More OTT content to go direct to consumerJanuary 10, 2020 12.52 Europe/London By Julian Clover The number of companies that choose to by-pass the traditional pay-TV operator and instead market their services direct to the consumer are expected to dramatically increase in 2020, a new report claims.ABI Research 54 Technology Trends to Watch in 2020 expects consumers to move away from the “forced packaging of channels into fixed bundles”. ABI expects consumers to be granted the ability to pick and choose the channels that are most important to them.It says the “growing penchant” among content owners to go direct to the consumer is creating a more challenging market that is leading to a decline in subscriber bases.However, one technology that ABI does not expect to see is the 8K Television sets that were announced by vendors early in 2019. Instead, ABU believes the move to from high definition to 4K will continue in 2020 with very limited 8K shipments, representing less than 1 million worldwide.