Startover, ‘Catch Up’ and Replay TV are central components within the on-demand television experience, providing easy and near-immediate access to popular linear channels – setting Pay TV operators apart in the race to be the super-aggregator who makes it easy to discover and navigate all the best content.
The importance of Startover, ‘Catch Up’ and Replay TV demand a first-rate user experience, but this ambition has been compromised by a reliance on using EPG start/end times as the basis for where a programme begins. The goal is to create an optimal user experience, avoiding the possibility of viewers watching incomplete commercial breaks, missing the start of the programme they seek or, even worse, inadvertently watching a spoiler.
This webcast investigates how Liberty Global has tackled this problem head-on, ensuring that programmes have the correct start- and end-times in place – significantly improving the on-demand experience and increasing users’ satisfaction and engagement. You will hear about the EPG correction technology behind this advance, how the solution was implemented using a single, existing API with minimal internal integration resource, and what the immediate impact has been for viewers.
Speakers
- Chris van der Linden, Director Entertainment Platforms, Liberty Global
- Roland Sars, CEO & Co-Founder, Media Distillery
- Simon Miller, Managing Director, Gracenote International, Nielsen
- Regina Poniridis, Consultant & Research Analyst, Caretta Research
- Moderator: John Moulding, Editor-in-Chief, Videonet
This webcast:
- Reviews the dynamics that are driving consumption of on-demand viewing, looking at the market in general and across Liberty Global services.
- Reviews the ‘legacy’ model where Replay TV assets are recorded from linear feeds (with EPG schedules providing the guidance on where to start and stop recording).
- Explains why EPG schedules are not fully reliable – including the reasons programmes are delayed or extended and how operations departments try to rectify errors today.
- Outlines how an automated EPG correction system works, focusing on the technical and practical benefits obtainable via the integrated solution from Media Distillery & Nielsen’s Gracenote.
- Offers lessons from the Liberty Global implementation: what to plan for, pitfalls to avoid, how a Replay TV UX upgrade is brought to life, audience insights, and the potential for multi-territory scaling
- Reviews other next-generation content discovery features that can increase engagement with on-demand content, including episode-specific and personalised VOD imagery.
- Considers the provision of Replay TV in the wider context of how Pay TV providers become the trusted guide to content that consumers love across multiple sources including streaming.
- Considers how the industry can streamline and scale the implementation of a broader content discovery feature set, with reference to the ‘discovery-as-a-platform’ operations model.
