My wish list for a better streamed TV experience
TV on demand. Satellite TV. Catch up. Sky, Virgin, Netflix, Amazon Video, Apple TV, Disney +, Britbox, etc., etc. Availability of quality content and consumption have both soared in recent years, also boosted in the last twelve months by a lack of many other available pursuits.
Does this embarrassment of riches and more stuff to manage in the home, present any consumer challenges that trusted brands could help consumers overcome?
A wishlist
I want an updated reference of what digital TV subscriptions I have.
Are my subscriptions providing me with value for money? Individually, most of them don’t feel that expensive, but has my household watched them recently? How much are they costing in total? What’s the bang for buck?
What contract commitments do I have? Notice period?
I want to be able to pause or cancel them easily and not pay cancellation fees.
I want to be able to hear about special offers that are relevant to me (if Now TV are discounting a weekend pass to Sports, I actually want to know about it).
Better curation and recommendations. I want to know what to watch next, not spend my dinner trying to make a decision based on an image and a show name on the Netflix home page.
Easy to manage, standardised parental controls across all subscriptions.
Whilst there are solutions that are solving some elements of this challenge - such as banking integrations that can identify relevant subscriptions and cancel them, there are major opportunities to help people get the most out of their subscriptions that bring together all of the above. Streamed TV is the new standard, and solutions designed to maximise the benefit of a medium we all engage with on most days, will deliver major utility to consumers.
Subscription Manager
As part of our Open Utilities APIs, Ideavate provides consumer-permissioned access to digital TV and streaming data and viewing history, to enable consumers to manage their subscriptions and get more from them. During the last twelve months, we’ve also developed an application/ UI to provide a one stop shop* for managing the increasing number of digital TV subscriptions (as illustrated above). It doesn’t tick all the boxes on my wishlist, but we think it could form an integral part of a visionary solution that could help lots of people watch TV more easily, and before their tea gets cold!
If you’d like to discuss what’s on the telly and how to provide a better customer experience, please get in touch.
We integrated with a great company called Utelly, where our combined capabilities enabled them to make specific content recommendations based on our understanding of viewing history on other platforms.