IBC 2023 highlights

Escaping the noise at IBC

What drives an organisation’s presence at a tradeshow? It’s a relatively large expense, so what do we, as vendors, want to achieve from our presence at events such as IBC? These are the questions we at Friend MTS ask ourselves when planning these events, and the answers can take us to some interesting places. And so it was at this year’s IBC when we presented the Friend MTS IBC lounge for the first time. 

To answer our own questions, the lounge was designed to be a place where our customers and partners could visit us in a relaxed environment, take time out from a busy show to unwind, recharge (devices, mind and body) and, if required, get some expertise and advice from the Friend MTS team in a quiet, private environment. 

The over-arching goal for us at a tradeshow is to connect with people, and we’re pleased to say that the IBC lounge on the balcony up in Hall 1 was a great success. Thanks to everyone who visited; we hope you enjoyed it and we look forward to welcoming you back next year.

UEFA fireside chat

Probably the highlight of this year’s event was on Saturday lunchtime when we were joined in the lounge by UEFA’s Senior Anti-Piracy Expert, Diego Dabrio, for a fireside chat with our Operations Director Chris White. Diego shed light on how UEFA manages the security of its live football broadcasts to preserve revenue for the beautiful game to thrive.

Diego also revealed what impacted UEFA’s policies, the tools and processes they found most effective, and the challenges and opportunities they faced at present and expect to see in the future. Find the full chat here to learn more from Diego’s insightful session, including four principles of UEFA content protection strategy, the three types of content the organisation secures and the key reason why UEFA takes content protection and anti-piracy extremely seriously.

Friend MTS – key themes

Over the last twelve months, Friend MTS’s growth has accelerated at a rapid rate. At the end of summer 2022, we announced the NorthEdge partnership and investment, and since then there’s been significant expansion across our teams, and infrastructure in all territories – not to mention the addition of a significant number of customers. We recently announced the opening of our new office in Singapore, and we’re currently expanding our regional offices and adding to our commercial, technical and development teams in Europe and the US.

Also, a hot topic at the show was dynamic delivery server blocking. This enforcement solution, pioneered by Friend MTS in 2017 and already in use across multiple territories worldwide, is widely accepted as the most effective anti-piracy enforcement technique available. There’s significant interest from broadcasters and rights owners in all territories as organisations increasingly look for proven tools and techniques that return measurable impact on piracy of their content.

Last but not least, the most frequent question that we were asked at the show was “Content security costs money – what do we get from it?” And it’s a valid question – ROI on major investment should always be challenged – but we’re helping customers change how they view their content security investment. Though these technologies are traditionally viewed as a cost centre, increasing sophistication of technologies such as subscriber ID watermarking opens up channels of communication to diverted audiences, enabling broadcasters to directly reach viewers who may or may not know that they’re consuming stolen content. When deployed alongside restrictive measures (such as content revocation) this dialogue enablement is key to engaging with viewers who may subsequently be converted to legitimate subscribers.

Takeaways

IBC was a great success for our team this year; we discovered new ways of engaging and interacting with the people who matter, namely our valued customers, prospects and partners. As IBC and other industry-renowned events continue in their post-pandemic phase, they enable fresh and original approaches to offline and online communications while affirming the benefits of premium in-person events. 

As seen again at IBC 2023, our market-proven content security and anti-piracy solutions continue to gain popularity among a growing number of broadcasters, content owners and OTT service providers, as more and more businesses strive to bolster the protection of their content from theft and seek new revenue streams that can be uncovered by converting subscribers that pay pirate services for their premium sports and entertainment fix. As legislation in various territories continues to develop, new, more effective anti-piracy measures already deployed in the pioneering lands are becoming increasingly prevalent to secure high-value content in its post-distribution journey. 

See you in Amsterdam in 2024.

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