DTVE May/June 2019 issue

Multi-play service providers face serious challenges. The phrase ‘highly competitive environment’ has been making an increasingly frequent appearance in cable and telecom operators’ quarterly earnings presentations, as they have struggled to differentiate their offerings on the basis of something other than price and to drive up margins.

Ahead of the annual ANGA COM trade fair in Cologne, this issue of Digital TV Europe looks at some weapons in operator arsenals that could give them an advantage in the battle to win and retain subscribers at a time when other ways to differentiate offerings are losing their edge. Exclusive content is becoming prohibitively expensive for territory-specific service providers while the way content and other services are packaged is already being used to maximum advantage and can easily be copied.

Operators competing head on in the classic triple-play market therefore are tapping into the potential differentiating power of the user experience, raw broadband speed and value-added broadband services to stay one step ahead of rivals.

In this issue of Digital TV Europe, we first take a look at the user experience and, in particular, at the rise of Android TV as the operating system of choice for a growing number of service providers.