Top Pay TV Market Trends Driving Migration to the Cloud

The global pay-TV market size is anticipated to reach USD 260 billion by 2027. The rise of IPTV competition is encouraging IPTV operators to review their legacy business models and consider more innovative and cost-efficient ways of providing an enhanced IPTV subscriber service.

On the other hand, established IPTV market players fall under the growing pressure of emerging start-ups ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction by offering highly-customized and reasonably priced viewing options to their subscribers. To meet this challenge IPTV market players need to diversify their service packages and make them appealing to broader audiences seeking more flexible content viewing options.

Moreover, the implementation of 5G technology will additionally boost the growth of the IPTV sector. Additionally, 5G will bring new opportunities for data collection, analysis, and optimization to deliver a truly personalized viewing experience.

Subscribers also expect to access video content anytime, anywhere, on any type of device - ranging from TV to smartphone and other hand held device to laptop and this demand is rising.

These disruptive challenges are provoking IPTV operators to switch to cutting-edge cloud technologies. Modern clouds deliver a unified and agile platform enabling comprehensive content delivery and content security management. Switching to the cloud can help diminish capacity scaling upfront expenses, cut IPTV solution maintenance costs, and tremendously speed-up new services time-to-market.

Rapid delivery of new services remains a great challenge for traditional operators competing with SVOD services. Cloud allows to scale up and down flexibly in a matter of seconds. The traditional hardware-based model falls short to offer anything close to that extent of agility.

Seemingly unrestricted scaling appears to be extremely beneficial when an operator broadcasts major sports or entertainment events. Cloud infrastructure scaling provides high reliability and quality of the distribution.

By virtualizing the management of linear, VOD, or live channels using a cloud platform, a service provider achieves greater resource management agility. For example, by optimizing and scaling video head ends within the cloud, the broadcaster can unify UHD, HD, and SD video processing to lower latency and enable content to be delivered across multiple networks.

Virtualization also considerably speeds up time-to-market for product development. Operators acquire higher business agility by moving platform and service operations to the cloud. Furthermore, having a turn-key cloud infrastructure allows an operator to start new product development and launch new services as soon as possible, without waiting for the hardware being purchased and on-premise infrastructure being built.

Crucially, an operator can cut engineering personnel expenses by outsourcing platform maintenance; freeing them more bandwidth to focus on business processes and improving the quality of customer service.

Cloud technologies appear to offer unprecedented flexibility to IPTV businesses, enabling them to fine-tune their key processes in a way that would allow them to adapt and survive market turmoil. With the remarkable scaling speed and flexibility, cloud brings real competitive advantage allowing operators to invest their finance, effort, and talent in a smart and precise way.

For an informal discussion about how SmartLabs solution could work for your business contact sales@smartlabs.tv.