A curious press release came ours and everybody’s way this week, with Intertrust claiming a major victory with a new service in Italy, called Tivùon. Technically this has been in place for about two and a half years, but since most news on it was written in Italian, it took us a few moments to sort out precisely what has happened.
Tivùon was created to give OTT access to the broadcast TV companies which put together TiVu Sat, the free satellite in Italy, a bit like Freesat and other European offerings. But initially Tivùon was mostly paid premium content and is suddenly more like YouView or HbbTV in the UK, Germany and France.
Specifically, it did not have free to air catch up TV, and now it has been added. The question is why now? There are of course two obvious answers, one is that Vivendi recently took over control of Mediaset Premium, and so Mediaset, the driving force behind Tivu and Tivùon, has less of a stake in keeping this a format for selling premium TV programming, because that just helps Sky Italia. The second is that Italy is trying to adjust to an OTT world that includes Netflix, something announced in October and now in full swing.
Tivùon can be accessed on the right MHP set top box by tuning to the TV channels of RAI, Mediaset, and La7 (once Telecom Italia owned) and pressing the green button. Most of the set tops that can currently do this are made by Humax, with the odd device from ADB and SagemCom. But this is also about to change and HbbTV devices are being lined up at some future point, so that TV manufacturers such as LG and Samsung can simply divert devices made for Germany, France and Spain and sell them in Italy, and access the broadcast broadband format, without MHP.
Essentially this service solves the issue of fragmentation, in which users have to switch between different applications when searching for content – whereas Tivùon is a dedicated platform that combines on-demand content from various broadcasters into a single service.
We have seen in regions such as Germany that broadcast catch-up services via HbbTV are the dominant go-to source for viewing OTT content, for both live and on-demand (see our recent report), and by combining content from multiple broadcasters onto one free service, this has the potential for huge widespread uptake in Italy. And the monetization opportunities are even greater when coupled with a premium paid offering on top of this, as German broadcaster RTL offers.
Tivùon delivers free catch up programming from the last 7 days to connected TVs and set tops, and now it aims to reach 3 million homes in Italy by the end of this year. We’ll see. The free satellite TV platform Tivùsat, only reaches some 2.2 million households at present.
Tivùon is built using open standards technologies MHP, DASH, CENC and the proprietary DRM Marlin from Intertrust, but it says in 2017 it will adopt HbbTV, presumably with Marlin for a DRM.
The Marlin DRM was created in 2005 by Intertrust, Panasonic, Phillips, Samsung, and Sony. ExpressPlay using Marlin claims it is the leading DRM in the Chinese market. Intertrust says its Seacert certificate authority also provides Tivù with root key services for authentication and regionalization.
Telecom Italia’s TV platform Timvision offers a hybrid internet-connected DVB-T2 Android set top, which can be rented for €2 per month or purchased for €109. In November 2015 it was reported that RAI was planning to roll out its own SVoD service, but this now looks like it will replace it.