Over-the-top services are slowly chipping away at traditional pay-TV subscriptions. But, according to a new study, there’s a fairly simple way for pay-TV providers to hold on to their revenue.
In a global survey of thousands of pay-TV customers, Amdocs Ltd. and IE Market Research found that 51% of North American consumers planning to cancel or reduce their pay-TV subscriptions would maintain their monthly spend if service providers offered a unified interface for searching, discovering and watching both pay-TV and OTT content.
Creating a blended user interface (UI) is technically feasible, but most pay-TV providers have been reluctant to do so, presumably because they don’t want to point customers toward competitive services. The exceptions in North America have been smaller and midsize cable operators, including Suddenlink Communications , Atlantic Broadband , Grande Communications and RCN Corp. Those service providers all use TiVo Inc.‘s platform for delivering Netflix alongside their own video streaming servers with a user interface that supports integrated search and discovery.
The study also found that consumers rated pay-TV services highly for content choice, video quality and, perhaps surprisingly, service. OTT offerings, on the other hand, won out on price, multiscreen video features, content recommendations and overall user experience.
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