Ever thought Live TV ( and Europe) was dead ? Think twice...

A few years ago, and still nowadays, many people said and probably believed that live TV viewing was dead ( or will soon be) , and the same would apply to the historic main stream broadcasters who embodied the large live audiences ( the likes of TF1, P7, RTL, ..) , and also to the technologies and infrastructure like DTT which were dedicated to deliver these programs to their mass audiences. ( I remember having a call with a top Californian executive at Netflix in 2014, shortly before Netflix launched in France to suggest that may be integrating the VOD proposal from Netflix with national live TV would make sense to create an even better consumer proposal, and I probably sounded like a dinosaur or a fool...)

At least two recent events have shown us that predicting the imminent death of live TV might be an overly pessimistic ( or optimistic, depending where you speak from) statement.

The first one was the massive strive in all countries of live TV viewing during the Corona confinement ( see https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/when-coronavirus-reminds-us-importance-broadcast-tv-vincent-grivet) , while many predicted, or expected, or worried that this would only mean massive VOD viewing and cause massive congestion of internet networks in addition.

The speculations that Amazon ( like other famous OTT services including Apple TV) will now integrate live TV programs in its offer is an other sign of the resilience and the confirmed end-user appeal of live TV, even the more when it is smartly integrated with on-demand and with modern customer interfaces.

And this integration of live with on demand can happen in both directions, it is not the monopoly of US OTT giants. In reality, the integration has happened already, and is happening predominantly in the other way, meaning Live TV champions adding on-demand elements to their service proposals ; consider for instance the replay from all main stream broadcasters, the national aggregation platforms like Freeview Play in the UK, Loves TV in Spain, Tivu in Italy and soon Salto in France; these are innovative and powerful proposals of a combination of live and on demand content, and believe it or not, they have not been designed under the sun of California, but in Europe, around the studios and headquarters (sunny or rainy) of TV channels who have been here for 40 years in many cases... , and these integration are not insiders' rumours of future launches, they are here and have millions of users daily. And also, a large part of the technology which powers these innovative integrated hybrid proposals has not been created in a garage in the MIT or Palo Alto surroundings, but it has been crafted, and continue to be developed in Europe by German, Polish, French, British, Dutch,etc. engineers, under the banner of a European born and managed standard, namely HbbTV. So, may be not only live TV is not dead, but also the European TV champions are not dead, and Europe as a whole is not dead in the digital media technology landscape.

#HbbTV #Salto #Freeview #LovesTV # Tivu