Good data is key to success, and pay TV services will be shelling out $1.9 billion more for analytics over the next five years, according to new research from ABI Research.
The firm predicts the market for analytics within pay TV services will increase by 105 percent by 2022, growing from $1.8 billion in 2017 to $3.7 billion in five years.
Pay TV companies are starting to follow the likes of successful video companies such as Netflix, Comcast, Telstra, and Sky, by moving to artificial intelligence and machine learning to support an analytical focus, ABI reports.
ABI says video companies selling a variety of point-solutions including content and metadata engagement, customer management, and consumption measurement, play a large role within these markets, as well as larger network-oriented business support systems and business intelligence vendors.
“Today’s siloed solutions mean that each business unit may rely on separate sources of data in solutions coming from different vendors, especially as small and mid-size video services,” Sam Rosen, managing director and vice president at ABI Research, notes. “Best-in-class OTT companies and Tier-1 operators with multiple services in diverse geographies started to build unified data platforms that centralize data and then provide access to every group based on their functional requirements.”
The new report isn’t the only source predicting analytics will play an increasing role in pay TV providers’ investments.
Findings put out in June by the Pay-TV Innovation Forum 2017 found that more than half of industry executives polled cited advanced data and analytics as an area that will have a significant impact on the North American pay TV industry over the next five years. More on that here.
ABI reports that investors, such as Conviva, are already delving into the pay TV services analytics opportunity. Conviva recently publicized $40 million in funding for a re-launch to test building more complete analytics solution. Samba, an automatic-content recognition-based measurement platform for smart TVs, also finished a $30 million funding round to disrupt the measurement space. Samba is unique in that it’s capable of capturing total device viewing that is not restricted to a specific service, ABI finds.
“Offering an analytics dashboard is table stakes for technology companies offering any component of a video distribution service,” Rosen concludes. “The ability to charge for the solution derives from moving from descriptive to predictive analytics, as well as offering modules for new roles within the video service provider. True next-generation solutions must offer comprehensive data architectures, as well as offer tools to enable prescriptive analytics or self-optimization via artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
Read ABI Research’s full Analytics Opportunity in Video Services report here.
