VietNamNet Bridge - The domestic OTT market is entering a period of stiff competition with copyright posing the biggest pressure. 

The OTT market has entered a  period of stiff competition

OTT (over the top) is a term used to refer to applications and content such as audio and video that are provided on the Internet. 

The most typical characteristic is that it serves in an optimal way the people’s entertainment needs with low service fees and many add-one.

In order to provide services at low service fees, OTT television companies have to spend big money on copyright, content production, technology and infrastructure. 

Analysts said that FPT Play, Zing TV and VTVgo, the best known OTT TVs in Vietnam, are pouring ‘tons of money’ into investments and incurring losses of billions of dong each year.

OTT television companies have to compete fiercely with each other to obtain the copyright for hot content. 

Meanwhile, Vietnamese users only want the content free of charge, while providers of pirated videos try every possible means to dodge the laws.

OTT service providers in Vietnam cannot satisfy all the requirements on copyright for content, because of many reasons.

Some OTT service providers have good telecommunication platforms, but they don’t have experience in content production. Other service providers come from content producing, but they either have dead applications or cannot develop multi-platforms. 

VTV, the leader in content production, has had to diversify its content production models. It makes some programs itself, calls for investment from different sources to make others, and buys copyright from other content producers. 

Most OTT TV customers don’t care if the programs they watch are copyrighted or pirated. Vietnamese have the habit of watching TV free of charge and demanding high quality of services. 

This practice, plus the limited online payment methods (currently, payment can be made with credit cards, game cards or telecom cards), make it more challenging for OTT service providers.

There are no official statistics about the number of units that violate TV copyright and the losses caused by piracy. However, the representative of the Ministry of Information & Communication (MIC) affirmed that piracy on the internet had reached an ‘alarming rate’.

Nguyen Thanh Lam, director of the Department of Radio, Television and E-information, said at Telefilm 2018 that to prevent copyright infringement, it is necessary to restrict cash flow from advertisements. 

For example, state agencies need to warn advertisers against cooperating with firms which commit copyright infringement.

Earlier this year, MIC ordered the pull-out of all ads posted on 50 websites, including many OTT TV websites with a high number of views, such as hayhaytv, hdviet and hdtivi.

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