Despite TiVo emerging victorious with an $18.5m bid for MobiTV, beating six other companies to the prize including Amino, Swiss IP video provider Zattoo is hovering on the periphery waiting for juicy offcuts that could provide it with a route into the lucrative US market in which it currently only has a single customer in the form of Hotwire Communications, a service provider on the east coast.
Zattoo’s CEO Niklas Brambring has revealed that MobiTV is one of several options for the company to gain a foothold in the US. However, now that TiVo has won the auction to take MobiTV out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Zattoo may have to engage directly with TiVo parent company Xperi about forging a deal that will suit both parties.
There are concerns about TiVo’s commitment to the cause, since it will require millions of dollars of additional investments to rejuvenate MobiTV – with its numerous debts as well as a transformation of its subs-based payment structure being the priorities. Vendors like Amino and Zattoo looked better-placed to serve MobiTV’s existing customer base once the numerous debts were paid off, while Xperi is clearly more interested in monetizing MobiTV’s patent portfolio than in supporting existing operator clients or spearheading new cableco and telco TV platform launches.
While Zattoo was born into direct-to-consumer streaming, its B2B technology wing has flourished in recent years at smaller Tier 2 and 3 operators in Europe, including at Irish telco eir and German ISP 1&1 Ionus, while Sky Deutschland is a more major recent scalp.
Unlike Zattoo, MobiTV has struggled to break out of the US market, where the company has been consigned to serving smaller cablecos represented by the National Cable TV Cooperative, along with a couple of headline customer names like T-Mobile. Ultimately though, these numerous tiny contracts have proven unprofitable and untenable for MobiTV.
The Zattoo TVaaS platform comes pre-loaded with apps ready to deploy and it transcodes, encodes and protects live channels via multi-DRM in the Zattoo back end, to be played out directly over an operator’s own network – without any additional smartcard or CI+ modules. The vendor has also added an application for set-tops based on Android TV Operator Tier to its white label platform.
The vendors may have missed out on MobiTV, but they could still play a part in its future, if TiVo is serious about turning the business around.