In our latest blog, Laura Rognoni reflects on this year’s Connected TV World Summit recently held in London, and explores how innovative bundling, premium content, and creative personalization are reshaping a new era of streaming entertainment.
I recently had the pleasure of attending the Connected TV World Summit (CTVWS) in London, where industry leaders gathered to discuss the future of TV and digital media. Natasha Matos-Hemingway, Chief Executive at Shahid (MBC Group), kicked off the event with a compelling presentation on Shahid’s platform growth, boasting more than 3.9 million subscribers. She attributed their success to a seamless blend of a great product, exceptional content, and an efficient go-to-market (GTM) strategy. This set the stage for insightful discussions on what differentiates a premium streaming service, the types of content that resonate most, and the importance of bundled offerings.
Navigating the Plateau: Quality Over Quantity
One of the standout discussions at the Summit revolved around data insights from Ampere Analysis, revealing that streaming service subscriptions have plateaued, with growth largely driven by previous subscribers returning to the service. This underscores the challenge of retaining users and reducing churn, especially given the often-substantive re-acquisition costs. While bundling and collaboration are trending topics, the real focus to successfully attract and retain audiences should be on the quality of these connections and the compatibility of the partner’s long-term strategic roadmaps. Effective bundling means choosing partners that offer high-quality services and have aligned strategies, whereas bloated and incompatible bundles are often counterproductive. As Priya Dogra from SKY emphasized, great partnerships lead to better outcomes, engaged users, and stronger connections, fostering business scalability and growth.
These insights align with the approach NAGRAVISION has taken with OpenTV ENTera. We’re dedicated to cultivating a partner ecosystem that seamlessly integrates with our streaming solution. By exclusively collaborating with partners who are fully committed to our specification, we tackle complex integration challenges and utilize the solution’s full range of capabilities. Our mission extends beyond delivering a streaming service; we’re dedicated to crafting a strategic roadmap for operators’ success and our selected partnerships are a testament to this strategy. Our collaborations aren’t just about offering extensive content options, but reflect our commitment to integrating diverse services, creating rich entertainment environments, and boosting our customer’s operational efficiency.
Personalization and Sports: Key Drivers of Engagement
Personalization remains a pivotal topic in shaping customer experiences, as highlighted by Matthew Hughes from EE. It was fascinating to hear that 80% of customers are more likely to engage with personalized services, which boosts viewing and loyalty by at least 30%. Personalization for EE begins with diverse content through strategic partnerships that encompasses both content and hardware.
The key is to create a layered experience, striking the right balance between investing in quality content and developing seamless, intuitive discovery methods. This involves rethinking how users experience entertainment and matching user viewing data with content and metadata to build a highly engaging environment. YouTube’s success in connecting audiences with content owners and keeping users engaged beyond recommendations is a prime example.
At NAGRAVISION, we’re leveraging our partnerships with industry leaders like XRoadMedia and SimplyTV to harness AI and metadata and develop highly personalized offers with OpenTV ENTera. It’s not just about the content; it’s about empowering audiences to feel in control of their own experience. Our focus on features like keyword searches, swim lanes, deep-linking, and localized metadata is crucial to create fully bespoke environments that can anticipate the audience’s needs. As both content and user interfaces (UIs) become increasingly similar across platforms, creating better journeys based on a holistic understanding of viewing preferences is essential.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, on-demand and live sports offerings also emerged as a key topic, with data from OMDIA highlighting that UK sports fans generate £2 billion in video revenue annually. Half of these fans engage with sports content on social media and other digital platforms, and 30% are likely to pirate video content—1.5 times more than non-sports fans. These insights emphasize the importance of content security and anti-piracy measures, key hallmarks of NAGRAVISION’s streaming security solution, to ensure that high-resolution experiences across multiple devices are delivered securely to legitimate subscribers.
Sports streaming faces important challenges like converting users beyond specific events, high content rights costs, technical issues, and managing live events. With OpenTV ENTera, NAGRAVISION prepares operators for high volumes of concurrent streams using multi-CDN technology, ensures low latency and enables interactive solutions to enhance the viewing experience.
Simplicity and Innovation: The Future of Streaming
Ultimately the discussions at CTVWS highlighted that core to success in the world of digital entertainment are consumer offers that offer simplicity paired with a great user experience that provides frictionless access to content. This goes beyond traditional recommendations or non-curated bundles and focuses on the long-term strategy behind these choices. Pairing simplicity with innovation and collaboration is key. As Dan Simmons from Caretta Research emphasized, it all starts with UX. That’s exactly why, at NAGRAVISION, we provide maximum flexibility to our customers in terms of user experience, ensuring a seamless relationship between the app, back-end, CRM, and billing systems to create a cohesive and efficient streaming ecosystem.
The discussion also confirmed that NAGRAVISION’s streaming solution, OpenTV ENTera, is fully aligned with the latest operator requirements given its focus on bundling and a high-performance user experience. With innovative content integration and a strong partner ecosystem, OpenTV ENTera is paving the way for an exciting future, highlighting our commitment to innovation and excellence as we enable new opportunities across digital entertainment that are designed to redefine consumer engagement.
This year’s CTVWS underscored the importance of standing out in the crowded streaming landscape. In the words of Ben Keen, while it may look like the industry is revisiting traditional business models—emphasizing simplicity, aggregation, and UX —we’re reinventing them with greater flexibility and agility.
To learn more about NAGRAVISION streaming solutions visit https://nagra.vision/streaming-solutions/ or to learn more about OpenTV ENTera, download our fact sheet.
