thePlatform, the Comcast-owned video management and publishing company, has announced improvements to its mpx video content management system, as customer Liberty Global prepares to roll out its Horizon system in the Netherlands.
“It’s been a long project, so we’re really excited to get that out the door,” thePlatform’s Marty Roberts, senior vice president of sales and marketing, thePlatform, told Broadband TV News. “We’re continuing to play that role as the central video hub for their online role, their iPad and like that.
Roberts said thePlatform had been involved in a number of TV Everywhere-type initatives, similar to the Horizon project, where online validity was checked against the cable subscription. Recently packages have been established where the online offer exceeds what the customer has in their linear offer.
“The LGI plans were super ambitious. Most customers don’t do both, they don’t put up an online portal and the infrastructure for a new set-top box, there’s a lot of moving parts on this project.”
Roberts explained that while a cablenet might only be able to offer four episodes of a series in catch-up VOD over a network, due to capacity restrictions at a headend, there were no such limitations online. Increasingly operators were seeking broader models for their online offer as compared to the standard linear offer.
thePlatform is building a number of new features into its e-commerce systems, such as the ability to buy a season pass regardless of whether the full series is yet available, or tailor-made genre-based collections.
Roberts said the average customer was now managing several million titles.
thePlatform is working with customers to run their preferred payment system – either in house or as is the case with one European customer integrating with PayWizard. “Our goal was that if a customer was looking at this solution versus an online e-commerce solution it would be very competitive, but we’re also bringing the video management stack into the equation”.
