Farncombe, the UK based consultancy and services to the global digital TV industry company, has announced that its design practice, WeAreAka, played a key role in the creation of an advanced electronic programme guide (EPG) and user interface for the forthcoming hybrid digital TV platform provided by Turkish platform operator Digiturk.
WeAreAka designed the user interface and has played a key role in engineering the overall user experience for Digiturk’s hybrid satellite and IPTV platform. According to a press release, “he new interface fulfils Digiturk’s requirement for an intuitive, user-friendly search and recommendation system to help viewers navigate the operator’s extended catalogue of linear and on-demand content. The guide achieves this through the use of an advanced and highly effective keyword search mechanism.”
Digiturk’s new service will be launched at the end of 2011 and marries satellite with IPTV delivery through a hybrid digital video recorder from Sagemcom. It provides video-on-demand and catch-up TV features, including both streaming and progressive download, alongside Digiturk’s established linear multichannel satellite broadcasts.
The new UI fulfils Digiturk’s requirement that the consumer should never be more than four clicks away from accessing any premium content. Another consideration on which WeAreAka delivered was that the UI must integrate with the BesTv third party recommendation engine.
“We chose to partner with farncombe’s WeAreAka because of its unparalleled experience in developing innovative and intuitive interfaces for major operators,” said Digiturk’s STB and Conditional Access Manager, Taylan Özsipahi, in a statement.
“We began by presenting the WeAreAka team with the challenge of enhancing content discovery and they came up with a streamlined and intuitive design which enables smooth and seamless browsing and searching across live and on-demand programming,” he added.
“With the launch of the first hybrid TV service in Turkey, and one of Europe’s most advanced digital TV platforms, Digiturk is demonstrating a pioneering approach to using new technologies for this ambitious project,” said Jean-Marc Racine, managing partner at farncombe. “Right from the start, Digiturk understood the importance of effective navigation and search to help subscribers become aware of the vast choice of content now at their fingertips and to be able to find content easily, regardless of its origin.”
