Vodafone TV quietly launched in Germany late last week without any official press release or ribbon-cutting ceremony. So, why is Vodafone so keen for its new bells and whistles video platform to avoid any song and dance? Covering up delays? Patching over an imperfect launch? Modesty? Or perhaps the VTV team is taking a well-deserved vacation?
While there was a smattering of news about the impending VTV launch in Germany earlier this year, the target launch date for VTV has always been penciled in for Q1 2021 as far as we are aware, although internal timeframes at Vodafone might have differed to those issued into the public sphere. Vodafone has therefore met this timeframe, albeit at the very back end of the target window.
Let us not forget that it was at IBC 2015 when we first heard about Vodafone’s plans to unify its video technology stack across most of its footprint, which itself came about 6 months after Vodafone first embraced the Kaltura technology that would eventually form the backbone of VTV as we know it today.
In other words, VTV has been six whole years in the making.
We probably speak for the majority of the industry outside of Germany when we say Vodafone has long given off the impression that VTV was already live in the country, where the operator completed the takeover of Unitymedia pay TV and broadband assets from Liberty Global last year. Perhaps Vodafone wanted to keep it that way, bedding in VTV as an established platform long before the trigger was actually pulled? The back-end migration of Liberty Global’s legacy Horizon platform to VTV across some 24 million cable homes was supposedly “completed” in August of last year, so we can deduce that it took the best part of 8 additional months to add the finishing touches.
Indeed, Germany was under a soft launch of selected trials at customers with no marketing activity, while Vodafone was still selling legacy Giga TV platforms. This allowed Vodafone to optimize and improve the product, collecting valuable customer feedback, before officially opening sales channels last week and halting the sale of legacy platforms, meaning the RDK-based GigaTV platform will begin being phased out.
Given the drumming up of VTV in the public eye over the last six years, both by Vodafone itself and its merry band of video vendor experts, there is the possibility Vodafone simply thought the marketing department had successfully fulfilled its job, and saw no reason for an eccentric virtual launch party. Nevertheless, after plowing so much time and money into the cloud-based VTV project, it was probably the least the team deserved. We’re sure there will be one hell of a belated soiree once lockdown restrictions are eased.
As we said, the journey began in February 2015 when Vodafone’s German cable company Kabel Deutschland used the Kaltura technology. What was installed was a combination of Kaltura home grown technology and software from Tvinci, the Israeli company acquired by Kaltura back in 2014, which had by far the most success in OTT video services in and around Europe at the time. Then, in September 2015, Vodafone revealed that Kaltura was behind the implementation of its Spanish OTT service, previously called Ono TV Online – what would eventually become Vodafone TV.
Vodafone’s introduction of Synamedia to the equation in April 2020 (3 years after Cisco’s Infinite Video software was deployed) raised a few eyebrows, triggering Kaltura to say it was actively supporting the introduction of Synamedia to the Vodafone ecosystem as a security and set top software technology provider – claiming the respective technology portfolio in the VTV context are completely complementary.
The rest, as they say, is history. Years of blood, sweat and tears followed as the gargantuan cloud-based back office migration took place, taking in elements from Nagra, Wiztivi, WIT Software, Sagemcom, Synamedia, and relying heavily on AWS cloud infrastructure, to create a single product over multiple networks, numerous regions, and several technology stacks. Today, VTV claims to scale to be the biggest TV platform not just in Europe, but in the world.
This is evidenced from VTV launching across four countries in one year, something that even a company the size of Vodafone could not carry off with an on-premise environment. We recall a Vodafone executive voicing the message, “What we do in a year, AWS does in a month, it’s impossible to keep up.”
While people tend to focus on the success stories, there are always lessons to be learned from the challenges, and one of the toughest components of VTV was getting the integration layer in between legacy set tops and the new VTV back-end. Vodafone stands by this proving a successful going forwards, as it targets magnitudes of savings by having one global video platform. This is not just about migrating services to the cloud, this a cross-department project with many moving parts.
TV is typically a capex-heavy industry, and a major challenge in a back-end migration efforts like this is that the set top vendor is not around anymore, leading to problems like missing out on access to middleware software support and back-end software support. In turn, this leads to a ton of issues around set top security.
One simple strategy to overcome these challenges is to minimize changes to set top clients. However, the view from Vodafone is that the most effective method is to push migration efforts a layer higher, somewhere inbetween the set top and the back-end where these services can be handled efficiently in the cloud.