VietNamNet Bridge – The three OTT televisions VTV Plus, VTC Play and FPT Play all complain that the piracy has been hindering the development of OTT TV. Meanwhile, the watchdog agency still has not set up regulations on the service provision.

The OTT TV market has just started up, but the copyright infringement has become serious, thus making service developers depressed.

Pham Anh Chien, President of Medianet Corporation, the partner of VTVcab, which provides VTV Plus, said the success of the OTT TV commercialization would depend on two factors – the attractive content and the copyright protection.

According to Chien, the Internet and mobile based TV copyright infringement has been putting big difficulties for OTT TV content providers. Pirated TV content has been broadcasted through free apps. While the illegal broadcasters can earn money from ads and watchers don’t have to pay money, authentic televisions suffer heavily because they cannot collect fees from OTT television users.

Chien, while believing that OTT TV would, step by step, become the new choice instead of traditional TV and change people’s way of watching TV, still feels worried about the development of OTT TV.

“In order to develop OTT TV, TV content providers and televisions need to apply the policies to well control the content and apply good security policies,” Chien noted.

Le Anh Dung, Director of the Research and Development Center of VTC Corporation, said he believes in the high commercialization capability of OTT TV, however, this can be done only with the reasonable management policies.

He went on to say that the mushrooming of unlicensed TVs and the improper treatment to the violators will badly affect authentic service providers.

Also according to Dung, some 1,000 OTT apps have been developed in Vietnam, most of which provide services free of charge or seeking profits from ads. Many of them provide low quality services, because the investors are not financially capable enough to make heavy investment in the transmission line system or server.

“Copyright infringement proves to be the biggest challenge for OTT TV service providers to implement the commercialization plan,” Dung said. “Meanwhile, the current policies with light punishment cannot deter violators.”

Vu Anh Tu, Technology Director of FPT Telecom, also said that commercializing applications and digital entertainment content is really a difficult matter in Vietnam because of the special conditions in the market and the difference in the consumption style and way of thinking between Vietnamese and other countries.

Vietnamese would rather watch online films on the websites, where there are a lot of ad pieces and malware traps, than watching films on “clean’ websites, just because they don’t have to pay money for the services.

OTT televisions feel worried about the feasibility of the OTT TV commercialization also because they are not protected by the laws. To date, the State still has not set up the regulations on providing OTT services. Therefore, OTT service developers still do not know if their services are licensed and how they can charge users.

Believing that OTT is an irresistible trend, television service providers have jumped into the market, though none of them has made profit on it.

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