Research conducted in the UK by Digital Marketing Agency Digital Clarity earlier this year revealed that 72% of the under 25s surveyed use social media apps, such as Facebook and Twitter, on their mobile phones to comment on shows while they are watching them.

These statistics call the model of the passive “viewer” into question; instead the industry would be better placed to regard significant numbers of TV audiences as “users” who want to take advantage of their companion devices to engage with their favourite shows through the use of social TV applications.

Television has always been a social activity, whether this is families gathering around the big screen in the living room to watch a film or individuals talking about the latest episode of X-Factor at work.

Connected TVs and companion devices present new ways for people to engage with TV content, however, operators still need to address the pain point around the lack of interoperability. Pay TV providers can therefore add value and build stickiness into their subscription packages by integrating social TV in a user-friendly way across all of their users’ screens.

Users are already adept at shaping the online experience to suit their own needs and preferences and by deploying hybrid multiscreen services, there is no reason why this cannot translate to a television context. Therefore services providers should be thinking creatively about how they can take advantage of social TV to better immerse customers with their service packages.

Initiatives such as DLNA offer opportunities for a certain level of connectivity, however, there is no single standard that works across all Consumer Electronics products. The array of incompatible operating systems on the market makes the development and deployment of social TV apps both time-consuming and expensive. Multiple versions need to be built for each OS and then transcoded for delivery to different devices from the headend. Therefore, the successful integration of social TV into a subscription package means deploying a more comprehensive networking technology to ensure the process is seamless and coherent across devices.

Netgem believes the most cost-effective answer lies in using a smart hybrid and smart set top box as a home multimedia server to redistribute broadcast content, as well as broadband delivered content and apps, to every companion devices around the home.

netplus.ch wished to rapidly deploy innovative additional TV services, including PVR and VOD, with a flexible enough solution to cover customer’s needs, who have expressed a desire for nonlinear multimedia content and multiscreen services and who want this as soon as possible.

IPTV 2.0 is about offering the technology and solutions to enable operators to continue deriving value added services from their network and customer assets in a competitive multi device environment.

IPTV 2.0 is about offering consumers a real multimedia home network solution, in a multi-branded consumer electronics environment, enabling seamless integration of multi source video content (personal, free to air, Internet and paid for) into an innovative and integrated state of the art user interface (Interactive Service Guide).

There’s no doubt that IP delivered content in a lean back context will increasingly become a standard part  of consumers’ viewing habits, the question is who will manage the user’s access to this programming? The company that “owns” the remote psychologically takes ownership of the whole viewing experience and that brand becomes synonymous with what is typically a major component of the viewers’ leisure time.

There are currently three (main) ways to receive OTT content on the big screen, through a hybrid STB (subscription or free to view), a connected TV or a media streamer.  To date the vast bulk of connected TVs have been large format premium products and have not, therefore, seen mass market pick-up. A cheaper solution which minimises the barrier to entry for consumers has been the development of low cost web adaptor STBs. Sony, Apple and Toshiba have all brought low cost OTT devices to market to extend the connected TV experiences. Sony and Apple were able to deploy quickly since they had their own in-house solutions in place, whilst Toshiba recognised the importance of bringing their offer to market quickly and thus used third party, Netgem, middleware.

By offering these types of flexible services, along with the option to access both free to air with their own and/or third party premium OTT subscription services, it has been possible for less established digital TV players, such as CE vendors, to set themselves up as virtual service providers at a fraction of the set-up cost of a cable or satellite pay TV operator. There is also the potential to drive revenue by taking control of the home’s secondary television sets by providing services that will complement those of the incumbent pay TV service providers

However, recent statistics released by Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates indicated that a significant number (around 20%) of UK pay TV subscribers would be “quite likely” to cut the cord in favour of the hybrid YouView platform when it launches whilst a further 6% would consider using it for secondary screens in the home. As broadband speeds increase and the concept of OTT is established with viewers competition for ownership of the living room will clearly become more heated.

Of course it won’t be possible for a CE company to offer the breadth of content provided by established pay TV players since much of the premium programming is locked to the service providers due to exclusivity clauses.  Equally, bandwidth constraints limit the amount of HD and 3D content that can be consumed over IP.  All this makes it highly unlikely that alternative vendors will be able to wrest away control of the living room from the pay TV operators, at least in the immediate future.

Despite the clear advantages these factors offer the Pay TV operators, they will need to move fast to launch the types of digital home services which will meet subscriber demands. Features including access to IP content, such as YouTube, through the TV, catch-up programming and multi-screen services with a usable interface across all screens have all reached the market already. As consumers become increasing familiar with these services they will become seen as first desirable, but ultimately standard. If operators do not meet these expectations, then subscribers have a growing number of options to replace their services.

At this point the market is more open than ever before and only time will reveal who prevails in the battle for the remote.

watching live TV on tablet

Younger consumers are looking for a more interactive television experience as demonstrated by the increasing use of portable devices, such as tablets and smartphones, to access social media outlets and engage with friends around TV shows.

This is borne out by research conducted in the UK by Digital Marketing Agency Digital Clarity earlier this year, this showed that 72% of the under 25s surveyed multi-task by using social media apps on smartphones to comment on shows while they are watching them.

The growth of social TV goes hand in hand with the exceptional uptake of portable devices, such as phones and tablets, for consuming and interacting with video content. More than a third of the UK population now owns smartphones and tablets are also becoming must-have gadgets. Operators that fail to embrace mobile devices for the consumption of TV services within the home risk losing a great deal of business. Conversely, operators can offer a more immersive TV experience by bringing companion devices and social TV applications into the managed infrastructure.

Young people are growing up with multi-screen technology and social media and youth audiences are set to become some of the most lucrative demographics for operators.  The demand for advanced social viewing experiences is set to increase exponentially as these users reach maturity. In order to remain competitive, operators must be able to offer the types of interactive and multi-screen services within their own bundles, or they will risk losing tech savvy younger customers to CE companies or piracy.

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Netgem set-top box N8000

Since more and more people are using tablets to access content, service providers that fail to support these portable devices risk losing customers to alternative services outside of the traditional pay TV infrastructure. Therefore operators need to offer subscribers interactive and multi-screen viewing experiences that are consistent and simple to use.

Getting content onto tablets and smartphones is a first step, but service providers need to  make connected devices work together to complement each other in order to deliver a truly next generation TV experience. Netgem has developed the ‘nCloud’ to address this challenge.  The nCloud is a software suite, built around a Media Server. It leverages local content and blends it with cloud-based applications and services. The Media Server acts not only as an aggregator of various content and services, including personal content, but also as a service orchestrator linking the operator with all screens in the home.

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“Home Cloud” technology offers easy access to all content, including live TV and VOD, through a consistent UI via any connected device. nCloud is built around a hybrid set top box which acts as a home server to blend pay or free to view programming with streaming and on-demand content and services delivered via the Cloud for redistribution to connected devices around the home.

A home server is a more cost-effective alternative to transcoding at the headend. The delivery of apps and services as HTML5 pages to client devices over a wireless network ensures a fluid and coherent experience, regardless of what device is being used.

In addition to the operating savings, using the end user’s existing wireless network provides clear performance benefits. The STB is used to deliver both locally stored and OTT content to devices, this reduces latency because the majority of users’ requests are handled within the home. Local storage meets the security needs of consumers, since their personal content is kept within their own network, and also those of the content owner by reducing the threat of piracy.

Connected TV is old news, the ways in which users consume TV content is evolving so operators need to start thinking more intelligently about all the devices within the connected home. This is why Netgem believes the Set Top Box has a long future ahead of it as a home hub, despite the growing popularity of connected TVs.