© 2010 Rapid TV News
Chris Forrester ©RapidTVNews | 08-02-2010
Rapid TV News’ latest Round Table examined how much R&D work was needed to keep smaller pay-TV broadcasters up to speed.
NDS’ Howard Silverman, speaking at Rapid’s Round Table on Conditional Access/DRM, admitted that smaller players often needed even more work than their larger cousins. “The large operators, because of their size and sophistication, often kind of tell us what they want and then we implement,” said Silverman. “I would say that while you would think that the smaller operators might need to keep things simpler and cheaper, but from our point of view we often engage them in a more fundamental way than we necessarily do with the large operators, where we incidentally use dedicated teams just to work on those larger accounts.”
Silverman added that he saw the challenge as “how [we] productise our technologies. The market leaders who drive the leading technologies are typically the larger operators that have the buying power. If [a service] were to come to market first, the followers need to compete and they need to introduce those services as well. Our challenge is to provide a productised version of these leading edge technologies and solutions in a very easy to deploy and fundamentally cheaper way. So, we do split our R&D effort. On one hand, obviously, we try and make sure that everything is generic but we also work very hard in productisation.”
Graham Turner, of Nagra Kudelski, said that in his view the R&D that is being done is fundamental to delivering service to both the larger operators and what the smaller ones need. “But one thing that we do see is that there is a difference in business models. Traditionally, the larger operators - and both Nagra and NDS have a number of larger operators who can very easily operate a traditional vertical business model - they can go out, they can fund, putting set-top boxes into the market, they can also subsidise other things. A new start-up does not have that sort of financial luxury normally. We found a lot of interest in ways to support horizontal market and going beyond, say, what the operator will actually do in order to persuade someone else to buy the boxes.”
Turner explained that there were many innovative tricks that were extremely useful for smaller pay-TV operators, not least pre-pay cards, not dissimilar to those used in the cellular phone industry. “We have found that it [this technique] has been very successful in Italy, but also we are seeing it in a place like Mexico as well, particularly in digital-terrestrial TV where there is an interesting interplay between what might otherwise be a pure free-to-view service together with some elements of pay TV. People can make quite a respectable business there and grow it into a very large mass market even though it is not the old style traditional DTH or cable business.”
Alex Borland, from software CA specialists Latens, added that they take big and small alike. “Some of our customers are, let us say, pushing the boundaries further than others, big and small alike. Some of our smaller operators’ customers absolutely want to push their boundaries quite substantially. They have new business models and they are in a very competitive market place, so it is important for them to make sure that they can leverage and build that position out in their own markets. Ultimately, for us as a business, because we are also a fairly new arrival in the market place, we took a very fresh look from an architectural point of view of their business right from the ground up. We have leveraged a lot of technology from some of the recent innovations both in the set-top box side of the business and also the head-end transmission facilities.”
Readers can view the Round Table discussion by clicking [here]
© Rapid TV News 2010
