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CSA takes action to boost pay-TV and HD’s fortunes on French DTT platform

May 11, 2010 by Barry Flynn

The French regulator, the CSA, will shortly advertise three new pay-TV and two new free-to-air HD slots on its DTT platform. Meanwhile, France Ô, the public service channel targeted at viewers from the country’s overseas territories, will be rolled out nationally in the coming weeks.

The decisions result from a public consultation triggered by two pay-DTT channels, AB1 and Canal J, handing back their licences last year.

The new services will launch next year, and will be spread across the six existing multiplexes (R1-R6) as well as two new ones, R7 and R8, which will be opened up as a result of analogue television being switched off region-by-region between now and the end of 2011.

Farncombe’s interpretation of today’s CSA announcement is that the new DTT multiplex configuration will be as in the table below:

R1

R2

R3

R4
France 2 i>télé Canal+ HD M6
France 3 BFM TV C+ Cinéma W9
Local/
France 3		 Direct 8 C+ Sport Paris 1ère
France 5 Gulli Planète NT1
France Ô Europe 2 TV TPS Star Arte HD
LCP France 24 New pay-TV slot TBA

R5

R6

R7

R8
France 2 HD TF1 New pay-TV slot TBA Gifted channel to TF1 TBA
TF1 HD LCI New pay-TV slot TBA Gifted channel to M6 TBA
M6 HD Eurosport New FTA HD slot TBA Gifted channel to Canal+ TBA
TMC New FTA HD slot TBA Other channels TBA
NRJ12
TF6
Arte

Source: CSA, Farncombe analysis (Note: Pay-DTT channels in italics, HD channels in bold)

The allocation of three new pay-DTT channels is designed to boost the attractiveness of pay-TV on the French DTT platform, which has so far performed poorly.Meanwhile, the creation of new free-to-air HD channels should make it easier for the DTT platform to compete with satellite and cable, which both enjoy superior bandwidth and much larger HD offers.

French rules which mandate the inclusion of HD DTT tuners in TV sets already favour the platform. With 46.1% of French homes owning an HD-compatible TV display at the end of 2009, the new services should be able to benefit from a mature addressable market.

Posted in Digital Terrestrial. 0 Comments

ISDB-T expansion around the World - It takes many to Ginga

May 5, 2010 by Adriana Whiteley

After choosing the Japanese ISDB-T standard for their digital terrestrial TV (DTT) system, the Brazilian authorities have invested much money and diplomatic effort in spreading the Brazilian variant ISDB-Tb and the Ginga middleware to other countries. They were partially successful: Ecuador has recently announced it will adopt ISDB-Tb, after Argentina, Chile, Peru and Venezuela. A few African countries, including South Africa, are reconsidering their previous inclination to adopt the European DVB-T standard.

However, political will is not enough to convince Brazilians it is worth buying a set-top box to watch DTT. Despite tax incentives, quotas on TVs, incentives for mobile TV handsets and intensive marketing, Brazilians continue to be confused about what ‘DTT’ means.

Farncombe recently visited several large electronics stores in Brazil, and despite the availability of integrated DTT TV sets for sale, the vast majority of salesmen confused DTT with high definition or with digital pay-TV (pay-TV operators use the European DVB standard).

Three years after launch, Farncombe estimates that less than 2% of households view DTT services, and most DTT tuner sales are “accidental”, as they are integrated into large TV sets (in which DTT tuners are mandated), mobile and portable devices.

Farncombe believes that the key reasons for the challenges faced by Brazilian DTT are:

  • Lack of exclusive DTT content: DTT services are HD versions of analogue TV ones and most cities with DTT coverage only receive the top one or two broadcasters.
  • Competition from pay-TV services: the launch of new DTH operators has decreased the pay-TV entry price and driven a 20% increase in the number of pay-TV subscribers in the last 12 months. In addition, the focus on HD as DTT’s differentiator makes DTT attractive only to HD-set-owning higher-income households, which are more likely to subscribe to pay-TV.

In spite of the slow adoption of fixed DTT in Brazil, mobile operators have launched several handset models with integrated DTT tuners and broadcasters are investing in in-fillers to improve DTT mobile reception. Meanwhile, other countries have learnt from the Brazilian experience and are allowing multichannel DTT and subsidising decoders to create an initial viewing base for DTT services.

Farncombe’s experience advising broadcasters and governments planning their transition to DTT has taught us that careful planning to ensure the platform’s attractiveness to viewers is more important than the choice of transmission standard (ISDB-T, ISDB-Tb, DVB-T or DVB-T2), which can have very similar end-user functionality depending on the network configuration. Technical specifications that are not mandated and officially certified are often ignored by most vendors, and the high degree of fragmentation of the receivers’ base makes it commercially unfeasible to offer advanced TV services.

To know more about Farncombe’s experience in DTT transition please contact us at strategy@ftl.co.uk

Posted in Digital Terrestrial. 2 Comments

Red-button advertising ends on Sky - but where does Anytime+ fit in?

