Telcos stick with STBs to avoid 'becoming
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Telcos stick with STBs to avoid 'becoming an app' | |
| By Mary Lennighan, Total Telecom Wednesday 19 March 2014 | |
European operators will continue to provide set-top boxes to create stickiness and drive revenues; form factor will likely change though. | |
| It came as little surprise at TV Connect on Tuesday when a well-established set-top box maker insisted that telcos need to stay with the business model that sees them provide set-top boxes to their TV and video customers, rather than restricting their presence to effectively being an application on a smart TV. More interestingly, the telcos backed up this theory. In a presentation designed to extol the virtues of the STB, Christopher Cytera, IPTV partner manager at Dune HD, noted that 270 million set-top boxes were sold worldwide in 2013, up 8% on the previous year, and predicted that the figure will rise to 286 million units this year, the market growing to $2 billion by 2017. "That's a lot of set-top boxes which aren't going to go a way in a hurry," said Cytera. One of the reasons for his optimism stems from the operator community, which risks being disenfranchised by the move to smart televisions. "Operators don't want to be an app," he insisted. "BT hasn't invested billions in BT Sport just to become an Internet provider." A number of operators have been vocal about their desire to move STB functionality into the cloud in recent years, but those who took the stage alongside Cytera were keen to hang on to hardware. "We are not getting rid of the set-top boxes at all," said Mila Milenkovic, head of business development at Telekom Srbija's residential customers division. Her company, the incumbent operator in Serbia, needs something with which to control the customer experience in order to generate revenues, and that's where the STB comes in, she explained. "We cannot get rid of set-top boxes" either, said Yaman Alpata, director, digital media marketing, at Turk Telekom subsidiary TTNet. For TTNet, the STB means lower churn. "Customers with set-top box ownership stay more," than those who receive their programming through apps, Alpata said. But while the set-top box looks set to be with us for while, the format could well change. As Martin Kaiser, director of roadmap service solutions at France's Bouygues Telecom, pointed out, a competitive market means margin squeeze, giving IPTV providers less scope to subsidise expensive hardware for their |
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