From aggregation to conversation: insights from opentv(r) ENTera's first Customer Connect event. Laura Rognoni Solution Marketing Manager In this blog, Laura Rognoni explores the conversations, ideas and industry shifts that shaped NAGRAVISION's recent inaugural OpenTV ENTera Customer Connect workshop in Munich, and what it tells NAGRA about the next chapter of TV experiences. Just two weeks after IBC, nine operators from around the world came together at Gut Sonnenhaus, a beautiful Bavarian hotel nestled in the German countryside near Munich, for the first OpenTV ENTera Customer Connect Workshop. Joined by two of its strategic ecosystem partners, 3SS and Bango, NAGRA spent two days sharing perspectives, exploring new ideas and discussing some of the questions currently shaping the TV industry. The format brought together NAGRAVISION sessions, partner perspectives, live demonstrations, customer examples and hands-on masterclasses, with plenty of time for customers to compare experiences and continue the conversation informally. That balance was important. The event was designed to create a space where operators can step away from the day-to-day, look at the bigger picture and have open conversations about what is changing, where the opportunities are, and what they need from their technology partners. More content is not the same as better discovery. One of the clearest themes across the two days was the changing role of aggregation. There is no shortage of content today. Global streamers, local services, FAST channels, broadcaster apps and operator platforms are all competing for attention. YouTube alone now accounts for around 29% of US streaming minutes, while the number of FAST channels worldwide continues to grow.[1] [,] [2] But bringing more content together is only the first step. As the number of services grows, viewers need a simpler way to navigate this landscape. Aggregation can help create a more unified experience across services, but its real value lies in what it enables next: helping viewers discover relevant content without having to jump between apps or search endlessly across different catalogues. For operators, this creates an opportunity to move beyond simply offering access to multiple services. By bringing together content from different sources and making it easier to discover, they can create more coherent, relevant experiences tailored to their audiences. Regional and cultural content, live sports and events, personalised recommendations and carefully curated bundles all offer ways to differentiate from the global platforms. Live TV is particularly interesting in this context. Sports and major live events can bring viewers back to the big screen and create shared, lean-back moments that stand out in an increasingly on-demand world. By surfacing relevant live content alongside on-demand recommendations and other services, operators can help viewers find something worth watching more easily. Aggregation, in other words, is evolving from bringing content together to making that content easier to navigate, discover and enjoy. The TV interface is becoming conversational. The conversations at the event naturally flowed from aggregation to discovery, and from discovery to AI. Tools such as Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and other AI assistants are already changing how people interact with information. TV is not immune to that shift. As viewers increasingly expect to ask for what they want in natural language, the traditional grid, menu and remote-control experience need to evolve. An interesting demonstration came from 3SS, which showed new conversational and voice capabilities on its 3Ready platform. The examples included language discovery, AI-powered recommendations and discovering content across different apps through a more conversational interface. Sports is an obvious use case. Instead of searching through multiple services to find a particular match, a viewer could simply ask what is available and let the platform do the work. The potential goes beyond discovery, too. The same conversational layer could eventually help customers troubleshoot issues or answer service questions, making AI useful not just for engagement but also for customer service and operational efficiency. Operators can differentiate by knowing their audiences. For operators, competing with global streaming platforms is never going to be about having the biggest catalogue. It is about understanding the relationship they already have with their customers and using that knowledge intelligently. Operators have something particularly valuable: a direct, logged-in relationship with the household. They know what services customers subscribe to, what they watch, how their behaviour changes and, in many cases, what they pay for. The next step is turning that data into a deeper understanding of the audience. A viewer watching six hours of TV every week is different from one whose viewing has dropped from ten hours to eight, and then to six over a few weeks. The trend itself can be meaningful. AI can help identify those changes and use them to improve recommendations, personalise offers or flag potential churn. That same