The Multiscreen Cloud: the Many Advantages of a Hosted Service

NAGRA and Spain's ABERTIS TELECOM are making the multiscreen cloud TV a reality. By joining forces and technologies, both companies are putting television services on multiple devices at the disposal of pay-TV service providers and free-to-air broadcasters thanks to an efficient and quick time-to-market hosted service. The joint service offers a simple solution to add multiscreen services to their mix. Alex Mestres from ABERTIS TELECOM and Xavier Heusghem from NAGRA explain.

What does this new service mean for the industry? Simply put, it puts multiscreen television services within every pay-TV service provider's or free to air broadcaster's reach. Multiscreen is inevitable and is here to stay we wanted to make it easy and accessible for any pay-TV service provider or free to air broadcaster to quickly deploy multiscreen services at affordable cost and make it work for them.

What are the main benefits of a hosted service? The benefits to TV service providers and broadcasters are clear: there is no infrastructure to put in place, virtually no waiting time and it leverages proven components from both NAGRA and ABERTIS TELECOM. Another key advantage is that launching multiscreen services will not incur high upfront cost and can be mainly OPEX based. Both service providers and broadcasters can benefit from the many advantages the service has to offer and what's more it's available today.

How did you make it work? By combining the technology and expertise from both companies. NAGRA is providing its security expertise and the building blocks for making multiscreen a reality from content management and service delivery, to DRM and user interface frameworks. ABERTIS TELECOM on the other hand is an infrastructure provider and takes overall responsibility for the hosting and operations of the platform within their data centers, leveraging their existing network and transport infrastructure. In addition, ABERTIS TELECOM is also providing their ingest facilities, CRM platform, payment gateways and advertising management system and they'll manage customer care and assistance.

In short, it is a complete solution for the deployment of cloud-based multiscreen services.

You just mentioned the new service targets both pay-TV service providers but also free to air broadcasters. Could you clarify? This is a very important point. Although pay-TV service providers and free to air broadcasters have similar challenges to take up such as being able to quickly add new services to their existing offer with limited investment and complexity to deal with, they run different business models and do not have the same gaps to fill.

Pay-TV operators are seeking to quickly launch multiscreen OTT services to remain competitive, avoid churn and get new subscribers. They are already familiar with managing subscribers (OSS/BSS, CRM, payment & billing), are willing to explore new monetization models such as advertising but do not always have the knowledge and resources to deal with the increased complexity and the costs of multi-format encoding and off net distribution.

The main revenue model for free to air broadcasters is to get revenues from advertising on linear channels based on the number of viewers they have, these viewers being more and more attracted by on-demand content. Their challenge is to add new appealing branded services like catch-up TV or even VOD to compensate possible erosion of their core business. Lots of broadcasters have managed to have catch-up content available on their web sites but such solution does not scale and they might face rights and security issues that we can manage for them. Contrary to pay-TV service providers, there are not familiar with managing subscribers and do not always have the tools for it.

Thanks to this new service, we can bring high value to both.

Can you tell us a little more on the main highlights of the service? Sure This is a fully hosted multiscreen television service supporting the delivery of a consistent experience across multiple devices, built on an industrial grade infrastructure, guaranteeing business continuity. Offered services include, content ingest and transcoding, asset management and storage, live encoding, CDNs, business support services (BSS), advanced advertising, recommendation, payment management and obviously service operation, monitoring, customer support and reporting. Key features of the service are Live TV with start-over, catch up TV, VOD, multiple monetisation models (AVOD, TVOD, SVOD), smooth integration of broadband and linear services with HbbTV, support of multiple devices, networks and content types, studio approved content protection, customisable content navigation and user interfaces.

Is anyone using the platform today? Numerous customers are currently running trials with the service. We are working on several multiscreen deployments with a number of customers and we'll be announcing those in the near future. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) also used the hosting platform to offer its members HbbTV based interactive applications fully populated with content from the 2012 Summer Olympics and Eurovision European Song Contest.

The beauty of the solution is that it provides a seamless integration of broadcast and broadband services with a unique set of monetization capabilities including subscription, transaction and advertising models, micro-payments and recommendation.

This is all great news for service providers and broadcasters. It also looks like this type of partnership is a growing industry trend can you tell us a little more about that? Really in the end it comes down to How do we best serve our customers? The answer simply boils down to giving them the right choices and opportunities to help them grow their business. The hosted solution resulting from the partnership betwe

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