DishTV, one of India’s largest satellite operators with 26% market share, announced this week it has selected Wyplay to provide its Frog turnkey middleware for DishTV’s set tops.
DishTV says the move is part of its plan of moving towards a more open future which will allow the industry to evolve, it claims to have created some sort of excitement in the Asian operator community with this view. What DishTV really means by this is that Wyplay’s Frog middleware is an HTML5-based open source project, which removes the need for any design involvement from hardware manufacturers or chipset vendors.
Frog is written for Linux which allows pay TV operators to develop a graphical user interface in HTML5, create partnerships with third-party software suppliers and build apps enabling interactivity on set-top decoders and mobile devices.
The Frog platform saw its introduction at CES 2013, and shortly after went open source – attracting 75 licensees by doing so, which are also members of the Wyplay open innovation community. It has already been chosen by Sky Italia, Belgacom, SFR and Vodafone and Canal+ – it’s been a rapid rise to fame for the French middleware firm.
With the addition of Wyplay, which is focusing on aggressively expanding beyond Europe and Latin America and into Asia and the US, DishTV customers will have access to live broadcast TV, recording functionality, push VoD, and interactive applications. DishTV launched its DishFlix box service in August 2015, which relies on Kudelski products for push VoD services. The DishFlix box needs to be connected up to the existing DishTV set top, and allows users to download 25 movies per month for a fee of $1.50.
DishTV was founded in 2004 and has a subscriber base of about 13.7 million customers, and competes with other DTH operators in India such as Tata Sky, Videocon d2h, Doordarshan Free Dish, Airtel Digital TV, and Sun Direct.
At the end of 2014, Wyplay added Sigfox’s low-power, long-range IoT networking protocol to its Frog set top software platform, which means that set tops using the Frog software can send small-volume information over the Sigfox network to the set tops which aren’t connected directly to a home’s internet connection, or where there simply isn’t one. But Sigfox has no network in India as yet.
Wyplay CEO Jacques Bourgninaud, said, “We are thrilled to partner with DishTV, Asia’s largest DTH company, in delivering a brand new customer experience to its subscribers. After several months of assessment and preparation, we are now confident that all conditions needed for a successful international expansion of Frog Turnkey solution are in place, especially in terms of collaboration with STB manufacturers supporting our solution. We are now in the home stretch before the deployment of our offering, and excited about prospective for development in this new unique market.”
Last year, Wyplay grabbed another two wins, with set top manufacturer Humax licensing the client-side Frog middleware, and deals with Sky Italia and Telecom Italia deploying a Frog-powered HDTV decoder. It also integrated V-Nova’s Perseus compression technology, a method of video compression that promises UHD quality at Full HD bandwidths.
Earlier this month, DishTV products became available on Amazon India, including the DTH DishTV box and satellite dish, remote, and DVD player.