period, many Muslims tune in to Shahid. It’s something that you can really only do if you fully understand the market(s) you operate in. Bigger streamers do tend to lose that touch and focus more on a global audience, whereas regional streamers can get a much higher amount of engagement during significant periods in certain markets.
Something else I also really appreciated from how Shahid operates, is their use of different media types. They don’t just rely on their on platform for growth, but rather leverage a lot of social media and even real life events to enhance the experience for their end users. Massive (social) media campaigns with actors and actresses and influencers are very effective, especially during periods like Ramadan, making it a great way to grow the user base. And with having both SVOD and AVOD offerings available, the barrier to entry is very low.
It is a good time to be a regional streamer.
About MAUD, and handling large scale live events
It has been the talk of the industry for a while now: live sports. We’ve seen several of the largest streamers our there struggling to handle the 60+ millions of concurrent streams, and for good reason. That’s a lot of bits to be pushed through the networks of ISPs! Enter MAUD, or Multicast Assisted Unicast Delivery. In his talk at the Summit, Colin Phillips shared some of the results of using MAUD in production.
Starting off, to give you an understanding of why MAUD is a thing, you need to understand traffic during regular viewing times and peak times with e.g. live sports events. Because the average traffic actually increases rather gradually. The peaks however are increasingly bigger and bigger. In a slide from Colin, you can see exactly the effect of some of the largest live sports events.
The two lines depict the growth, with the pink line being the average growth in traffic, and the purple-ish line being the peak growth. You can clearly see that the peaks become bigger and bigger much faster, making it rather difficult for ISPs to have the needed network capacity to handle those peaks. In fact, if you want to handle those peaks, you’ll have a lot of ‘spare’ capacity during regular viewing times. As you will understand, having to increase network throughput only for big peaks, is expensive.
By leveraging MAUD, you can hook into the, for many ISPs, existing multicast network and distribute efficiently without having to deploy any additional hardware or requiring any app changes. The cleverness of MAUD lies in the modem in the homes of end-users. If controlled by the ISP, this modem can be expanded with multicast to unicast capabilities, changing the stream back into a ‘regular’ stream that your phone and TV will be able to play without problems. Sounds great, right? And it does, but there is only one caveat I do want to highlight.
In another talk about MAUD, a panel discussed whether MAUD is indeed the future to handling these bursty live sports events. I briefly mentioned it in the previous paragraph already, if an ISP has an existing multicast network, it requires very little effort to leverage the power of MAUD. On the other hand, as Iuniana Oprescu, Principal CDN Architect at Sky, explained, if you don’t have a pre-existing multicast network, should you want to leverage MAUD capabilities, you’ll have to build and then maintain yet another network, next to your already existing unicast capabilities. It’s suddenly a massive investment to use multicast, just for MAUD. Which you might then actually instead just put towards expanding your unicast capabilities, with similar effects.
Colin ended with a graph of the bandwidth savings achieved in the production tests. So if you have a multicast network just sitting there — MAUD definitely seems like a direction to look in.
Concluding
This was my first Connected TV Summit, and I did thoroughly enjoy some of the insights and panels provided by industry folks. If there is one takeaway from the summit, it’s that the industry is bustling with energy. Smart TV manufacturers are not standing still and try to get a bigger portion of the market. Meanwhile Pay TV operators look for interesting and innovative ways to retain their business, often with bundling of different subscriptions, and with an attempt to keep their broadband business going. The same bundling happens from some of the global applications, who, with lower control of the UX, continue to seek opportunities to increase their user base. Regional streamers like Shadid on the other hand, have a rather strong opportunity to gain a local following, by playing into the regional news, events and celebrations. Finally, on a more technical note, MAUD is definitely an interesting thing for ISPs to look into, if they already have a multicast network and look for new ways to combat unicast traffic peaks.
The next Connected TV Summit is already planned for next year, and I’ll be sure to be back! Will you be there too?