May 5, 2010 by Barry Flynn

BSkyB’s sales-house, Sky Media, has decided to end ‘red-button’ advertising after nine years.  Sky is one of the best-known pay-TV operators offering this application, according to which viewers press the red button on their Sky remote control during a commercial spot to gain extra information about the advertised product, or to receive a brochure or sample in return for entering their details. At its peak in 2006, 160 such campaigns were running on the red-button service.

However, the service was always clunky - particularly when trying to enter personal details via the remote control - and the advent of green-button ‘bookable’ advertising, which allows viewers easily to watch and access long-form ads recorded on their PVRs or in parallel broadcast streams, has rendered the old service obsolete.

While hybridisation of Sky’s HD platform with broadband might have rescued red-button advertising by increasing its functionality and sophistication, comments made last week by Sky confirm that the priority is to use the IP connectivity of its installed HD base to launch a ‘true’ VOD service (‘Anytime+’) later this year.

Sky’s next generation of advertising technology will instead exploit the partitioned hard drive incorporated into later models of the Sky+ box to deliver targeted ad substitution, along the lines of the Sky AdSmart technology currently embedded in its online Sky Player product. This ‘push’-based targeting is unlikely to be very granular, perhaps only addressing homes by zone or region.

It will be interesting to see how Anytime+ integrates this model when it surfaces this year. Because of the quality mis-match between ads delivered over the air and over-the-top video, targeted advertising on VOD pre-roll ads is more likely to be inserted at source. But whether BSkyB’s aim is to make such ads more tightly personalised remains unclear.

Posted in Broadband, Digital Satellite and TV-over-Internet. 0 Comments

Digital day-and-date boosts VOD and electronic sell-through

March 27, 2010 by Barry Flynn

Some rare insights into how VOD and electronic sell-through (EST) revenues benefit from a ‘day-and-date’ (D&D) DVD release environment have been afforded by Warner Bros.In the opening keynote at the Screen Digest PEVE Digital Entertainment conference in London, Jim Wuthrich, president of International Home Video and Digital at Warner Brothers Home Entertainment, revealed that the studio’s top VOD title last year was Gran Torino, which bought in $60m from on-demand and EST against a total box office take of $148m.

Two years ago, Warner began releasing its films on Blu-ray Disc, DVD, VOD and EST on the same day. At the time, it said that  margins from D&D VOD were between 60-70%, compared with 20-30% for optical discs, and that controlled  trials of D&D showed practically no effect on DVD  sales.   

The studio is now forecasting that global digital spend (i.e. VOD plus EST) will grow by 19% in 2010 to reach $2.5bn, with EST accounting for $900m of the total.

The Warner experience shows that studios are gradually becoming more comfortable with the digital rental and sell-through of movies. This is part of a wider phenomenon to do with the overall shrinking of video release windows.

D&D release also helps to reduce the incentive for piracy. Given digital’s higher margins and a possible reduction in piracy losses, any resulting drop in Warner’s physical media sell-through and rental business caused by collapsing the windows may be worth putting up with.

Posted in Digital Cable and TV-over-Internet. 0 Comments

MHP was no GEM: the jewel in interactive TV’s crown is likely to be the Internet

February 19, 2010 by Barry Flynn

Europe’s TV standards group DVB has designated GEM as its primary middleware technology in place of MHP - after standardisation body ETSI adopted it as a self-contained specification.

GEM - which stands for Globally Executable MHP - was, as its name suggests, a DVB-independent derivative of MHP (Multimedia Home Platform), a Java-based system originally proposed as a common European interactive TV platform.

Now, GEM becomes a standard in its own right, eclipsing MHP.

The original idea behind MHP was that its inclusion of a Java Virtual Machine would enable interoperability of interactive TV applications across different digital TV platforms. But in practice, MHP implementations turned out to be stripped-down, customized affairs that were only nominally independent of the platforms that deployed them.

MHP boxes also generally cost more than ones using interactive technologies such as OpenTV or MHEG, a factor which was exacerbated by an unexpected hike in licensing-fees in March 2006. MHP interactive environments also proved costly to maintain.

Thus, apart from MHP’s success in colonizing the Italian DTT market (the result of a government subsidy being made available for interactive set-top boxes), the middleware was never widely adopted.

GEM has now emerged as the more significant technology: (a) it is incorporated into the high-definition optical disc standard Blu-Ray; (b) it forms the basis for the US Opencable standard (under the brand ‘tru2way’); and (c) it underpins Brazil’s interactive middleware standard Ginga-J.

GEM is also compatible with the US and Japanese digital terrestrial broadcasting standards.

DVB claims that GEM/MHP technology is currently in around 50m devices worldwide, the vast majority of which are likely to be Blu-Ray players, in Farncombe’s view.

However, the trend towards hybrid decoders and connected TVs indicates that such broadcast-specific interactive TV platforms have probably had their day. In the future, interactivity on the TV is likely to use the broadband link and to derive from existing, tried-and-tested Internet technologies, with new standards such as Europe’s HbbTV and the UK’s Canvas pointing the way.

Posted in Digital Cable, Digital Satellite and Digital Terrestrial. 2 Comments