APAC sees growing CTV demand, fueled by broadcaster video-on-demand growth

Large global OTT players are investing in South East Asia, while home-grown Asian OTT brands are holding fierce competition as reports see this sector increasing by $5bn in 2019 alone. OTT and connected TV (CTV) are a major focus right now, what with the launches of HBO Go Asia and HOOQ, a streaming solution backed by Singtel.

Earlier this year, US tech software company, Telaria announced a major move into this space in APAC with its partnership with Thailand’s True Digital & Media Platform. This will see Telaria utilize its video management platform to manage and monetize live TV and video-on-demand inventory on the TrueID platform.

The Drum caught up with Telaria’s general manager of South East Asia, Kevin Smyth on the CTV trends across APAC, issues with fraud and what publishers and advertisers need to be doing to get ready for the increase in live content.

CTV is being pegged as a big strategic move for 2019 – how is Telaria responding to this?

Telaria has been an early mover in CTV as we recognized the great growth opportunities in this medium. It’s why we built our Video Management Platform (VMP) to address the specific needs of CTV advertising. At Telaria we actually help power the growth of CTV. Publishers choose us to innovate with them because of our focus on innovation and viewer experience. In APAC we work with all of Australia’s leading broadcasters to manage and monetize their BVOD inventory as well as Astro, True Digital and FPT Television in Southeast Asia. Connected TV currently represents 38% of Telaria’s revenue and we’ve seen CTV requests in Southeast Asia increase 657% year-over-year in the first half of 2019. We’re continuing to make huge strides in the industry by constantly developing new products and features that solve for CTV’s complexities.

What consumer trends are driving this?

With the price of connected TVs becoming more affordable and the sheer volume of new programs that streaming media companies are producing; consumers are very rapidly shifting away from their traditional TV packages in favour of CTV. We’ve found that a majority of consumers simply don’t distinguish between watching content via CTV or on linear TV. A study we conducted in the US found that 84% of generation Z, millennials and generation X TV watchers consider streaming content through their internet-connected TV to be “watching TV.” Increasingly consumers want to watch what they want, where they want, and CTV enables that behaviour.

What should broadcasters and publishers be doing to get ready for this?

Consumers watching CTV content expect a lean-back TV experience with the brand quality control and advertising rules they have grown accustomed to while watching linear TV. The technology to deliver a premium ad experience within CTV is much more complex than for other digital mediums. Publishers need specific tech solutions to create a great user experience across “big screen” formats such as ad podding, which eliminates ad redundancy and conflict, and audio normalization, which ensures that content and ads are delivered at the same volume level.

How does the increase in live content impact CTV trends? What do publishers and advertisers need to be doing to get ready for this shift?

Live CTV inventory is an exciting development and there’s a lot of interest from advertisers for this content. As more live CTV content becomes available, it will help shift advertising dollars from traditional TV to CTV. As advertising on live CTV becomes more common, the industry will coalesce around best practices to ensure a good viewer experience. Publishers cannot risk showing lagging ads or ones that haven’t been vetted creatively within a live program. There’s still a high degree of communication between the advertiser and publisher when it comes to buying live CTV programmatic. As more industry standardization happens, and buyers and publishers pass standardized tags, programmatic can improve the buying process.

How much of an issue is ad fraud in CTV?

Fraud in CTV is still rare, but with the medium’s growth and the resultant growth ad dollars moving to CTV, it’s an unfortunate reality that bad actors will actively try to cash in. It’s up to technology providers to be active in flushing out bad actors and to keep the ecosystem clean. Publishers and advertisers have to hold their technology partners to high-quality standards to ensure their ad revenue and ad spend isn’t being spent on fraudulent inventory.

We’ve attained the TAG Certified Against Fraud seal due to our efforts in combating fraudulent and invalid traffic. Our partnerships with Pixalate and White Ops help prevent invalid and fraudulent traffic from entering the bid process for any DSP transacting on our platform. Taken together, this means we eliminate almost all instances of fraud even reaching the buyer.

What are the key differences in CTV trends across APAC versus global?

In other parts of the world, CTV content has been produced in large part by newcomers that specifically focus on streaming. In APAC the growth has been fueled by the emergence of broadcaster video on demand (BVOD). This supply of premium broadcaster video inventory has introduced a new opportunity for APAC advertisers who want to consolidate their video strategy across multiple screens while having the ability to manage frequency capping based on device IDs and IP addresses. Specifically, in Southeast Asia, the region’s fragmented nature, in terms of providers, languages, and devices, means that the connected TV adoption is not yet running in parallel with Australia and New Zealand. However, we are seeing a growing trend of CTV supply opening up across emerging markets.

This article and cited credit goes to:

https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/07/17/apac-sees-growing-ctv-demand-fueled-broadcaster-video-demand-growth