Digital front and centre

17-04-2015

From MipTV keynotes to breakfast meetings, and with Mip Digital Fronts in between, the digital content revolution and the impact it is having on traditional broadcasters has never been more obvious.

First off was Jeremy Darroch, CEO of Sky, who is in charge of a broadcast giant that claims more than 20 million subscribers and a content budget that exceeds US$7bn across operations in the UK, Germany and Italy.

Jeremy Darroch
keynotes at MipTV

When he took to the stage for his Media Mastermind keynote on Monday evening, one of the central parts of the discussion was about the growth of OTT and his belief that it was in this field that improvements to that 20 million number could be made.

“There’s an explosion in technology and distribution platforms, with mobile and OTT, and it is allowing us to get to customers where we struggled before,” he said.

Darroch told a packed auditorium that there were “lots of plans” for Sky to develop OTT services, such as its existing Now TV product, and that it wanted to move into “transactional markets,” which are “somewhere we can build a big share.”

Barely a day later, a similar conversation was being had over coffee and Danishes at TV4’s stand. The Swedish commercial broadcaster has linked up with Ericsson to provide its refreshed VoD service, and TV4’s CEO and president Casten Almqvist was on hand to explain just how quickly things were changing. He also revealed why the broadcaster has been so fundamentally changing the way it organises its online offering.

It is to the Nordic region that many are looking when trying to guess how the TV landscape might look in a few years’ time, and TV4 is in no doubt that digital integration has been consigned to the past.

TV4’s Casten Almqvist

Almqvist and TV4’s Cecilia Beck-Friis, exec VP and chief digital officer, are now focused on putting digital front and centre, and for them it has now become – as it is for Darroch – a question of just how quickly they can move in this space.

US majors such as HBO are already launching their own OTT services, while others, such as Scandinavian giant Modern Times Group, is preparing to launch its Viaplay service into Central and Eastern Europe ahead of, or perhaps just after, the arrival of Netflix in the region.

Amidst all this was the Mip Digital Fronts, which saw the likes of Maker Studios, Vice Media and AwesomenessTV prove to delegates why they are so renowned, and perhaps feared, among the more traditional broadcasters. They have been ahead of the game and now broadcasters are urgently focusing on how they can retain their dominance.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, TV4 believes that viewers have already begun stampeding towards VoD. The technology’s early adopters have been joined recently by a second larger – albeit still relatively minor – group of viewers. But TV4 believes that a cataclysmic shift is on the horizon as audiences move away from traditional linear channels forever and fully embrace VoD.

Companies such as Sky are hoping that their existing services will, for the time being, deal with that demand. But Darroch has been clear that OTT, in which the company has already taken significant strides, is now a growing focus and deserving of considerable investment and development.

TV4, meanwhile, has shifted its entire management structure and operations to embrace digital as it prepares for the onslaught of viewers making their way from linear TV. Both broadcasters, and plenty of others around the world, will be hoping that they can re-engineer themselves before the wave hits.