WATCH VIDEO. Caroline Van Weede, Managing Director of Cable Europe, and Peter Percosan, Partner, Digital Strategy, announced this year’s winner of the Cable Europe Innovation Award.
UPC Hungary won the Cable Europe Innovation Award, voted on by delegates at Cable Congress, for bringing more than 20 TV apps to legacy set-top-boxes (STBs) in partnership with Metrological and ActiveVideo Networks and others such as YouTube. Bringing online content to pay-TV subscribers is a win-win for the online and pay-TV industries, but last summer, no one had been able to do it at scale without the purchase of costly set-top-boxes (STB).
This has provided UPC Hungary with a powerful new service differentiator that is a world’s-first achievement for cable: the ability to offer an almost limitless source of online content to every subscriber, without the cost and time-to-market that rolling out new set-top boxes would have entailed.
Entry submission highlighted the cloud-based apps platform that ActiveVideo and Metrological teamed up to bring to UPC Hungary, with particular emphasis on delivery of full YouTube experience from the cloud to more than 520,000 existing SD and HD STBs.
Submission discussed key metrics, including: 68% initial usage rate; 83% return usage rate; more than 1MM minutes per day of YouTube content streamed; and average engagement of 45 minutes.
UPC Hungary worked with its partners to offer over 20 apps on TV via any set-top box in the cabler’s subscriber footprint. This has provided UPC Hungary with a new service differentiator that is a world’s-first achievement for cable: the ability to offer an almost limitless source of online content to every subscriber, without the cost and time-to-market that rolling out new set-top boxes would have entailed.
Second straight Cable Europe Innovation Award for ActiveVideo; Ziggo won last year for Interactive Cable VOD with No Set-top Box.
Other finalists this year were OptimizAIR wi-fi solution by Celeno and Telenet, and Cloud video Engine for realtime generation of interactive channels by R, Syntheractive and Cinfro.
