TV Everywhere in MENA to grow to $100m by 2018: Frost & Sullivan

TV everywhere in MENA in 2013 accounted for more than USD 10m, which is projected to grow ten fold by 2018 to $100m.

The main drivers of TV Everywhere are high proliferation of connected devices and high speed internet connectivity.

Rising consumption of online video content in the Middle East triggers market opportunities. Boom in local Arabic content availability online will boost TV everywhere adoption.

MENA is expected to be linked through 545m consumer connected devices by 2020, said a Frost & Sullivan report.

The deterrents in its adoption are lack of online ad spending, the predominance of FTA content and rampant piracy of online content.

The report also said that there will be six to seven connected devices for every user by 2020 in the MENA region. With 36m 4G–LTE subscriptions in MENA by 2020 and 390m internet users countries such as KSA, Qatar and the UAE will consume 15 Gigabytes per capita monthly data consumption.

Pay-TV in MENA will likely increase from 8% 2013 to 10.5%in 2018 driven by growth in pay satellite and IPTV.

The report inferred that TV Everywhere is a must-have service offering for any pay-TV provider today. High QoE, personalised experiences and targeted advertisements are key differentiators for subscriber count and for top line revenue.

Legislation and standardisation play key roles in unlocking the online content ecosystem – within pay-TV verticals like cable and IPTV, and also across all broadband/all mobile.

Any tech savvy teen can publish video online – and pure online video services are capturing millenial imagination. Free to air channels also compete for time and eyeballs.

Strategy: Cloud architectures will play a key role to deploy TV everywhere. As delivery to unmanaged devices grows, so will the need to use the cloud to complement the traditional STB based managed device paradigm.