Proximus: studios handicapping pay TV providers by restricting rights

Proximus’s TV offering

Pay TV service providers need Hollywood studios to make their content available on all platforms and abandon outdated and self-defeating restrictions on the rights they grant, according to Stephanie Rockmann, director, content and media at Belgian service provider Proximus.

Speaking on a panel session at the Connected TV World Summit in London this morning, Rockmann said that the rights service providers now required from studios “to provide a really good service” are still not available.

She said that the studios decisions to restrict the rights they made available to partners only make it more likely that consumers will turn to pirate services where “everything is available in HD”.

She said studios’ restrictions on how content can be distributed in which window handicapped providers who “protect the value chain” and only benefited the likes of providers of Kodi box services.

Rockmann said that her company was “a telco, not a media company” but added that content is necessary to complement connectivity for all service providers. In practice, she said, this meant making as much content as possible available to subscribers.

“The first step towards realising our strategy is to integrate Netflix onto our set-top box,” she said, adding that the was now on all Proximus’s set-top boxes. “The user experience is so important, especially for something like Netflix which is available in dozens of ways,” she said.

She said that “the super advantage of a set-top box is that it gives very easy access” to such services.