SURVEY

The TV experience
OTT
The TV experience
Platform differentiation
The TV experience, as defined in the introduction to this section, is
central to what TV operators – and in particular, pay TV operators – bring
to the market.
The usefulness – or essentialness – of the TV experience as a
differentiator for operators is borne out by the responses of our
survey sample. Sixty-three per cent of respondents agree that the
TV experience is a useful way to differentiate a service, in addition
to the content offering, pricing and other factors, with a further 21%
agreeing that the TV experience is the single most important way for
TV operators to differentiate their offering from competitors – meaning
that a noteworthy 84% in total believe the TV experience is a key factor
for service differentiation. Only 14% of respondents say that the TV
experience is of limited use as a differentiator as consumers choose
their provider mostly for other reasons with 2% holding the belief that
the TV experience is of little or no value in differentiating a TV service,
as consumers choose their provider entirely for other reasons (fig. 6).
Our respondents were also asked to consider the importance of
each of 10 components of the TV experience as a differentiator. The
highest rating goes to the inclusion as part of the TV experience of
catch-up on-demand TV players from popular broadcasters, which
was rated ‘very important’ by 56% of the sample survey. The next set
of features in importance is the interactive linear TV guide, advanced
search capabilities and recommendation tools, along with access to
paid-for on-demand services from the service provider itself. All are
seen as either ‘very’ or ‘moderately’ important by around three out of
four respondents.
Next up in order of importance is access to multiple content sites
via a TV app store, content enrichment features such as externalsource
movie reviews and sports statistics, and TV apps related to the
content, with a majority of 67.5% and 66.1% respectively citing these as
important differentiators.
Also seen as important are social interaction features and the
availability of user-generated content that is relevant to the show being
watched, with over half of respondents rating social interaction as very
or moderately important. With service providers still at an early stage
of integrating these relatively new elements into the TV experience,
responses to our sample indicate they are likely to become more
important – both for consumers and service providers – in the future
as technology evolves to enable advanced capabilities in this area, as
is shown by responses to our respondents’ rating of features from a
viewer’s perspective (fig. 7).
perceived usefulness or importance from the viewer’s perspective.
Once again, on-demand services rate highly – in particular ondemand
services from third-party providers such as Netflix or Amazon
Prime Instant video. Over half of respondents rate this feature as ‘very
important’ for consumers. The next most highly-rated feature is the
backwards EPG that enables catch-up viewing direct from the guide,
rated very important by 43% and moderately important by 44%. Both
indicate the high importance, from the perspective of the user, of
personal viewing capabilities and control of viewing.
The plain seven or 14-day linear TV guide is also still rated highly, with
about 78% rating it as either very important or moderately important.
On the theme of enabling viewers to find content, unified search is
also very highly rated, with 38% judging it to be very important and 44%
Fig. 6
20.8%
14.1%
The TV experience is a
useful way to differentiate a
service, in addition to the
content offering, pricing and
other factors
1.9%
How important is the
TV experience –
defined as interactive
guide, VoD portal,
navigation tools, apps
etc. – to TV operators? 63.2%
The TV experience is of
limited use in differentiating
a TV service as consumers
choose their provider mostly
for other reasons
Useful features
Our respondents were also asked to rate a range of 13 features for
The TV experience is the
single most important way
for TV operators to
differentiate their offering
from competitors
The TV experience is of
little or no value in
differentiating a TV service,
as consumers choose their
provider entirely for other
reasons
8 Digital TV Europe Industry Survey 2016 digitaltveurope.net