Video on demand is losing out to OTT services in Russia due to difficulties in the acquisition of licence rights to content and the necessity for consumers to make a double payment, to the provider to gain access to the content and for the content itself.
That is one of the main conclusions of a new report entitled Television and on-demand services in the Russian Federation, published by the European Audiovisual Observatory and edited by J’Son & Partners.
It adds that IPTV has become the starting point for non-linear TV closed systems in Russia – VOD, the main business elements of which are PPV and SVOD – which are now offered by almost all pay-TV operators and mobile networks.
OTT services are meanwhile now provided via connected TVs (for instance Yota Play), on video portals (including free ones such as Ivi, Tvingle and Zoomby) and on mobile phones (Omlet.ru, Trava.ru).
The report also points out that the scale of the video viewing market (41 million people in June 2011, compared to 40 million in France and around 34 million in the UK) points to a promising future for interactive services in Russia.
