Following shortly on from launching its managed cloud entertainment platform Tara TV in Europe, TV2U has also made 120 live channels from India available to viewers.
Speaking to Broadband TV News about TV2U, its background, current activities and plans for the future, Nick Fitzgerald, its CEO, said that it was a relatively young company, having been established around three and a half years ago. It was born out of Digital Rapids, a pioneer in encoding and transcoding technology.
He added that although TV2U owns about 80-85% of the technology it uses for the delivery of content, its key strength is analytics. Every stream is uniquely controlled and allows the company to build up a profile of viewers and their content consumption. This, in turn, allows it to push content through a recommendation engine.
Fitzgerald also said he believes that Tara TV is the way forward, as viewers want to chose what to watch. Besides offering traditional content, including live channels (not just VOD), it also provides TVOD, including the latest movies.
Fitzgerald also said that the company sees customer participation as very important. It has therefore created a managed contribution channel.
Viewers supplying the content are told how many people are watching it and on what device, along with how much ad revenue is being generated – and which is put back by the company.
