International Trade Today is a service of Warren Communications News.

Data Sharing Spurs Pay-TV Universe Friction

A battle about data sharing is brewing between content owners and distributors and platforms they’re on, said Nick Cicero, Conviva vice president-strategy, on a Parks Associates webinar last week. Cicero noted an uptick in media companies building their own devices,…

Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article

If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.

citing Comcast’s Sky Glass TVs unveiled this month by its Sky Group division in London, plus Amazon’s Fire TV and Roku TV platforms. “You have this battle between the TV platform, the device manufacturer and then the application layer on top of it,” Cicero said, “and figuring out what slices are going to own a bunch of the stack.” He contrasted Disney, which owns a large body of content with set makers LG and Vizio that own the operating system and device layers. Parks analyst Paul Erickson said: “If you own the metal, you can control everything upwards from there.” Consumers would prefer data access to be equal across services and devices so they can have the most personalized experience possible, he said.