NEW DELHI: The Growth of OTT Content: Opportunities and Challenges for Service Providers, a new global survey of cable and broadband operators, finds that most are fairly optimistic about the potential impact of over-the-top services, with 70 per cent saying the potential benefits outweigh the risks.

The results were part of a survey of operators in North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa conducted by Incognito Software, a provider of broadband software provisioning and service activation solutions.

"The widespread growth and popularity of OTT content across multiple devices is forcing cable operators to rethink their business models and how best to add value to their subscribers - and the survey results show that there is no single answer when looking at operators of different sizes and across multiple geographies," said Incognito Software President and CEO Stephane Bourque. "Whether operators take a positive or negative view of OTT content, one thing is constant: their network usage is going to increase."

The study also found that nearly 82 per cent of respondents have already upgraded their network infrastructure to cope with increased subscriber bandwidth usage and that 75 per cent of the providers who reported a growth in bandwidth consumption attributed the increased demand to streaming video sites.

In terms of managing OTT consumption, the survey found that the most popular approach was fair usage policies (40 per cent), followed by bandwidth caps (34 per cent), and proprietary OTT services (22 per cent), the company reports.

Nearly half of the providers in North America utilise bandwidth caps as their primary means of managing OTT, the survey found. Fair usage and service add-ons are the next most common approaches (33 per cent).