Dish has selected Nagra’s MediaLive Secure Player to implement dynamic advertising insertion (DAI) for its Dish Anywhere multiscreen VoD platform. Dish has also updated its TV everywhere platform to support multiple user profiles on the same home subscription – despite being rather busy with the launch of its pure OTT Sling TV offering.
The Nagra platform allows Dish to configure advertising skipping management, which covers how many times an advert will be shown to a viewer, and the reporting of statistics and analytics to Dish and its advertising partners. Quality monitoring is also handled by the platform, which supports PCs, iOS and Android devices. Nagra has been a long term partner for Dish, and has recently posted solid annual results, which included news that its anyCAST Command security offering would be deployed on the Dish network in 2015 – to meet new requirements for 4K content protection.
MediaLive Secure Player, as the name suggests, has the Nagra Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE – more widely known by its trade name UltraViolet) and DTLA (Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator, which promotes the Digital Transmission Content Protection [DTCP] specification) approved DRM systems, to provide managed DRM.
The main part of the MediaLive platform, the Secure Player element is primarily concerned with four applications. According to Nagra, Define allows flexible service definition across the full content lifecycle, to allow easy monetization of premium content (and includes content and catalog management, with promotions and product definition). Secure, the second area, simply provides the necessary security and DRM to allow rights holders to provide Dish with content – and includes security monitoring and upgrade management, as well as device rooting or jailbreaking detection.
Deliver, the third element, concerns delivery management systems for multiscreen services, which covers encoding and encryption management, EPG and VoD data delivery, CDN selection, ad signaling, recommendations, and remote control support via companion apps. And finally, Personalize covers the account and device management sections of the offering, which would allow Dish to cater its offering to each unique user – and push them the right sorts of adverts. That section includes device provisioning and activation, user authentication, billing management, recommendations, and asynchronous device messaging.
This should allow Dish to add a lot more value to its Dish Anywhere users, who are increasingly demanding access to the content library afforded to them by their satellite subscription, while out of home. The most notable new feature is unique profiles for separate users within a single home subscription, which then allows Dish to push more focused (and hopefully successful) advertising to its viewers.
The accounts also allow viewers to set up their own watchlists and favorites, but also allow the account administrator to pay and view their bill from within the application – admittedly a less appealing use of the app than the personalized recommendations and remote DVR management, but one that is nonetheless quite useful. The administrator also has control of content access and age-restrictions, giving parents greater control over what their kids watch through the app.
“Our technology focuses on the customer experience, be it the programming they watch, the device they use, or even the advertising they see,” said Vivek Khemka, Dish SVP Product Management. “With the new features of the MediaLive Secure Player, we have a tightly integrated system that helps us leverage those opportunities while maintaining a secure multiscreen environment,” added EchoStar Technologies President Mark Jackson.