To compete in a multi-faceted video environment, DTH operators must answer this question: How can future growth strategies be adapted to leverage technology that works alongside satellite?

Today’s broadcast market provides a much more complex video environment for traditional satellite pay-TV providers catering to insatiable consumer demands for 3-D and HD content on different screens. It is no secret that video services remain the lifeblood of the satellite industry and that the success of DTH operators around the world fuels the demand for capacity. For operators, the challenge lies in how to combine other technologies with satellite to improve their service offering.

In this executive roundtable brought to you by Via Satellite, key technology decision makers from DTH operators spanning four different continents discuss these technological challenges, as well as where they will be investing in product development.

Taking part in this roundtable: Vivek Khemka, vice president of consumer technology, Dish Network (United States); Rajiv Khattar, president of projects, Dish TV (India); Martin Lewerth, CTO, Modern Times Group (Scandinavia); Oleg Kolesnikov, technical director, NTV+ (Russia); and Mark Billinge, vice president, broadcast operations and technology, OSN (Middle East). 

VIA SATELLITE: What are the most important technological decisions your companies have to make during the next year?

Khemka: I think one of the things we are going to be rolling out in the next 12 months is the ability to share recordings and live HDTV across multiple locations in the same home. That is a core table stakes feature at this point. Beyond that, most of our boxes are hybrid boxes in the sense that they can get satellite and Internet delivered content. What we are working on is building out the Internet delivery to satellite boxes of content that complements the content we deliver on a linear basis via satellite.

Khattar: DishTV is looking to add more HD channels as part of its consumer offerings, thus Dish TV is always looking for technologies that offer efficient use of bandwidth. We intend to launch another 15 to 16 HD channels in the next month or so. Another thing that will impact DTH operators in this country is that all of the other operators apart from Dish are working on a single satellite, which is a big risk. This impacted one of the other players in our market and they had to migrate services to another satellite, which caused a lot of consumer agony. By being on two satellites, Dish has built in a satellite redundancy for its operations and we are working with other players to offer them the redundancy in case of a disaster. Unfortunately, ARPUs in our market are very low and it is expensive for the operators to build redundancies at all levels. DishTV has spread its risk across two satellites, so we are quite safe.

Lewerth: Our strategy is to extend our linear free and pay-TV business models online and we will offer our various OTT initiatives to both existing satellite pay-TV subscribers, as well as new customers that, for various reasons, do not have a relationship with us today. We will be device agnostic. Our ambition is to offer our services across any end-user device.

Kolesnikov: In general, the main thing we see is convergence and the way we are delivering services today. We are trying to be everywhere — on satellite, cable, Internet, OTT, etc. We are looking at developing IPTV distribution as well as some cable distribution. These are the major things we are working on in terms of improving our distribution.

Billinge: One of our next immediate projects is that we are moving to MPEG4 DVB-S2 across all of our capacity. We can do that on the back of the set-top box swap, which took place last year during a major project to secure the platform. This resulted in a new Conditional Access system being introduced, coupled with that set-top box swap. All the DTH bases now have an MPEG4 set-top box. The vast majority of these boxes are HD ready. The natural roadmap of the platform is to take advantage of that, and make more use of our current capacity. This means that we are going to MPEG4 across our entire platform, which will enable us to launch additional HD channels without incurring the expense of additional capacity and disrupting too many of our paying subscribers.

VIA SATELLITE: How have you been looking to combine satellite with other technologies to augment your content offerings?

Khemka: We started investing in hybrid boxes about five years ago. Every one of our HD boxes that we have in the field is a hybrid box — whether DVR or non-DVR. It is capable of delivering both satellite and Internet delivered content. In the last six months, we have been acquiring content for IP delivery to the point that we have as many assets on our on-demand platform than any of the leading cable providers here. Our customers get linear content, live content and we deliver multiple TV shows and movies on an on-demand basis via IP.

