Ways to Break Through TV Multimedia Service Bottlenecks

Since its launch in 2005, IPTV service in China has enjoyed significant growth with a user base reaching 380 million in 2023. However, while IPTV subscribers continue to increase, the user base has reached its peak in terms of both growth rate and potential. Furthermore, despite the huge user base, the revenue of the IPTV value-added services has not been maximized for operators, and the basic video services are facing problems like fierce competition from OTT and the increase of an older audience, leading to a bottleneck in development.

To define a second growth trajectory, IPTV needs to explore something new. There are two key aspects to consider: boosting retention of the existing audience, especially senior audience, and attracting young people who are vital in shaping trends.

Currently, IPTV, similar to cable TV, mainly attracts older generations. To enhance retention among this existing audience, IPTV providers are exploring new services that offer convenience for viewers, for instance, making an outpatient appointment or offering health consultation online. In China, there is a growing consensus within the industry to develop services tailored to the elderly.

However, there is a need to further improve service capabilities and quality to empower the eldercare industry.

To attract young generations, IPTV needs to address three challenges.

The first significant challenge is the lack of interaction. Young people, growing up in an online world, are accustomed to sharing their thoughts and experiences on the internet. OTT services have gained popularity among young viewers due to their interactive features, such as comments, bullet comments and sharing options. However, such functions remain rudimentary or even absent on TV platforms due to limitations on interaction models and security concerns. To attract young audiences, IPTV services need to align with their viewing habits.

The second challenge is the unattractive UI design of IPTV platforms. TV interaction is not user-friendly, and linear TV leads to poor operability, making young audiences less inclined to use IPTV.

The third challenge lies in the inferior processing capabilities of current IPTV set-top boxes (STBs) compared to mobile phones. This leads to less smooth UI control, insufficient support for new services, and an inability to install popular apps on the

internet. Consequently, young audiences, accustomed to high-end mobile phones, have little interest in watching TV.

It takes time and collaborative efforts to address these challenges. With increasingly diverse entertainment options and rapidly changing user habits, there is not much time for TV to adapt. Here are some discussions on how to take IPTV services to the next level.

Optimize Basic Video Services

Actually, young people's reluctance to watch TV is often due to the content offered rather than the TV itself. However, if a popular TV show or a sports event is available on both TV and OTT platform simultaneously, viewers may prefer to watch it on TV for a better viewing experience. As a must-have for most households, TV sets still hold great potential. To seize these opportunities, it is essential to optimize the video services offered on TV platforms.

• Optimize Viewing Experience

It is crucial to cater to the needs of the elderly and kids. This can be achieved through simplifying the UI and introducing voice control. Furthermore, introducing popular contents like sporting events, esports and live webcasts can attract young audiences.

• Introduce Short-Form Videos

The success of TikTok shows short-form videos can effectively engage users and enhance customer stickiness. Recent statistics show that people are spending more time watching short-form videos on mobile phones. Notably, the elderly shows an increasing interest in short-form videos, which poses a threat to the IPTV service that focuses on long-form content. Therefore, it is urgent to introduce short-form videos to IPTV services.

The introduction of short-form videos can drive traffic to long-form video services, maximizing monetization opportunities. By using algorithms, short-form videos can be recommended to users based on their preferences, increasing exposures and subscriptions to the relevant long-form videos.

Looking ahead, model tuning can be leveraged to target different audiences within households with relevant content, such as education content for kids or healthcare content for the elderly. This can help form accurate recommendation algorithms for TV services. Considering the higher compliance standards for TV content and the important position of TV sets in households, there is an opportunity to build an ecosystem that is different from that of mobile devices, creating a new business model specifically tailored for the TV screen.

• Innovate Video Experience

It is also important to accelerate the launch of new video services for TV screen, such as 360-degree VR, free-viewpoint video, multi-view mode, and multi-viewpoint video. These services are suitable for scenarios like cultural tourism, sporting events, live concerts, and live esports. By combining these new video services with compelling content, we can attract young people to spend more time watching TV. This business model has already been developed and needs to be promoted for large-scale deployment.

In addition, exploring the application of metaverse technology on TV screen can provide users with a brand-new TV viewing experience. For example, MIGU of China Mobile held a "Metaverse World Cup Music Festival", creating a virtual interactive space. Viewers could access this metaverse world though their TV sets and use avatars to enjoy a 360-degree view of the singers' performances while watching the interaction between real persons and avatars. This approach was very popular among young people.

Upgrade TV Services

As technology, especially AI technology, develops rapidly, traditional TV services like IPTV need to keep pace with changing consumer needs. We need to think about how to introduce the industry's latest technology to make TV devices and services smarter, enable continuous service upgrade, and add new impetus to the industry growth.

• Smart Voice Control

Voice control technology has matured and is widely used in IPTV services. For example, by configuring far-field voice modules or Bluetooth voice remote control, users can search for and play programs via natural language dialogues, enjoying a true hands-free experience. This significantly increases the activation rate of video programs, showing the positive effect of new technology on services.

• Introduction of AI Capabilities

ChatGPT has gained great popularity as an AI application, reaching 100 million monthly active users in only two months after its launch. This success shows the potential of AI technology to drive traffic. Currently, many Chinese companies are stepping up efforts to launch similar AI systems. We should seize this opportunity to introduce AI to IPTV services and optimize application scenarios for home users. Here are some areas where AI can be integrated into IPTV services.

—Smart elderly care: AI can play a crucial role in addressing the needs of senior citizens who live alone or having difficulty in getting medical care. By guiding them in identifying their health priorities, enabling online interaction with doctors via TV sets, and reminding them to take medicine, AI makes it much easier for senior citizens to access medical care, greatly increasing the service value for them.

—Digital humans: Digital humans have become increasingly popular. When combined with conversational models like ChatGPT, they can become smarter and more human-like, enabling new services like elder care, child companion and emotional guidance. They can also be utilized as virtual idols, virtual spokespersons of a company or a brand, or customer service robots, interacting with customers in a more immersive way and expanding business models.

—AI-powered education and entertainment: Generative AI technology experienced explosive growth in 2022. For education and entertainment, applications such as AI avatars, AI painting and AI video products, can greatly enhance user interaction and revitalize traditional value-added services.

Upgrade Hardware of Terminal Devices

The growth of services reply heavily on hardware development. In order to support the future IPTV service development, upgrading the hardware of terminal devices should be the top priority. The next-generation terminal hardware needs improvement in the following aspects:

• Gigabit network access: Enabling Gigabit wired access and Wi-Fi 6 wireless access can guarantee high bandwidth and low latency for video services like XR.
• Video processing capabilities: Enhancing video processing capabilities is essential to support multi-channel 4K decoding, binocular 4K VR display, UHD multi-view mode, or even 8K decoding and display, allowing users to experience more and better new video services.
• AI processing capability: Integrating an AI processor, such as a neural processing unit (NPU), is becoming increasingly important for IPTV terminals. To effectively support AI-powered services, the NPU should deliver a processing performance of at least 3 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

The development of mobile phones has shown that advancements in hardware processing capabilities can facilitate the proliferation of new services. Similarly, for IPTV to overcome current challenges, it needs to accelerate hardware configuration upgrades to optimize its processing capabilities. This will enable IPTV services to attract more attention and investment within the industry, thus entering a new development stage.