Amazon Alexa Voice Control Becomes a Concern for Broadcasters

Streaming Media

Amazon paints Alexa as the natural way to interface with your TV but its message has been forcefully pushed back by broadcaster Channel 4.
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At IBC, Sarah Rose, C4’s chief consumer & strategy officer, voiced concerns around the prominence of search and discovery of Amazon content as voice replaces the remote as the dominant TV interface.

“As a content provider we have no control over this service,” said Rose. “We have to actively defend ourselves.”

This followed the declaration by Amazon that it rates TV as the most important device in home “and the next space [for Amazon to tackle],” according to Amazon European GM for Alexa, Fabrice Rousseau.

“Voice is a great opportunity to change the TV experience since voice can control content in a much richer way,” he said. “Voice enables a much more personal and customized interaction and service. It will get you to specific content much faster and will cut through the noise. People will find more of the content they want, they will watch more and that drives revenue for all.”

This alarmed C4 – which, it transpires, is working with Google Assistant to trial voice services. Rose said Rousseau’s analysis over simplified the situation for the broadcaster and content owner.

She said, “We recognise that voice will be an unstoppable consumer force and that we have to embrace and leverage it but there are some bear traps we’re wary of falling into if we don’t think properly about how to engage with this technology.

“We need to feel that voice enables us to continue to deliver a diverse and plaurality of content and that that won’t be taken away. One concern is that some of this more niche content may not be surfaced on a home page and get lost.”

She urged broadcasters to work together to standardise voice interfaces (their metadata) “so that the consumer isn’t going to be confused” and also urged Amazon to share data on Alexa interactions with consumers around content.

“The platform needs to help us understand usage. Unless we see data we don’t know how to provide services for it. The communication between tech giants and smaller players like us needs to be much more open that it traditionally is.”

Rousseau insisted that there were no plans to prioritise Amazon Prime over that of other content providers – as yet, he caveated.

Richard Halton, CEO at YouView suggested that the spat between broadcasters and tech giants was a “proxy war” given that Amazon’s core business is retail and Google’s is search.

Adam Thibault, GM of TV and V2T Nuance Communications illustrated a middle ground in which voice assistant technologies and content/platform owners might partner. Amazon’s partnership with Microsoft in which Alexa and Cortana ‘talk’ with each is other was offered as an example of a more sophisticated interface for managing services such as search, viewing and retail in the smart home.

“Voice interaction today is not a conversation but it will develop this way,” said Thibault. “If a consumer requests their voice assistant to watch ‘Game of Thrones’ and they don’t have the right subscription, they will be able to use voice alone to navigate a path to HBO and sign up to, pay for and watch an episode or a series,” explained Thibault.

Rousseau said Amazon’s strategy was firstly to get broadcaster, platform owners and device manufacturers to integrate Alexa. The next step is around search.

“Our vision is for Alexa to be open,” he claimed.

Smart speaker sales topped 16.8 million in Q2 2018, up from 5 million in 2017 and will be in 100 million homes worldwide by the end of this year. Some 20,000 different devices can be connected to Alexa alone, up from 4000 at the beginning of the year.