Becoming a data-driven broadcaster and delivering a unified and personalised broadcast user experience

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ABSTRACT

In designing a system, Authentication, Authorisation, Identity Management, Device Synchronisation, Data Collection, Data Anonymization, Analytics and Recommendation Engines need to be considered as keys to providing customised non-linear TV, Radio and Online channels.Meeting audience expectations is becoming easier for broadcasters with Hybrid broadcasting. The advent of transport technologies such as Hybrid Radio and HbbTV (Hybrid broadcast broadband TV) facilitate a wide range of opportunities for custom-made content aggregation, discovery and, ultimately, consumption. In the connected world, editorial teams need to better know their audiences so as to better provide them with targeted content (format, duration, angle). To achieve this, broadcasters need to uniquely identify people across their various devices. As data privacy concerns are paramount, broadcasters need to let the user control whether he wants to be identified based on a profile, anonymously or not at all. Also, broadcasters should embark on this strategic pathway, in such a way as to avoid vendor lock-in, using open solutions and adopting standard interfaces for data exchange.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and its Public Service Media Members are working to put together a set of standards and technologies to enable broadcasters to offer a simple and smooth personalized user- experience on connected devices and ultimately across all their channels. This paper will present the required architectural elements and examples of use cases that help broadcasters embrace the personalised media future that awaits us all.

INTRODUCTION

With the new distribution opportunities offered by hybrid technologies and standards (HbbTV [1] and RadioDNS [2]), broadcasters’ new challenge is to provide the right content on the right device at the right time to the right people. To embrace this digital shift requires us to challenge the way our systems are designed and to provide the right tools to our editorial teams so that the user is put at the centre of our infrastructures while at the same time keeping control over the data generated by the system.

Unlike the online players of Netflix, Google and Facebook, which all have the ability to take in account feedback, considering a user as an individual, broadcasters do not yet have this as part of their business DNA. The ability to provide a unified and simple user experience across devices is based on the capability of uniquely identifying a device connected to the broadcast channel. The idea is therefore to create a link between the devices and the broadcasters. These links can then be assigned to someone to create a group of devices where broadcasters can offer a common and consistent experience.

ETSI TS 103 407 [3], Cross Platform Authentication for limited input hybrid consumer equipment (CPA) is an open standard that associates online user profiles with media devices and that, in particular, enables broadcasters to offer device synchronization, to build users’ profiles and to start collecting data, with subsequent leveraging of data analysis. This is the foundation of delivering a unified and personalised broadcast user experience.

First, this paper outlines the organizational milestones required to deliver a data-driven media experience, Then, it describes the basic technical concepts required to deploy a cross platform authentication mechanism including a description of the benefits in terms of user experience. Finally, it covers a few personalisation use cases employing this architecture.

DATA-DRIVEN DISTRIBUTION

From a broadcaster’s strategic point of view, delivering a unified and data-driven media experience requires organization-level adoption and implementation of the following elements:

Open Standards and Interfaces: Broadcasters’ metadata related to the channels and content shall be available to the rest of the system.
Analytics: Data collection to measure the audience and to track system performance.
Single Sign-On: A robust cross-platform authentication mechanism allowing each user to authenticate on each of their devices (Online, Radio and TV included). A good design should support identity federation and should let the user choose their preferred identity provider.
Recommendation:Abroadcaster’sabilitytoprovidecoherentnon-linearaccessand discovery of its content catalogue.
Personalization: A broadcaster’s ability to adapt its user-experience to the user across all platforms. This includes direct access to relevant content and preferences as well as the ability for editorial teams to target and propose tailored content to audience clusters and, ultimately, to any individual of the broadcaster’s audience.
BusinessIntelligence:Theabilityforabroadcastorganizationtounderstanditstotal audience experience in order to positively impact its business.
Data Broker: A broadcaster acts as Identity provider in order to provide user authentication to access external services. Good examples for Public Service Media are Libraries, Mobility, etc.