Delivering convenience is increasingly a challenge – We want to change that

Our Time To Play vision gives a strong message that TV service providers have to keep pace with change – if they are not in the game they are going to get left behind.

We know that TV remains a premium experience that consumers are willing to pay for. So, how can the industry overcome the challenges it faces to deliver the convenience and experience consumers continually expect?

In these rapidly changing times, the industry must develop a deeper understanding of emerging consumer behavior, learn how the elements interoperate and create a seamless, rich experience. Mixing screens and platforms easily creates a spiderweb of poorly integrated technologies, and a complex back-end will always reflect on the end experience, making it clunky and unsatisfying. And if consumers are going to keep paying for TV, we simply can’t deliver this kind of service.

Unfortunately for most TV service providers, many of the platforms, technologies and systems they have for a TV solution today will need considerable adaptation or even replacement in order to be built-ready for the explosion in complexity and scale for the future. Platform and service agility will be crucial.

The solutions they require involve high degrees of intelligence and automation within processing systems, and an even greater amount of flexibility to adapt to new devices, formats and opportunities. Even the global processing of metadata surrounding content will need to be harmonized. Industry moves in aspects like standardized MPEG-DASH adaptive bit-rate streaming will assist in reducing the cost and complexity of delivery.

We are seeing an increasingly developing landscape of new industry players, but it is the existing TV service providers who are in a superb position to hold onto customers with their trusted brands and established services. However, they will have to transform their packaged services for every screen. To address this, the new solutions require tight integration in the back-office to harmonize and interconnect every possible screen with one-another and any content. The presentation styles and client support for every consumer interaction will have to be unified.

Not addressing this will lead increased frustration among consumers. They don’t care about the technology behind the services, they will simply expect to be able to start watching a movie on their main TV set and finish watching it on their tablet in bed, for example.

It is a trend that is undeniable, as the evolution of consumer expectation continues at an unprecedented rate of change. Speaking at ‘The Future of Entertainment Summit’ in London, June 2012, Mike Darcey, Chief Operating Officer at BSkyB, declared: “We have always felt that we were ahead of the consumer, and we brought things to market early like Sky+. It was our job to explain to consumers why they needed them. But today customer expectations of what they should be able to do with their content have caught up and run ahead of us and as an industry we are trying to catch up.”

Ericsson’s mission is to help operators innovate, deliver and unify this experience across multiple platforms to multiple screens, by turning complexity into simplicity, and giving end users a TV experience that’s worth paying for. We see clearly how content consumption is rapidly evolving, and how this is driving significant changes across the TV industry.

We know that creating the next-generation TV experience requires a combination of skills taken from the world of telecoms and television. It needs experience that reaches wider than ‘just’ TV, further than ‘just’ mobile and beyond the limits of fixed-line networks. Drawing on decades of broadcast, media and operator expertise, we are making new TV experiences a mass-market reality. Our portfolio of solutions and our expertise and services make us ready to enable content owners and TV service providers to prosper through the inevitable re-invention of TV.

We have built the next generation platforms that unify TV anywhere services, enable the scale and agility for the almost infinite and unknown, make delivery networks video-optimized, and bring deep integration and services to our customers. We are ultimately preparing for the realization of a Networked Society, where everyone, everything and everywhere will be connected in real time.