German operator Vodafone Deutschland has launched its new cloud-based multiscreen 4K UHD video service GigaTV on its cable network this week, only slightly behind schedule, built around Cisco’s Infinite Video technology which it launched at IBC 2015.
It was almost two years to the day when Kabel Deutschland, prior to the Vodafone rebrand, handed US OTT video technology firm Kaltura its first European tier one installation, and it was a rush job, put together in three months, and that was one of the key criteria in the RFP.
GigaTV has been a less hurried project, with the initial plans first intimated two years ago, and only seeping out into public view early last year, but the fact is that it could not afford to be a rush job. After all, it has to compete with Liberty Global’s Horizon platform through its German operation Unitymedia – a set top and UI system which was tirelessly perfected over more than four years and finally rolled out in Germany in September 2013. Cisco was also involved in the Horizon system, supplying its Mediahighway middleware in set tops and SnowFlake UI.
This was back when nothing like Horizon had ever been done before, and here we are almost 6 years since it was first installed in the Netherlands, in a position where the technology vendors have applied these same learned skills to other projects and are now far more advanced – resulting in increasingly rapid deployments of TV services.
GigaTV runs on a Cisco (Technicolor) set top with 1TB storage, and includes broadcast, on-demand, catch up and time-shift TV, coupled with internet video content, which can be viewed on the TV set and mobile devices within the home. German media company ProSiebenSat.1 is the first official partner for the service, integrating its live TV and VoD streaming offering maxdome into GigaTV, but no Netflix partnership has been mentioned, yet, despite Vodafone partnering Netflix on phones all over Europe.
GigaTV and the 1TB UHD set top costs €14.99 a month for cable subscribers, providing 120 channels and 55 catch up services, plus 3,000 VoD titles, or €19.99 a month for additional HD channels, whereas the multiscreen only version with 47 channels is available for a monthly fee of €9.99 to non-cable subscribers, and Vodafone plans to expand GigaTV to its non-cable broadband customers in the future.
Cisco had gone on record saying it would work alongside Kaltura for the GigaTV project, to combine search, recommendation and personalization for multiscreen. Cisco tends to use recommendation software from UK player ThinkAnalytics when it does this kind of work, but Kaltura has teamed up with US firm Iris.TV to provide recommendations, so Vodafone Deutschland may have switched to that.
Vodafone in Europe operates almost as if it were several separate companies and rarely reaches a consensus on how to go about anything except its core cellular technology.
The technology details behind GigaTV and Cisco’s Infinite Video are familiarly minimal, but we presume this is an amalgamation of old Cisco products, and we know it has a collaboration deal with Ericsson, meaning it could be using its Envivio encoding technology, although we believe Kabel Deutschland installed Harmonic encoders. When we find out we will let you know.
Ericsson could have been tapped for its BSS (Business Support Systems) expertise, however, Cisco recently opted for a cloud-based subscriber management system from Evergent Technologies instead of Ericsson, and this already has some impressive deployments in 150 countries. Cisco says its Infinite Video platform accommodates multi-DRM security.
Cisco and Vodafone Deutschland claim the service is the industry’s first comprehensive video hub for the home, but Liberty Global might have something to say about that. As will third-placed German cable operator Tele Columbus which launched its 4K hybrid IP video service AdvanceTV last month – a multiscreen project headed up by Canadian IPTV software house Espial and naturally including Cisco conditional access.
What was installed in the 2015 Kabel Deutschland multiscreen system was a combination of Kaltura home grown technology and Tvinci’s, the Israeli company it acquired in the first half of 2014, which had by far the most success in OTT video services in and around Europe up until that time.
Germany is a market dominated by broadcast OTT catch-up services, which are somewhat holding the TV Everywhere and SVoD boom at bay. This is because Germany was an early adopter of HbbTV which has a high penetration today.
Vodafone added over 1 million broadband lines in 2016 to reach 13 million in Europe, but it lost almost 1 million mobile clients, excluding those it sold off in the Netherlands. The operator is no longer breaking out its TV customers in detail, but it said that it now has 9.7 million TV customers, a rise of 104,000 from the third quarter to fourth quarter last year. Revenue was down to £13.69 billion ($17 billion) in the quarter from £14.25 million ($17.7 billion) for this time last year.