The company that runs Southern Africa’s Kwesé Play is to be the recipient of the Judges’ Prize at IBC 2018.
Econet Media will receive its recognition as part of the Awards Ceremony on Sunday 15 September at 18:30 in the RAI Auditorium.
Streaming service Kwesé Play offers a mix of local and international content. It also has an exclusive partnership with Netflix. The company works across all types of OTT devices, but has particularly looked to mobile in an area where fixed broadband can be limited.
“Kwesé Play is a game-changer, bringing sport and entertainment to viewers in a part of the world which has been hard to serve,” said Michael Lumley, Chair of the IBC Judging Panel. “In our discussions, we recognised that the way the technology partners had collaborated on this project was innovative and successful, but we also felt that the outcome transcended the technology, delivering social change by connecting local people to global content.”
The technology partners which worked with Econet to develop the Kwesé Play platform include Verimatrix for its security technology, AWS Elemental for encoding the content to a single streaming format and DRM, and Roku for developing a player which would interpret the unified stream on any device.
