Visit Alticast at CES

CES 2016: ALTICAST INNOVATION DRIVES BUSINESS RESULTS FOR PAY-TV OPERATORS

Alticast will demonstrate at CES 2016 how solutions at the intersection of pay-TV and consumer electronics are enabling cost-effective delivery of new services that engage millennials, enhance video experiences and allow for new services that increase the value of pay-TV bundles.

At its exhibit at the Venetian (Rooms 30-224 and 30-225), Alticast will show examples of its innovation across emerging technologies –including Android, RDK, cloud and IoT services – that build on successful deployments with operators worldwide.

During the January 6-9 event, Alticast will show how:

·       Latin American, U.S. mid-tier and Tier 1 operators can replicate the experiences of a leading Vietnamese operator that successfully deployed a completely integrated suite of Alticast products for delivery of live and on-demand services to low-cost set-top boxes and mobile devices.

·       Pay-TV operators with large footprints of legacy set-top boxes can migrate the user experience to the cloud, enabling delivery of advanced user experiences and personalized services while preserving investment in existing hardware.

·       Operators can engage millennials by simply and cost-effectively implementing an elegant, personalized and sophisticated approach to navigation using multi-pronged metadata connections and state of the art discovery techniques.

·       The versatility of the Alticast Application Framework enables operators to adapt seamlessly to changing market needs by supporting Android-based STB solutions as well as RDK, allowing use of native and HTML5 applications and providing a migration path to IPTV.

·       U.S. mid-tier, Latin American and other operators can partner with CE device manufacturers to create complete solutions that enrich content discovery, including single-search integration between pay-TV and OTT content catalogs and voice-activated navigation.

·       Home automation and other IoT functionality can be aggregated on existing STBs or new data gateways, allowing for partnerships and revenue sources that offer quick time-to-market, while leveraging the operators’ existing broadband infrastructures.

Media and industry analysts interested in meeting with Alticast executives at CES 2016 should contact pspr@att.net to schedule a date and time.

Trends in Recommendation and UX at TVoT

I traveled to Television of Tomorrow (TVoT) last week in NY City. This show runs twice a year bouncing between NYC and San Francisco, and although the NYC conference is shorter, it is just as intense. There was the usual mix of targeted advertising, User Experience, and OTT trends resplendent with Periscope stars. I participated in a panel on recommendations and UX trends led by Patrick Donaghue, the longtime Cablevision UI visionary, and included representation from LG, Digital Smiths, Rovi, Freecast and Lingospot.

While recommendation engines have been around for sometime, they are starting to mature with new trends blending big data from social networking to increase the effectiveness of recommendations. Taking all those new data points and creating an innovative UX that addresses a new generation of viewers is the challenge put forth to Alticast UX designers. Our 4K AltiView 3 concept UX was shared to exemplify these new trends.  The biggest challenge is bringing all these great ideas together and getting them out in front of consumers.

The Advertising Conundrum

When our blog kicked off in 2013 I wrote an entry about opting in or out, discussing some of the pros and cons. In that short time, cable advertising has started to mimic some of the internet ad methods to become better at targeting online viewers. While TV ad targeting lags a bit behind, cable companies are working hard at Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) to catch up, even using online behavior data for personalized ad selection. When I wrote the first blog post, I suggested I that wasn't too concerned about sharing my data if it helped focus the ads I saw, and generally I still agree with that statement. However, my behavior would suggest otherwise. The one shortcoming of online internet ads is the inability for it to know when you have made a purchase decision. I was getting ads for outdoor lighting over 3 months after I purchased the lights from that very company! Subsequently, I am now blocking ads in my browser.

A new measurement approach to online video banner ads has been in use for quite a while. Internet ads often allow skipping after a designated watch time. Some believe this provides a better value to advertisers by assuming a higher quality impression rate, by analyzing drop off rates and knowing the number of people who watched the full ad. In television, there are often contractual requirements to block ad skipping; this has fueled a growth in products that provide time shifting to circumvent the ads altogether, causing a legal uproar, and prompting a counter attack with software to block the blockers. However, it seems there might be value in similar on-line models for cable and advertisers to consider. Ad skipping could provide more data for determining how to target ads. Combining various data sets and using smart algorithms to place ads provides technical challenges, but has the resulting potential for better ad consumption. In the meantime, the only ads that definitely won't get skipped are the product placements inside the programs.

Pay-TV Strategies for Engaging Millennials

With Millennials accounting for one in every five dollars of consumer spending, there’s the need for for pay-TV operators to reshape the video experience of Generation Y’s unique viewing habits, including increases in online consumption, multitasking and gaming-related activity.  John Carlucci, President and CTO of Alticast US, recently spoke about how pay-TV can engage this high-value demographic through higher quality UIs, as well as innovations such as simultaneous viewing of multiple streams of content and transitioning between handheld devices and the television with the swipe of a finger.