Pipe dreams & pain management: a day in the life of TV execs in Asia
In a room full of men with pipe, it doesn’t take long for smoke and heated argument to thicken the air. The issue, for many, is filling all that glorious broadband capacity. Do they care what they’re filling it with? Some do. Others, not so much.
Should they care? Absolutely not, say many (most?) telcos with lots of capacity to sell and a burgeoning universe of buyers.
“No matter what service you can think of going forward, almost all will rely on broadband. So we win no matter what,” Telekom Malaysia’s chief strategy officer, Dr Farid Mohamed Sani, told delegates at the first APOS l Tech in Hangzhou, China, earlier this month.
Wrong, you totally should care, say many (most?) in the content community, eager to put forward a case where a hi-quality content proposition is a robust contributor to keeping that monthly subscription money coming.
But Sani, like many others with service-whiplash, has “given up thinking what service will come next. “The more fundamental question for me is how do I serve the common denominator across all services, which is that I need to be available all the time everywhere,” he adds.
"No matter what service you can think of going forward, almost all will rely on broadband. So we win no matter what."
In between are differences of opinion on the strategic value of being a gigantic dumb pipe, what exactly constitutes a quality content proposition, discussion on how involved telcos and broadband providers should be in curating content, an exploding universe of companies willing to do whatever it takes (some call it dropping their pants/others describe it as being infinitely smart) for access to well-established and efficient billing relationships with billions of customers...
Pipe-talk not exactly a new issue. But the "just-how-dumb-should-our-pipe-be" discussion has taken a furious turn. Flashpoints include telcos’ blossoming romance with OTT/SVOD platforms that only want access to capacity and billing relationships; that neither want nor need help on the content side, which they can do very well themselves thank you very much; and are happy to talk whatever-terms just to get in the door.
That’s not all. Between the pipe and the viewer are a million things that need to go right to ensure the user experience. And a million things that could go wrong.
Between the pipe and the viewer are a million things that need to go right to ensure an optimal user experience. And a million things that could go wrong.
Issues in this space include billions of dollars of installed hardware and systems, many of which do not talk to each other; free-flowing tech vendors promising magic and a solution to all woes; a festival of conflicting interests; and an understandable reluctance by industry leaders to green light major change when they don’t actually know for sure where the next tsunami of disruption is going to come from. And then there are the data access and affordability issues all across Asia.
Opinions about set-top boxes, drives, clouds, TV set manufacturers’ involvement, and ways to get consumers to push the right buttons are just as heated as any other hot-button issues ripping through the industry right now.
Whatever the conflicts, the consensus seems to be that there should be as few buttons as possible between consumers and what they’re willing to pay for; that the new video world entails a seamless mix of linear and on-demand with the focus on getting viewers to what they want with minimal effort; that effectively managing big data is critical; that the end-to-end process should be dead easy; and how wickedly painful it is to get to painless.
Oh, and that the customer actually doesn’t care about your problems. It’s simple or bust. Simple really.
Here's what else is inside our new print/online issue, out today... www.contentasia.tv/issuefour2016/
PCCW’s Janice Lee on Viu in the future, FOX Networks Group's Cora Yim rocks Chinese originals, Ricky Owon his fave rabbit, how Asia’s industry really truly feels about tech & boxes, the games Fotini Paraskakis and DJ Lee are playing, & our supreme data leader Wared Seger at Parrot Analytics is showing us about Asia. Plus our first features ever in Japanese... all in the latest issue of ContentAsia in print+online.
Watch out for it at #MIPCOM in Cannes and #TIFFCOM in Tokyo. Safe travels and see you there!
Loads more at www.contentasia.tv