The broadcast market
Although the broadcast pay TV market is the largest and most mature, with close to 388 million digital pay TV households worldwide in september 2011(source: Dataxis), there are still a number of opportunities to launch a new pay-TV business. These include cable digitisation, converting free-to-air digital terrestrial television (DTT) viewers into paying subscribers and emerging markets requiring satellite pay-TV services.
The way in which consumers view live-TV is evolving rapidly and as a result, there is a clear need to develop new means for TV consumption. Examples of this include place and time-shifted viewing.
The client needs
A broadcaster’s needs vary according to the maturity of its business. When launching a new pay-TV service they must consider a number of key factors in order to make it a success: quick time-to-market, proven content protection solutions to enable access to premium content from studios, and differentiating services such as personal video recorder (PVR) and video-on-demand (VOD). New pay TV operators need to quickly generate revenue streams, hence a fast time-to-market and differentiating services are the key success factors.
For existing broadcast pay TV operators, the main challenges are increasing subscriber loyalty using TV features that will set them apart from their competitors, providing a high level of customer support, and addressing new customer targets to extend their reach. This is particularly important for the broadcasters with the arrival of new pay-TV platforms, like IPTV, putting increasing pressure on their business.
