In the old days, cable operators would buy premium pay TV channels and market those to their customers. Now, OTT services are taking that role.
“I believe premium OTT is the new generation of pay TV,” according to Pedro Bandeira, head of development, at Portugal’s NOS, to Broadband TV News, “and we are considering it´s emerging relevance in our offer. For us, premium OTT services are not competitors, but just another content provider.
In order to speed up the integration of OTT services, the operator is implementing Metrological Application Platform, WPE browser and cloud architecture to bring (premium) OTT services to its customers. NOS can now launch a cloud based TV App Store for their subscribers. WPE offers pre-integrated software plug-ins to integrate premium OTT services such as Netflix.
The Metrological Application Platform in combination with the open source WPE browser offers a framework architecture with software plug-ins. WPE helps operators to deploy high performance rendering of apps, next-generation integrated UX and third-party services on any set-top box. Metrological brings popular plug-ins, offering pre-integrated and pre-certified software code by which new services can be launched in months instead of years.
The Metrological stack will sit parallel to NOS’s current set-top boxes from Espial and will integrate with the operator’s UMA multi-screen video service.”
“We are able to anticipate the needs of our customers much quicker using a cloud-based approach, said Bandeira. Although NOS is Portugal’s largest operator, worldwide it is a small player “so we can’t develop everything on our own” That’s why the operator has chosen for a RDK based solution from Metrological.
Does he see a set-top box-less future, for instance with smart TVs? “Well, we don’t want to have set-top boxes, but at the moment set-top boxes gives our customers the best possible experience.” And there is the issue, that smart TV manufacturers do not yet offer a consistent and stable environment. “The world of smart TVs is still a jungle.”
Currently, NOS concentrates on all kinds of devices, such as the XBox and other game consoles that are relevant to Portuguese households.
Another challenge is navigation and search – how does the customer finds its way in the enormous offer of content available? Apart from third party OTT offers, NOS also has its own popular VOD service, and Bandeira stresses that in his vision the metadata of all the content partners will be integrated in a single search and recommendation engine.
“We are proud to partner with NOS to build this next generation video package bringing OTT experiences to ensure their customer’s television experience is always relevant and interactive,” added Thijs Bijleveld, SVP Sales and Marketing of Metrological.
“Our goal is to make the onboarding of apps and Premium OTT services and day-to-day content management seamless for NOS. Now NOS can add and change apps and premium OTT services line ups quickly and easily, leaving the integration efforts to us.”
