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Orange: OTT companies make good partners, because ‘they need us to grow’

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Christophe Rufin on stage at the Connected TV World Summit

By Barry Flynn, Contributing Editor

“OTT companies can be good partners, because they need TV and they need multichannel video programming distributors to grow”. That was the message from French IPTV operator Orange â€“ one of the first in France to integrate Netflix on its platform – to delegates attending the Connected TV Summit in London.

Christophe Rufin, Orange’s Director of Cloud, TV and Entertainment Ecosystems, gaves examples of three separate strategies the operator – which has around 7.5m TV customers across Europe – had recently adopted in a bid to re-define and improve its relationship with the OTT world.

The first of these he described as being “like cord-cutting, but in reverse.” Currently, the operator offers alongside its package of basic channels a premium bouquet of four pay-TV channels called Orange Cinema Service (OCS), which is accessible off-net through an application called OCS Go. This is available on rival ISPs’ platforms as well as on satellite for around €11.99/month and also launched to PlayStation games consoles earlier this year.

“We use it to attract new customers who have another ISP,” said Rufin. “If they come and take the bundle within Orange, they will have this service included [in their Orange pay-TV bundle]. The price will be better, the service will be easier, there is only one bill. So that’s quite an attractive strategy.”

Another tactic was the launch in April of a service called Les chaînes Web as a new ‘channel’ on its EPG. This appears as a ‘grid’ of seven different YouTube multi-channel networks (MCNs), which the viewer can then click on to be taken to that MCN’s particular content collection. The seven MCNs include Golden Moustache, a comedy-based MCN launched by French commercial TV station M6 in 2012, which has nearly 2m subscribers on YouTube; Studio Bagel, a Canal+-owned MCN bringing together a collective of comedy writers and video-creators with a similar YouTube subscriber profile to Golden Moustache; and Vice, the well-known millennial-targeted news network which currently attracts around six million YouTube subscribers.

“It’s displayed as linear content and it’s targeted towards the millenials. That’s why I call it TV Everywhere in reverse,” said Rufin.

The move is an intriguing one, because Orange is in effect integrating OTT content some of which is owned by traditional linear TV players (and rivals) such as Canal+. Indeed, a new study of MCNs from research consultancy Ampere Analysis shows that over three-quarters of those acquired in the last three years were bought by traditional media companies. According to Ampere’s calculations, there are 22 MCNs already attracting at least 1 billion monthly views each – equivalent to a combined market value of $6.5bn.

The third venture, launched last month, is a social TV service jointly created by Orange and social network Twitter. This allows Orange subscribers to watch a TV programme alongside a Twitter feed carrying tweets related to the broadcast.

Rufin described it as “a lean-back” version of Twitter which was “really a combination of pay-TV, live TV and OTT. You are on the main screen, […] you look at your show and you see what’s happening on your TV. If you want to engage, it’s actually quite fun. You can take your tablet or mobile, participate in the conversation. It’s really like a game thing and you can see your Twitter [stream] appearing and it’s a whole new experience.”

More significantly, perhaps, it’s also a way to discover content. Currently, the service is accessible via a grid showing the top 11 shows currently being broadcast. “It’s a way to discover what’s trending in terms of shows,” points out Rufin.


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