Jean-Marc Racine, Chief Product Officer, Synamedia has offered his 2020 industry predictions, forecasting that new ecosystems and partnerships will boost the demand for linear TV addressable advertising, and that cross-service TV bundles will become more commonplace.

Racine’s predictions are:

Bundling – The cross-service TV bundle will move centre stage as the perceived wisdom that cord cutting is decimating the traditional pay-TV sector will prove false. With the world’s media powerhouses launching streaming services into an already crowded market, consumers will be confronted with too many siloed options. Many services won’t survive and some cord cutters, tired of searching, may ultimately watch less. To avoid this fate, traditional pay-tv broadcasters and new players will join forces to offer a converged, curated “new pay-TV bundle” to meet consumer demand.

Piracy – We will see the industry raise the volume about the toxicity of streaming piracy and fraudulent, for-profit credentials sharing. While individual operators facing severe piracy situations are already calling for more to be done to combat pirates, we are only at the start of this battle to protect both the value of premium content and operator revenues.

Latency – Achieving synchronised latency between live broadcast and OTT streaming at scale will become a ‘must-have’ as live sports streaming goes mainstream. This will require the entire end-to-end chain to be optimized for low latency: using a low-delay encoder is a moot point if the CDN platform and player introduce delays down the line. Operators will also start to converge their broadcast and IP streams at the headend to help minimize any delay and optimise their workflows.

Hybrid oprations and cloud – As the move to the cloud accelerates, we will see greater adoption by pay-TV providers of solutions to find the optimal balance between CAPEX and OPEX. For example, the ability to launch, scale up and scale down high availability channels for smarter hybrid on-premise and public cloud deployments while keeping a tight control on costs.

Addressable advertising – We expect to see new ecosystems and partnerships to boost the growing demand for linear TV addressable advertising. This will include more pay-TV operator and broadcaster collaborations based upon sharing advanced advertising platforms and audience data to create solutions matching the needs of advertisers and agencies. The entire industry will also need to work together to define a standard way of measuring addressable advertising audiences and outcomes.

Categories: Advertising, Articles, CDNs, IPTV, Pay TV, Piracy, Targetted, VOD, Work flow