Germany’s largest cable operator Kabel Deutschland has rolled out its video-on-demand (VOD) service Select Video to additional 350,000 customers.
The new cities covered include Ahrensburg, Bautzen, Eberswalde, Erfurt, Georgsmarienhütte, Halberstadt, Kaiserslautern, Lüneburg, Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Pirmasens, Pirna, Salzgitter and Würzburg.
In total, 5 million households can now use the offering which contains on-demand movies and catch-up programmes from TV channels.
The video library comprises around 4,000 films from studios such as Warner Bros., Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Walt Disney, available in most cases in parallel with the DVD release. The movies cost between €0.99 and €4.99 and are usually accessible for a 48 hour period.
The TV catch-up section is available without extra charge and contains more than 11,000 programmes from over 50 TV channels such as RTL, Sat.1, ProSieben, VOX, Disney Channel and Eurosport. The majority of the content is available in HD quality.
Premium HD customers can additionally access catch-up programmes from pay-TV channels like History, Syfy and TNT Serie.
In contrast to third-party OTT services, the VOD content is directly sent to the customers through Kabel Deutschland’s cable network and not as an internet stream. Select Video is integrated into the HD receivers and HD PVRs provided by the cable company. The internet connection with a recommended data rate of at least 6Mbps is only required for navigation signals.
By the end of spring 2015, Kabel Deutschland wants to serve 90% of its total of 8.3 million customers with Select Video.