intelligence needs to be applied responsibly. Consent management, privacy and GDPR remain essential. Personalisation only works when customers trust the service using their data and the operator trusts the service to deliver against its business objectives. Aggregation works better when it is personal. Bango brought another important part of the conversation into focus: bundling. Subscription fatigue is real, and customers are becoming more selective about the services they keep. Bundles can help simplify that experience, but only when they are relevant to the individual household. The opportunity for operators is to use their customer relationship to make bundles more useful, bringing together the services people want while keeping that relationship within the operator ecosystem. This is where aggregation, personalisation and monetisation start to connect. The same understanding of a customer that helps predict churn can also help determine which offer, bundle or promotion is most relevant. Every interaction with the TV platform can potentially create value, whether through subscriptions, advertising, promotions or additional services. Home-screen placements, content rails and other parts of the TV experience can become useful commercial touchpoints when they are based on a genuine understanding of the viewer. The best ideas come from comparing notes. Perhaps the most valuable part of Customer Connect was simply having customers in the same room. Across the workshop, customers shared practical experiences of their TV platforms, discussed how their strategies are evolving and exchanged perspectives on the challenges they face in their respective markets. These discussions brought different viewpoints to the table, highlighting both common industry pressures and the different ways operators are responding to them. A customer panel moderated by NAGRAVISION's Senior VP, Sebastian Kramer, provided a further opportunity to explore these themes and compare approaches to the future of TV. Those conversations were useful because every operator is dealing with many of the same pressures, but from a different market perspective. The role of partners was equally important. Alongside 3SS and Bango, the discussions reinforced how much of the future TV experience will depend on different capabilities working together - from UX and content discovery to analytics, personalisation, AI, bundling and advertising. The informal conversations mattered too. There was time to continue discussions over dinner, and even a visit to Oktoberfest. Those moments helped create the open exchange that Customer Connect is designed to encourage. Customer Connect: a new strategic NAGRAVISION format. The first OpenTV ENTera Customer Connect gave NAGRA a useful opportunity to bring customers and partners together around a shared set of questions. It also reinforced something important: the future of TV will not be shaped by one technology or one company. It will come from how operators, technology providers and the wider ecosystem work together to make the experience more relevant, personal and easier to navigate. The shift from aggregation to conversation is ultimately about making TV feel less like a catalogue and more like a service that understands what people want. And the best way to build that future is to keep talking to the people shaping it every day. Laura Rognoni Solution Marketing Manager

What 3 Screen Solutions GmbH learned at CarApp World Europe: the in-car store is built, the hard part is getting people to use it. On 5 October, 3 Screen Solutions GmbH joined around a 150 people from carmakers, tech companies and content businesses at Espace La Rochefoucauld in Paris for the first CarApp World Europe, organised by Dataxis. Between the sessions and around 20 conversations, most of them with carmakers, there was plenty to take away. But one question kept coming up: once the apps and services are in the car, what makes people actually use them? Dataxis shared some figures that put those discussions into perspective. Across the 21 European markets covered in its presentation, the installed base of vehicles with an embedded in-car operating system is forecast to grow from an estimated 11.3 million in 2026 to 60 million by 2031. That's a lot more vehicles where these services could reach people. Getting them used is the next challenge. From connected vehicles to active ones Felix Walter, its CGO, joined Cédric Jarkovsky from Transatel | NTT, Petr Kredba from Škoda, Thomas Groenendijk from Mitsubishi Motors Europe and Brigitte Both from smart Europe for the Next-Gen In-Car Connectivity & Communication panel, moderated by Umair Siddiqui from SBD Automotive. Something that stood out was the difference between a connected vehicle and an active one. Knowing how many cars have connectivity doesn't tell you how many people are using the services available to them. And when you're building a business around those services, that's the number that matters. How people first come across a service makes a difference. If they have to find an app, download it and set it up, you're asking them to make an effort before they've seen what it offers. Having it already available