Last day of CASBAA was wrapped up and done.
Interesting points gleaned from live sessions and from reps at stands today IMHO are:
GDPR is the guiding European privacy and best practice watched by many operators and vendors.
If a company believes they have a better standard or solution it needs MPAA endorsement as the studios are risk averse and may strike down any Content contract linked Technical Questionairre(TQ) submitted offering non compliant CENC and MPAA aligned architectures. TV2U would if following this argument find the easiest path to TQ approval would be that before being able to broadcast they would already be compliant from the outset to MPAA standards.
If TV2U believe they have innovations and patents under IVAN then the best road may be to get these approved and/or endorsed by bodies overseeing MPAA and CENC. Then if they wish to commercially use them they will be easily approved in the TQ process via MPAA compliance as we understood how it was explained to us.
Content security and the use of analytics is big news as in a related way Facebook has come under pressure on one hand to be deemed a broadcaster/publisher and so fall under extensive legal obligations(which they refute as claiming only being a platform provider and not a broadcaster or publisher).
Second consumers and law makers have caught up with the leap forward that technology gave early adopters to use this technology before ample understanding of what it mean't occurred, and for laws and regulations to be put in place to provide protection or boundaries as to how far can technology invade privacy and reach with profiling and personalisation/recommendation technologies.
The link
https://www.v-net.tv/2016/10/05/securing-video-analytics-data-the-law-and-best-practice/ provides some insight into the emerging body of knowledge and legal frameworks that may act to constrain previously permissive attempts to harness gathered analytics.
This will and is forcing vendors like TV2U who conceived their business and data architectures in the past where little guidance and regulation existed to constrain thinking of what was possible with analytics, to think again and potentially revisit their models as more social pressures bring about stakeholder opinion of what is OK and what is intrusive as now being articled into regulations and laws, which are themself still emerging.
Most vendors are being conservative with the use of gathered data for these reasons as getting it wrong can and will in the future lead to some form of penalty or legal sanction in their opinion. IOT is now coming up against these potential delimiters in the way data can be gathered, translated into information, and exploited for commercial use it seems.
Its all an emerging area of law and policy so the wheel is still in spin but TV2U will need to ensure they do not develop services and products that breach such standards and laws. TV2U state they have a deep analytics capability and personalisation capability as a result so it remains to be seen whether they will be able to use data and analytics in the way they have previously announced as this issue seems to be one creating revision of data and analytics use by the vendors I spoke to.
DRM manufacturers claim they can now intercept illegal OTT streaming instances emanating out of KODI style streaming boxes linked to pirate or unauthorised content sites.
A key Indonesian speaker at a discussion session was Meena Kumari Adnani from one of the biggest Pay TV and OTT Industry groups(First Media PT TK Group) where I think she is Vice President for Business Affairs and Content Negotiations, who is legally trained.
Meena predicts from what was heard is a looming shakeout in the Indonesian OTT market which she noted is serviced by numerous OTT third parties but who offer free or very cheap potentially unsustainable business models moving forward.
It seems that Astro and her own group have the large consumer base and large content catalogues to prevent large adopt and then drop consumer churn rates reported to be high in that Indonesian OTT market. Securing large content catalogues and having original funded and sourced local content was critical in Asian markets was a point noted by a number of other speakers and those with opinions in these sessions.
Our company was there for e-gaming and gaming and that area has exploded in Asian markets with some big announcements made at the event. The mooted Fox and Disney merger was discussed and it may over time disrupt some content catalogues and channels available over time as content contracts come up for renewal as Disney may become a major broadcaster beyond what it now positions itself in the market as a key content house and be less willing to licence its catalogue to all operators as in the past.
All imho and always DYOR.