Khattar: IP based services are not taking off in India with such low ARPUs of $3 to $4, Experiments and trials have been occurring during the last decade. We have seen multiple players working on different business models, but commercially, no one has been able to get a successful business model in place. The cost of bandwidth has been very high to the household. There are also content rights issues and being able to offer this content across other platforms. The ideas are to get the ground fully covered by satellite and then build the offerings around the newer platforms.

Lewerth: Scandinavia is a fairly advanced broadband market with some of the highest broadband penetration levels and access speeds globally. We understood that this gave us an opportunity to once and for all achieve the target of providing a truly personalized end-user experience by simply making additional content available through the open Internet. So five years ago, we decided to develop hybrid satellite set-top boxes having the capability to connect to home broadband gateway.

Kolesnikov: We have a developed B2B services for small-to-medium sized telcos. It allows us to implement additional IPTV CAS to our regular DVB-S signals and then send them to head-ends via satellite. The content, which has previously been available via satellite for DTH customers, now becomes available to telcos and cable operators that already have head-ends installed. This is win-win situation because we’re not just offering off-the-shelf technical solutions for broadband operators, but providing them with full set of more than 150 channels.

Billinge: Our IP OTT services are likely to be delivered early next year when our next-generation PVR comes to market. I believe the first use of that IP port will be extended VoD services. We will be able to offer the customer a much wider range of services than we do already. Currently, we offer a push VoD service, where we partition part of the hard drive so it looks like an on-demand service, but it is very much platform controlled service. I believe the IP port will enable us to offer customers a lot more choice to the customer, which is key, as the market gets more competitive for IPTV.

VIA SATELLITE: How important are wireless technologies to a DTH provider?

Khemka: I think there are a couple of different ways to look at wireless technologies. First, you have delivery to the box via wireless technologies. Anything you are doing over OTT, we are looking at wireless deliveries for. Right now, the capacity and the spectrum is not there. The infrastructure does not exist to deliver video content to the set-top box at the picture quality levels that customers would demand. We support all the major platforms such as Android out there, so subscribers can consume live TV and on-demand TV on their mobile devices. That is one part of wireless. The other part of wireless is a huge amount of second screen applications. We know people are using wireless devices when they watch TV, so the key is using those second screens to enhance what you are doing with the primary screen, whether social networking, discovering content or even controlling the main TV. That is where we are looking to integrate wireless into the TV watching experience today. 

Khattar: We may use wireless as a return path at some point in time. There can be synergies as the broadcast can be DVB mode and the wireless technologies, which will be primarily IP-based, can be used to build value added services to the consumer.

Lewerth: Any wireless technology is important to us. It provides end-users with ease of use and flexibility, but I think you need to split up the question in different areas. Mobile broadband access is important since it allows us to deliver our services to end-users when they are out of the home. The mobile broadband market in Scandinavia is like the fixed broadband market and mobile broadband access is available everywhere with good access speeds. We also believe that in-home wireless solutions are important. When we started with interactive digital TV services in 2000, we learned that end-users tend to fear the hassle of connecting their set-top boxes with wires to the home broadband. Today, we are providing a plug-and-play WiFi bridge as part of our starter package to customers.

Kolesnikov: It is really important for us. It is potentially a huge market, but delivery distribution is not under our control. This is an obstacle for us to offer such a service. With the development of these networks, and the increases in quality that will come with that, we will be ready to launch services as soon as we think the networks are ready.

Billinge: We can give people access to content across many devices on a mobile platform, but I think we need to be careful in terms of how we deploy these services. We want to make sure that we have synergies between that digital platform and the DTH platform, both from a capital perspective and an operational perspective. 

VIA SATELLITE: How do operators use technology to satisfy customer demands for access content on new devices such as tablets and smartphones?

Khemka: There are so many platforms out there now that the challenge is figuring out how many of them you will support. They all seem a little independent of each other, so which horses do you bet on? Today, we have put all our eggs in the basket supporting IOS and Android. Technically, each of these platforms has different multimedia capabilities. They support different DRMs. While we want to offer a seamless experience to the consumer, it gets very challenging when you are looking across multiple platforms. If someone came up with a universal specification and said this works across multiple platforms, that would be great, but I think we are many years away from that.

