OTT is the driving force of niche TV services By
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By Niall Hunt November 10th, 2016
“OTT has shortened the gap between content producers and end users,” Henrik Schneider, director of broadcast and media services division, Antenna Hungária told attendees at the OTTtvWorld Summit today.
“You can now go direct to customers instead of going through intermediaries like cable providers.”
He explains that many content operators have seen this as a way to directly target customers, but for niche players “it is expensive to target your audience through traditional networks”.
He added: “These traditional networks don’t give much feedback on viewing habits, and are interested in how many households you cover [not the viewing habits].”
For niche players “OTT offers a lower entry point. This makes the cost of content the biggest barrier to enter the market.”
Schneider explained that there as seven main categories of niche, from sports and past times at the broader end, with arts at the other. “Many major sporting leagues are already set up to delivery OTT. The NBA are working with ESPN and others to market the services, but they deliver content direct,” he said.
In terms of pricing, he argued that most viewers don’t compare “the price of niche services vs the broad TV service. They compare it with actually going to a game”.
This is true at the arts end of the scale too. “Consumers of opera don’t compare the price of niche OTT viewing with their TV service, they compare it with going to the opera and often pay 5x the price of watching a movie,” he explained.
Schneider described MiniDig TV, which targets the Hungarian expatriate community through content delivery on an app. “It is very easy to target these audiences. In-app purchase means we don’t need individual contracts with each of the audience, we let the app stores take their share. If it gets big enough, we will switch payment method. This is not a model that are being used by other players.”
He also described the national broadcaster’s approach to the Euros hosted partially in Hungary. Not only did they add interactive match choice to services, they “also added metadata of match onscreen. We integrated social media. This type of hybrid approach is good for targeting niche, because you can use the same content as elsewhere, but add services and information for the niches that want it”.