Partnering With SKIDATA and Tata, Nagra Transforms Its Service Offerings

Partnering With SKIDATA and Tata, Nagra Transforms Its Service Offerings The Kudelski company adds user-interface enhancement to asset protection By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director

Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - 3:35 pm

Print This Story

Story Highlights

Long associated with protection of video-content, Nagra has been expanding its offerings to enhance user interfaces and also to leverage technologies from fellow Kudelski partner companies like SKIDATA to help clients develop new business models. And, of course, it will also keep its eye on protecting assets.

Ivan Verbesselt says that Nagra's relationships with SKIDATA and Tata are transforming its value proposition for clients.

We will do whatever is possible in the legal framework to maximize operator revenue related to the content, says Ivan Verbesselt, SVP, group marketing, Nagra Kudelski. We have taken down 150 major pirate sites, and, with things like our Dashboard service, our clients can see the source of the piracy, where it was pirated, etc.

Nagra has plenty of experience in the OTT market, working with 500 operators around the globe, which have services pulling in, collectively, $100 billion in revenues. Key to Nagra's efforts is its Pay TV Innovation Forum, an event that has been held for three years and involves senior executives from across the industry providing valuable insights into market trends.

The proliferation of OTT has permeated the core of TV-consumer behavior, and consumer expectations are changing, says Verbesselt. And then, on the back burner of everyone's mind is piracy, which is all over the place and harder to fight.

The proliferation and raised consumer expectations are putting more pressure on operators to offer an engaging user experience available across various devices and set-top boxes. The goal is not only to get consumers engaged but also to monetize content and gather information about subscribers that can drive growth.

With the growth in OTT and the explosion in new services expected in the next 12 months, linear OTT services will become more and more important. Those linear services will rely heavily on live content, which provides another level of challenge for suppliers looking to protect their content.

It is also one of the reasons Nagra launched NexGuard QuickMark late last year: the watermarking solution enables near real-time identification of the subscriber at the source of the piracy. With new technologies like real-time fingerprinting, streams from the internet, social media, or illicit streaming services can be automatically fed into the detection platform.

NexGuard QuickMark is also integrated into Nagra's OpenTV Player, providing an end-to-end application environment for live OTT. The OpenTV platform takes advantage of cloud-based services to help minimize issues like latency, media-asset management, and security. Latency, for example, can get down to the four- to six-second range with the use of technologies like time-stamping, which can help time accuracy be maintained throughout the playout process.

Blind detection of piracy can occur in a few minutes, says Verbesselt. So those in an OTT environment can act, because, if it takes too long, it will be too late as there is often no relevance after the event.

Working with SKIDATA, a company whose core service began with tracking skiers as they bounce around a ski resort and on the slopes, is allowing NAGRA to help its clients better integrate their OTT services and other digital-commerce opportunities with those at a sports venue.

You can have things like paperless access, merchant offers, and then securely stream content in the stadium and leverage the whole data flow from SKIDATA, which is typically not combined with pay TV, says Verbesselt. And fans can use our Cuts system to share a cut highlight from the venue feed.

Another new relationship is the one Nagra has developed with Tata Communications, the global communications powerhouse that works with entities like F1.

They know how to do networks; we know a thing or two about security. So we can layer on top and have a total fan experience, says Verbesselt. It's a new area for us, and we have all the tools. With a partner like Tata working on latency control, this can be an interesting offer for clients. The time is right: the expectations are there, and linear OTT is becoming more relevant.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2019/02/13/nagras-evolution-with-partners-...
	See more stories from svg

Most recent headlines