theibcdaily
Executive Summary 13
Strategic Insights
Enormous opportunities ahead for broadcasting Ulf Ewaldsson Senior Vice President and Group CTO, Ericsson Region: Sweden Interviewed by: Chris Forrester Ulf Ewaldsson, as well as his high-profile day-job, is also chairman of Ericsson’s Research Board, which gives him a special insight as to what is likely to happen over the next few years. Indeed, he sees further dramatic changes taking place in broadcasting: “As we approach 2020, established rights holders, producers, content owners, broadcasters and all forms of MVPD TV service providers will be competing and jostling for position with a raft of new entrants, investors and aggregators. In other words the media value chain is being dismantled and reset into a dynamic media ecosystem. The opportunities are enormous.” One new development is especially exciting. “One of the most important pieces of research under development is 5G,” says Ewaldsson, who was one of the key speakers in the IBC Roadmap Session: ‘Our CTOs Look Forward 12 Months’. “5G is the next step in the evolution of mobile broadband and will be a key component in the future Networked Society. Its arrival will be a watershed moment for the entire TV industry, delivering the flexibility and high reliability needed to deliver video to billions of users across the globe, and supporting the 15 billion videoenabled, connected devices by that time.” Ewaldsson forecasts that the trend towards the infamous Martini moment (‘any time, any place, anywhere’) is already
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with us. “As we move towards 2020, video will be everywhere, ranging from the connected car and wearable technologies, to tablets, smartphones, laptop computers and the living room TV. Ubiquitous mobility, broadband and the cloud will transform the industry but we need to build networks that can capitalise on these new opportunities. They need to be smarter and go far beyond today’s capabilities. The industry also needs to build agile platforms that can respond to new services and a whole range of new players across an evergrowing market. “The Networked Society is our vision of the future, a world in which virtually everyone on the planet is connected and will have access to mobile broadband internet. It will change all the business rules; it’s an irreversible entity and will open up a whole range of exciting and potentially groundbreaking opportunities across every industry, and of course, also in the media industry. “The Networked Society is creating the next era of television; one we call the internet era of TV. In this future TV landscape, the vast majority of the world’s population will have access to a screen that can send and receive video. By 2020, there will be almost 8 billion mobile broadband subscriptions, of which 3.7 billion will be on 4G networks, an increase from 0.5 billion in 2014.”
“As we move towards 2020, video will be everywhere, ranging from the connected car and wearable technologies to tablets, smartphones, laptop computers and the living room TV”
23/09/2015 11:51