Single-Sign-On : a game changer for public broadcasters

On 17 and 18 October 2017 I was pleased to organize, as Chairman of the EBU Big Data initiative, a 2-day conference dedicated to Single-Sign-On (SSO). This workshop was hosted at RTBF and welcomed participants from 30 organizations and 10 countries, mainly from the media world (TV, radio and press).

Single-Sign-On has been widespread in all sectors for years (it’s instrumental to e-commerce for instance) but the media world has been slow to adopt it. It’s been considered for a long time as a tool reserved to plateforms where payments need to be processed which explains why the press was the first to follow the trend in the media world. Radios and TV’s were slow to follow, especially public service media which had been used to give free access to their content. Why would one bother to register in this case ?

The rise of GAFA has dramatically changed the business landscape, putting customer’s data at the center of the game. Even public service media realize today that knowing their users better and engaging in a 1-to-1 relationship has become a priority. Using panels to measure a global audience has become insufficiant. The level of granularity provided by those oldfashionned methologies doens’t allow to cope with the complexity and fragmentation of online usages. The need to collect usage data and identify users has therefore never been higher. I may dare to say that it is actually a question of survival for traditional media if they want to propose a better customer experience, one that can be compared with the standards of the market.

For those interested to look at the agenda of this workshop, it can be downloaded here.
The proceedings of the conference will be made publicly available so that everyone (and not only EBU members) can reflect upon their own SSO strategy.

Image : courtsey Shutterstock