Khattar: Multi-screen formats are gaining popularity in the market, particularly where connectivity is very good. Today, in the Indian market, we are very well aware of the formats coming in and are keeping a watch on this scenario. We will look to get in it at the right time. The important aspect in this is the connectivity, which is a matter of concern in the Indian scenario even though the broadband penetration is growing.

Lewerth: Historically, and from a technical standpoint, you can say that operators have had fairly separate technical platforms for each device — one for mobile services and another for PC delivery. For operational reasons and also for ensuring a smooth end-user experience, the next challenge is to integrate everything into one shared platform.

Kolesnikov: While we are trying to position ourselves as a premium content provider, we are trying to provide solutions as well. It is another possibility for us to reach our customers. It is an interesting way of using 3G networks, but at this stage, they are not the most reliable way to deliver content, particularly if you want to collect money for the service. During the last year, we have been involved in a number of test projects with many different devices for platforms such as iPhones, iPads and smartphones. At the moment, we think the markets are not yet ready to make these services available to everyone. We can’t guarantee quality of service if we are using third-party networks, but with the development of mobile operator’s market and with new services such as LTE, these services will become much more available to customers.

Billinge: Mobile services are coupled with our set-top box development. It is about the ability to deliver content across multiple platforms. The region is a tech savvy one and one of the fastest growing broadband markets in the world. About 65 percent of the population in our market is less than 35 years old, so it is important that we can offer the platform across as many devices as possible. We want to give a buy-in to people, and we want to make sure it is not just a front-room experience. It is a lifestyle experience, whether you’re sitting at home in the evening or you’re on the go. We are aggressively looking at this, and it is on our roadmap to do something this year.

VIA SATELLITE: What do you see as the most exciting current and future technology that can be used alongside satellite?

Khemka: From a pure technology point of view, what I would like to see is something that really changes the way consumers consume, buy or think about content. We are seeing that consumers are paying too much for packages they don’t like. The content is restricted on the devices they can watch. It is a really simple concept that consumers have been demanding for ages and the capability of hardware to transcode at a much faster rate is enabling this. For example, the Sling transcoding chip we use in our set-top boxes allow us to transcode to different file sizes and bring different experiences to different devices. It is about getting the consumer experience right, and if the technology enables this, we can really push the space forward, rather than coming up with next billion-dollar or trillion-dollar technology idea that simply changes something.

Khattar: Multi-screen formats are something we are all keeping an eye on. India may have different scenarios compared with other markets such as North America, Europe and Southeast Asia where access to bandwidth is far stronger. We are looking to see what might happen in terms of the rollout of 4G services here in India, or as we call it, Broadband Wireless Access (BWA). There are still no players in this segment, but we are watching to see what happens. We are looking at the efficiencies and coding techniques.

Lewerth: We see all forms of OTT distribution as a very strong complement to our underlying DTH business. We also see OTT as a great opportunity to reach out to all those households having some form of broadband access, even to those households that for various reasons do not have a relationship with our DTH platform. Also, new EPGs making the user experience better and simpler and even the possibility to manage your viewing with other devices, such as tablets, are an exciting development.

Kolesnikov: The technology of having a return path via satellite will be altering the business dramatically if it can be implemented. It will definitely be something that is available on Ka-band, but right now, such a satellite does not exist over Russia. When we have such an opportunity, this could have a dramatic impact on the business. The only thing that is limited right now is that services for our customers do not have the same return channel that is available for IPTV solution. A return path via satellite would also be useful for our customers to whom we can offer a variety of different services, including Internet access and subscription management. There are some experiments right now going on with Eutelsat’s Ka-band satellite, but with the launch of the new Express satellite next year, there will be some Ka-band capacity. We will investigate this opportunity to test return path technology.

Billinge: We are looking at the next generation PVR, which will have an IP port and VoD service. That, coupled alongside a digital platform, is a great opportunity. One of the challenges for us is to have commonality across the two platforms. We don’t want to end up with silos of content that you can’t see across both platforms.