Fincons Group will be showcasing its latest endeavor, the Smart Digital Platform for media and broadcast businesses, at this year’s HbbTV Symposium and Awards taking place 21-22 November 2019 in Athens.
The solution is the first to be entirely compatible with both European HbbTV and new USA ATSC 3.0 standards.
Fincons Smart Digital Platform (SDP) is a flexible and fully customisable modular framework designed to provide Hybrid TV and OTT solutions and to act as an accelerator for new services scenarios. As such it is built to integrate with the latest standards, but it is also ready to be expanded and personalised as new technology becomes available. The SDP tool stems from Fincons’ pioneering experiences with HbbTV applications, such as the well-known Mediaset Play service, as well as ATSC applications.
As the two standards continue to evolve and provide each other with new learnings and inspiration, Fincons has leveraged its unique role in the development of both standards to design the first platform that is truly compatible with both: a unique opportunity for international entertainment businesses and broadcasters especially in a market environment that is seeing more and more international players join forces -and content- to leverage their assets and reach broader sections of the market well beyond national boundaries.
The SDP framework distributes functionalities in logical “SMART” modules intended to be the “building blocks” for any Hybrid TV solution. With the help of a template engine, the SDP makes it possible to design each page of an application (including navigation) to show features such as an Electronic Program Guide (EPG), channel details, video on demand sections and catch-up content. Display and interactive video advertising formats can be synchronized through application programming interfaces (APIs).
The prototype submitted for this award demonstrates how the SDP can be used to “smart watch” videos. In this example, cloud machine-learning services are used to analyse video assets, looking specifically for celebrity appearances through face recognition techniques; this subsequently allows ends users to skip directly to where celebrities appear. Using this tool, viewers could navigate directly to clips featuring their favourite actors. Starting from configurable templates, the application is automatically generated in either HbbTV2 or Atsc3.0 compliant code. The feature opens the door to many new possibilities and because of its modular and integrated structure enables businesses to realize return on investment every step of the process.
Fincons Group will be demoing its SDP platform with Artificial Intelligence powered facial recognition at HbbTV Symposium event.
