IBC 2019: consumer preferences take centre stage in media and entertainment

This year’s IBC – one of the largest annual gatherings of the media and entertainment industry – showcased the latest technologies and highlighted key market developments. Among the takeaways from the show, AI was a defining theme, with a growing emphasis on large-scale deployment. However, it was changing content-consumption patterns that arguably carried greater, long-term strategic implications.

Growth in AI consumption is creating commercial opportunities across the AI value chain. Over the past year, investment in AI has increasingly extended towards revenue-generating services and enterprise propositions, with operators assuming a broader range of roles across the AI value chain. Telcos in Asia Pacific are particularly active across multiple layers of the AI value chain. They account for 43% of those participating in the infrastructure layer and 38% in the model layer. This position reflects the combination of large and linguistically diverse markets, government-backed national and sovereign AI agendas, expanding AI infrastructure investment, and the scale of leading regional operators and technology ecosystems.

This edition of the Industry Checkpoint series focuses on pay TV, highlighting how the market has changed in the last six months and its implications. The report considers four major developments: the growing strategic importance of controlling the TV home screen, the move from provider-defined to user-defined video content bundles, the growing importance of live sports for OTT video in North America, and free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) moving into its next phase.