Meeting audience expectations is becoming easier for broadcasters with Hybrid broadcasting. The advent of transport technologies such as Hybrid Radio and HbbTV facilitate a wide range of opportunities for custom-made content aggregation, discovery and ultimately media consumption.
People like it because it is convenient. You can access it on every device. It is simple and personalized. Interesting content is one step away. You switch on the device, and select the content. Like it used to be for broadcast channels.
However, although it may seem convenient for the user, in reality for a broadcaster it is more difficult to keep a direct link with their audiences who are distracted from the main channel due to all the other available options e.g. YouTube, Facebook Instant Articles, SmartTV portals and more…
In terms of strategy, these connected players are becoming gatekeepers. For instance, recently, Facebook was accused of manipulating its news feed, which is actually curated by an editorial team. How are we supposed to provide complete and objective information to the public if they can only access a subset of the information? And in most cases, may not know they are receiving only subset.
For public broadcasters, it is now key to be able to leverage data while carefully respecting audience privacy and wishes. Therefore, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has started few initiatives in order to help the broadcast industry to wisely collect data and let the audience decide on the kind of information they would like to share with the broadcaster.
A good example of this is the ETSI’s Cross-Platform Authentication protocol (CPA) which was designed by an EBU Group to associate online user identities with media devices. One of the specificities is that the user can enjoy personalization at the device level and later bring this experience to other devices.
Public broadcasters are now joining forces to develop and deploy a recommendation system, which will be able to interface with third party providers and give editorial teams the ability to provide the right content, at the right time, to the right person, on the right device. Based on open source state of the art technologies, the data pipeline is currently tested by RTS (Switzerland), RTVE (Spain), RTP (Portugal) and BR (Germany).
Come and discover it on the EBU Booth (10.F20). This year, we demonstrate an example of hybrid personalized channel. Come and see a news channel, which offers the ability to skip content to user tailored segments created by an object-based production and selected by the recommendation.