While there has been deep integration of OTT into pay-TV platforms in Western Europe, the trend has not really been seen in the satellite sector.
Speaking in a presentation at Hispasat Innovation Days in London, Mohammed Hamza, SNL Kagan, senior research analyst, said that globally 40 different multichannel video programming distributors in 60 territories are now working closely with Netflix. They even include Comcast, despite a history of friction between the two companies.
Furthermore, Liberty Global signed a multi-year partnership with Netflix in September 2016 covering 30 countries in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Hamza added that this deep cooperation with OTT services covers such areas as marketing and promotional, segmentation and EPG.
He also gave the example of Sky as a company that had embarked on aggressive diversification in order to counter a slowdown in DTH subscriber additions – and indeed falls in some markets – in Western Europe between 2013-16.
Sky had expanded strongly into two areas: production, distribution and advertising on the technical side, and OTT on the content side.
