Deutsche Telekom’s Business Development and Innovation (BDI) unit has strengthened its claims to be a one stop OTT shop by tying up a deal with content partner Vubiquity.
Vubiquity in Europe is best known for content processing for VoD service, on the back of acquiring the On Demand Group from Seachange International back in 2012. This has grown up on the back of VoD contracts for companies like Virgin Media in the UK, initially distributing Sony and Disney movie content.
Since its acquisition and merger into Avail TVN, followed by a name change to Vubiquity, this activity has flourished, and now it boasts that it provides more than 28,000 hours of content each month, from over 460 content providers to over 100 million households via 550 service providers.
Avail-TVN had grown up partly doing the same thing but also offering VoD encoding, metadata management, TV Everywhere authentication services, advanced advertising insertion and data analytics, all associated with on demand content.
BDI is a 50 man business, effectively an OTT start up inside Deutsche Telekom and we first came across it when it signed a deal with Danish IP multicasting specialist Octoshape, who’s claim to fame is to encapsulate Adaptive Bit Rate streams and broadcast (rather than unicast) them reliably, even across networks which do not have multicast routers, to any device in the world.
In June 2013 BDI signed with Octoshape to offer a new service called LiveStream Perform using UDP as the core communications protocol and offering some patented ‘throughput optimization’ technologies.
It’s next visible step was to take on Saffron Digital’s end to end OTT technology in 2013, when it signed its first deals. Saffron is perhaps best known for its successes in delivering OTT video for Samsung and HTC to their smart TVs, and for building the Japanese KDDI OTT video system. More recently it has built an OTT service for French supermarket chain Carrefour based on a new version of its software that runs entirely in the cloud. It offers workflow, customer management, store front, video encoding, DRM and User Interface design and management and provides software to plug into back end processes, such as billing.
When you add these two clusters of services together – Saffron and Vubiquity – you get a pretty wide spread of capability from content preparation and delivery through ingest, right the way out to analytics, making BDI a genuine fast route to market for any video provider.
Karim El-Khazen, VP of BDI told us this week was, “This the international wholesale technology arm of Deutsche Telkom. We work with broadcasters and TV companies anywhere and so far we have built up 9 international clients, including some in Pakistan and Dubai. We have one global broadcaster already which has 12 TV channels. What we are building is an eco-system of partners to deliver VoD, Live TV, CDN optimization.”
BDI has offices in Germany, Budapest and Madrid and last May it added Paris based analytics firm Cedexis to the list. Cedexis offers CDN performance analyzers, cloud platform performance monitoring software and SLA monitoring tools. BDI also has a deal with CDN player Edgecast and of course with its own parent network Deutsche Telekom.
The main contribution to all of this from Vubiquity will be adding the initial VoD content delivery and licensing so that more or less any broadcasters can turn to BDI and create a cloud service from scratch in something like 3 months, including content.
BDI calls this service VideoRise and it had its first customer in November 2013 with the launch of a subscription VoD offering by Teleboy of Switzerland, complementing its live streaming service. Teleboy VoD was available on iPhone, iPad, and the Web with more than 2,500 hours of premium television content all based on using Saffron Digital’s multiscreen technology.
In February this year BDI announced myKIDIO, an OTT service for accessing video and audio books from smartphones, tablets or via BMW’s ConnectedDrive. This too was built around VideoRise with most of the components from Saffron Digital. It is, as the name suggests, aimed at children, particularly as passengers in BMW cars fitted with ConnectedDrive, allowing parents to control the app from the front dashboard. It also has a trip monitor made for children that wirelessly transmits information about the journey to the app, the so called “BMW Kids Cockpit”.
Given that BDI is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom it is likely that the DT subsidiaries in other parts of Europe, such as Romania, Croatia, Hungary and Slovakia will all be guided to BDI as one possible rapid route to OTT multiscreen services.
Saffron Digital’s President Jason Keane told us that Saffron and Vubiquity alongside Akamai, plan to push a similar combined service in the US but could not go into detail.
Keane also told us that Teleboy has now shut down its SVoD service in Switzerland, although the original linear OTT offering is still available.