in the car removes some of those steps, although people still need a reason to try it. The conversation also touched on the differences between new vehicles and cars already on the road. Licensing and revenue-sharing models need to take that into account. What works for a new launch won't necessarily work across an existing fleet. For 3 Screen Solutions GmbH, it was especially good to hear Petr Kredba from Škoda talk about how working with 3SS helped them bring video into the car. He spoke openly about the challenges along the way, finding the right content and using what they learned from viewers to keep improving Škoda Play. Felix shared an example from one of its live projects that made the discussion quite tangible. Live TV accounted for 10% of viewing in February and 67% in August. In between, the team had noticed growing interest in the analytics and made it the landing page in June. It's a good example of why the work after launch matters. You see what people are watching, make a change and follow what happens. That gives you something concrete to work with when deciding what to do next. And, of course, usage led to the question of revenue. Streaming, advertising and branded content all offer possibilities, but they depend on people spending time with the experience. Content partners also want to know how their services perform in the car. Getting the content in is only the beginning of that relationship. Five things 3 Screen Solutions GmbH took away from the day 1. More apps aren't necessarily the answer. Several OEM speakers made this point. The size of the catalogue matters less than whether it has something people want to use. A Dataxis survey from January 2026 added some context. Among 1,424 respondents with access to in-car apps in the UK, Germany and France, radio, navigation and music streaming featured most strongly in their top-five choices. Video and gaming ranked lower, although Dataxis pointed out that both are still available in only a limited share of vehicles in these markets. The results reflect what people have access to today, so they don't tell the whole story about what they might use in future. For carmakers, understanding those habits is a useful starting point when deciding what to offer. 2. Carmakers want a say in how everything comes together. One speaker described this as "editorial governance": deciding what appears, where and when. As more services enter the car, carmakers want to keep the experience consistent and recognisable, rather than leave users to navigate a collection of separate providers. That includes choosing what gets visibility and making sure the overall experience still feels like part of their brand. 3. People still need to find the services. 3 Screen Solutions GmbH heard versions of the same story throughout the day: the store is built, the apps are available, but usage hasn't followed. Dataxis used Volvo and Apple Music as an example of why integration and visibility matter. Having an app available is one step; how it fits into the car's interface and where people come across it also shape whether it gets used. That makes discoverability something to work on throughout the life of a service. 4. Getting apps into cars is still a slow process. Testing came up as a practical challenge for developers. Emulators don't always reflect what happens in a real vehicle, and access to better testing environments helps. There was also discussion of beta programmes that let developers test apps in selected production cars before a wider release. Making that process easier would help teams bring new services to drivers sooner and spot problems before a broader rollout. 5. The revenue conversation always comes back to usage. Subscriptions, advertising and revenue sharing were all part of the discussion. Whatever the model, it needs people to use the service. How you get them to try it, and what brings them back, needs to be part of the plan from the start. What 3 Screen Solutions GmbH brought back from Paris A lot of what 3 Screen Solutions GmbH heard reflects the questions 3 Screen Solutions GmbH work through in its own projects at 3SS. What content should people see first? Can they find it easily? What are they watching, and what should 3 Screen Solutions GmbH change based on that? Dataxis also drew a comparison with connected TV. From its work across TV and automotive, the questions around content access, visibility and integration are familiar, even though when and how people use the screen in a car is different. Those questions continue long after launch. Having the store and the content in place gives you a starting point. What you do next is what helps the experience become part of someone's time in the car. Thank you to Dataxis for a great first edition, to everyone who joined Felix on the panel, and to everyone 3 Screen Solutions GmbH had the chance to catch up with or meet for the first time. If 3 Screen Solutions GmbH didn't get a chance to speak in Paris, get in touch with Felix Walter or Thomas Guerbert, or visit 3ss.tv. 3 Screen Solutions GmbH'd be happy to continue the conversation. Together 3 Screen Solutions GmbH make entertainment simple & personal. 3Ready. Company.