IBC 2024: Capturing Customers in a Crowded Streaming Marketplace
Much of what I saw at IBC 2024 focused on various new and nearly new strategies for solving one of the oldest problems in the M&E and OTT world: capturing and retaining customer attention in a constant and crowded battle for eyeballs.
Streaming Made Easy author/publisher and Streaming Media FAST Times columnist Marion Ranchet did a fireside chat at IBC 2024 with Chem Assayag, SVP, Home Services at French telecoms provider Orange on the theme, “Who Owns the Customer?”
Improving the Super-Aggregator Experience
Assayag described Orange as a “super-aggregator”—an increasingly popular designation in the industry if IBC 2024 is any indication. This prompted Ranchet to ask, “How can you be the best aggregator in a world where the content is non-exclusive?”
“We differentiate ourselves by providing a very good experience,” he said. “Not just quality of service—what people really care about is the quality of experience. We have to make sure content is available and they can find and consume it easily.”
If services want to keep customers coming back, he said, “We need to recommend the right content when they come back. As an industry, we’re still not there,” he lamented.
The signature benefit of super-aggregation, Assayag contended, is streamlining and simplifying payment for subscriptions to services. “One single invoice for all the services makes it easier to consume the content.”
Also key to delivering experiences that will keep viewers engaged and less likely to churn is understanding that different demographics consume content differently, and tailoring experiences accordingly. “You have to think about market segmentation,” he said. “20-year-olds aren’t consuming content the same way as 60-year-olds. Young people move around a lot, and it’s a lot easier to move around without a big TV. We have to make sure people have choices and can consume content the way they want.”
When Ranchet asked what Orange was doing with AI (a de rigeur question in nearly every session or booth at IBC), Assayag discussed “very striking research” Orange did where they “observed people in their houses for weeks. We saw people spending 10–15 minutes looking for new content, then giving up and rewatching a series they liked.”
He went on to describe how Orange is working to address these issues by using “voice AI” and the “natural interactions” it enables to provide better search recommendations and making the experience “very smooth.” Still, he conceded, a learning curve remains for educating the consumer on the benefits of voice on remote: “We don’t think enough people are using it.”
AI and Content Discovery
The increasing role of AI in personalizing and removing the friction from CTV content discovery was a prevalent theme at IBC 2024. With Gracenote Chief Product Officer Trent Wheeler I got a close-up look at the company’s new Watch Prompts offering designed specifically to make the discovery process both purposeful, pinpointed, and (it seems) more entertaining. Leveraging Gracenote’s vast stores of data on streaming viewers, Watch Prompt offers not just descriptions to help viewers recognize why recommended content might appeal to them, but relevant clips from shows they’ve liked in the past (such as a Russian Doll clip featuring Natasha Lyonne to recommend Poker Face) or stills from the recommended program that specifically pertain to why it’s being recommended. Wheeler says Watch Prompts will be used for sports recommendations as well as TV series.
In a session on "The Future of Content Viewing" produced by Women in Streaming Media, Reelgood VP of Customer Experience Shuchi Mathur commented on the essential role AI and metadata have come to play in easing, personalizing, and enhancing the content recommendation process for streaming entertainment viewers. “Using metadata for personalization is more important than ever,” she said. For “personalized recommendations,” she continues, “you can explain why a piece of content would appeal to different viewers for different reasons. There are so many ways to tag a piece of content, and AI has made that easier.”
“Traditional media companies have such rich libraries,” Ateliere SVP, Enterprise Solutions Architecture Zeenal Thakare added in the same session. The sheer volume of content, she said, makes “content fatigue” inevitable, and drives viewers (echoing Assayag’s point) “back to old series.” When it comes to distribution, monetization, discovery, and capturing and retaining customers in the current media landscape, she said, “Not working with AI is not an option.”
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