The Winning Ticket For Pay-TV Operators

Forget the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.  The results that pay-TV operators are interested in have been tabulated, and they paint a clear picture of why intuitive navigation experiences are becoming increasingly important. 

According to the Leichtman Research Group, 81% of U.S. households now have a DVR, use VOD services from a cable or telco provider or subscribe to Netflix.  Moreover, 30% of households use two of those services and 13% use all three.

What this means is that subscribers are making use of more platforms than ever when it comes to content sources, creating a need for navigation that presents a 360-degree view of all available options.

Rather than searching individual silos for content of interest, subscribers are seeking to narrow the myriad of entertainment choices to their specific interests.  Forward-thinking operators are migrating from traditional guide paradigms to advanced user experiences that prioritize channels from all sources based on established viewing preferences, and supplement video content with related applications that enhance the viewing experience.

As content sources continue to expand, viewers can be expected to “vote with their feet” – shifting their loyalties to those experiences that offer the best views across linear TV, DVR, VOD and even SVOD.  The winners will be those operators who invest in new technologies that continually strive to offer personalized, customizable interfaces that most accurately address viewers’ individual preferences and needs.

Alticast's European Team wraps up ANGA COM 2015 with some key takeaways

ANGA Com 2015 has come to a close with 17,000 participants from 74 countries visiting over 450 vendor booths! From broadband to content, ANGA COM was brimming with new information leading to great excitement for the industry's future.

At Alticast’s booth, we featured demonstrations of our AltiPlex Cloud UI Platform, AltiView1, and Alticast Application Framework for both RDK and Android. 

Alticast's EMEA President, Tiann Schutte, attends a customer meeting in the Alticast booth at ANGA COM.

Even though customer visits to the booth and demonstrating Alticast's developments took up most of our time, we were able to tour the trade floor and attend some very interesting conference sessions. Some key take-away highlights from this year's show were:

•   Multiscreen is now a defacto part of any TV offering and is no longer seen as a complementary feature. In fact, recent market research showed that 65% of U.S. mobile video viewers watch TV and phone videos at the same time.

•   The rise of VOD is happening. Many Pay TV operators in Europe are gearing up their OTT services to be able to compete with Netflix; thus, resulting in great choice of services for consumers.

•   The repackaging of linear content into catch-up, start-over, and nPVR is becoming a key Pay TV service offering. This is driven by the consumer’s insatiable demand for content at any time. It also is a key differentiator between TV operators and OTT providers.

•    Cloud continues to be a big theme. The Cloud's elements of cost-benefits, streamlining operations and improved customer experience are the drivers in this discussion. The Alticast Cloud UI demo was the most popular demo on the stand as operators investigate ways to virtualize the STB and deliver competitive and compelling user experiences.

Perhaps Michael Fries, President and CEO of Liberty Global summarized the “takeaways” of the show best in one of the conference sessions,  “The deciding factor is not the content, but the user experience! It’s all about the app."

Julia Mooney, EMEA's Director of Product Management, welcomes a customer to the booth.

Alticast Powers World’s First Major Deployment of Cloud-Based Personal Video Recorder Service

SkyLife Chooses the Alticast Cloud Media Platform for Pioneering Cloud PVR Service

SEOUL, South Korea – February 26, 2014 – Alticast, a worldwide leader in interactive television, announced today that its Alticast Media Cloud Platform has enabled Korean Telecom (KT) SkyLife (SkyLife),” South Korea’s leading satellite television broadcaster, to launch its “SkyLife on Demand” (SOD) service, the world’s first large-scale deployment of a Cloud-based personal video recorder (PVR) service. 

SkyLife’s olleh TV SkyLife service – which combines direct-to-home (DTH) television programming with KT’s video on demand (VOD) services – was launched in August 2009 and today offers multiscreen TV Everywhere services with more channels, HD programming and VOD titles than any of its cable or IPTV competitors.  Eager to stay ahead of competitors, SkyLife enhanced their TV service with its SOD service, enabling each subscriber to record many channels simultaneously using Cloud storage. 

“Our new Cloud-based SOD service is the most recent example of our commitment to providing subscribers the very latest broadband video and data services delivered with the outstanding quality and reliability they have come to expect from our services,” said Ji-Woong Kim, leader of SkyLife’s new business development team.  “To deploy this new service, we turned to our trusted partner Alticast, which supported our initial launch of interactive TV and is following it up with the software solutions and expertise we need for this important new project.”

“SkyLife continues to make advances in TV Everywhere technology with its state-of-the-art Cloud-based PVR service,” said Thomas Jung, Alticast’s Chief Marketing Officer.  “In addition to SkyLife, major cable operators, telecom carriers, satellite providers and other service providers worldwide are in various stages of exploring Cloud-based PVR services to leverage the inherent advantages of virtual storage.  The success of SkyLife’s SOD service validates both the concept of Cloud-based PVRs and the capabilities of our Alticast Media Cloud Platform.”

At the heart of SkyLife’s SOD service is the Alticast Media Cloud Platform, which is comprised of four major components:  a Cloud content ingest/delivery system, a Cloud service system, a Cloud media storage system and a Cloud streaming system.  Each component is optional and interoperable with any existing pieces of a service provider’s Cloud-based PVR system. SkyLife is also using the Alticast AltiProtect DRM solution to ensure content protection by encrypting content when it is recorded.

Complementing its SOD service, SkyLife already offers an existing catch-up service, which utilizes local USB storage to optimize network bandwidth.  When content rights do not allow for programs to be stored in the Cloud, they are instead recorded at the customer premise using USB storage.  Subscribers locate recorded content via the STB UI and then seamlessly play the programs regardless of location.  Cloud-stored content allows viewing flexibility as these videos can be played back on approved mobile devices.