Vodafone and Walmart-owned Flipkart, companies at either ends of the content aggregation spectrum, came together last week to discuss different ways of achieving the same thing. Both are customers of US video software specialist Kaltura, which hosted a recent webinar about content aggregation, and both are proudly lauding themselves as successful super-aggregators in the TV landscape. That is where the similarities end.
The companies represent different approaches to a content industry that will increasingly span mobile as well as TV and fixed broadband platforms, especially in markets where cellular or WiFi are the primary broadband access mechanisms. And in the case of Vodafone, as it evolves from being a mobile-only to a converged and quad play provider, it is making yet another attempt to control that content itself rather than giving into the over-the-top model. It was not very successful when Vodafone was a pure mobile operator, and mobile content was immature – in the era of quad play, the results may be different, but only if the telco can differentiate itself from the other aggregators, such as Flipkart.
Flipkart, based in India, started life as an e-commerce platform, before diversifying into markets like social gaming and utility-based services over the past decade. More recently, the company asked itself how it could reach the next 100m users, which is when Flipkart Video came into the picture. Today, video is the most important part of Flipkart’s business and it claims to be India’s fastest-growing OTT service with 12m+ monthly active users (MAUs) today.
On the aggregation front, Flipkart says it has over 2,500 titles. Original titles helped top up the aggregation model during lockdowns, which in turn helped increase retention, and next Flipkart is planning to incorporate user-generated content. It also recently got into the Android TV game, selling an Android TV dongle called the MarQ Turbostream, built by Chinese manufacturer SDMC and running an Amlogic S805X processor.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have Vodafone, a telco by trade that has built an impressive cloud-based TV platform with Kaltura’s help – spanning seven markets with more to come. Increasingly, pay-TV operators want to be perceived like Flipkart, offering a place where users can dip in freely and find almost any type of content without leaving their ecosystem. The truth is, operators could hardly be further away from that model.
Vodafone’s director of TV, Nacho Garcia-Legaz, described his four-tiered approach to aggregating, going from light to deep commercial models.
- The lightest level, according to Garcia-Legaz, is a gift-giving service such as offering six months of free Netflix access with a certain fixed or mobile product.
- The next is carrier billing, where an operator offers HBO, for instance, as an added extra, paying less than it would cost otherwise, with integrated billing.
- Stepping it up a notch, he described having OTT video as a component of triple or quad play bundling, (for example, broadband + Netflix + pay-TV + mobile).
- The deepest level of commercial aggregation in the Vodafone view is having OTT as a component of TV – offering broadband + mobile + Pack A, for example (which could include pay-TV channels and discounted access to a host of third party OTT services).
“The biggest topic for me is make sure bundling and pricing gives you flexibility, not just offering a single tier or a single package. It makes sense for everybody involved,” said Garcia-Legaz.