There wasn’t exactly an explosion of acquisition announcements or major contract wins at this week’s TV Connect tradeshow, left somewhat overshadowed in the wake of NAB, but one company that made a whopping two announcements at the show was UI and OTT app developer Wiztivi. The French firm unveiled the launch of a new app with satellite fleet operator Eutelsat, and also formed a partnership with CMS/CRM company Alpha Networks.
Wiztivi works with telcos to build full UIs for VoD portals, EPGs, replay functionalities, personalized TV channels, app stores, and advertising solutions – based on its HbbTV (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV) and HTML5 framework. It claims to have developed 300 applications for 60 services, which cumulatively rack up 30 million video views every month.
Eutelsat and Wiztivi have worked together to build a smart EPG for mobile devices called Sat.tv, bringing FTA channels to what the pair says is a potential 66 million homes across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East equipped for DTH reception of Eutelsat’s HotBird satellites.
Faultline met with Wiztivi Marketing Manager Cyrille Billon in London, who explained that Wiztivi’s products are sold to broadcasters, operators, and TV and set top manufacturers as white label services, and boasted deployments with SFR in France, Primetime on LG TVs, MTV, Dailymotion, Wyplay, TF1 for Bouygues Telecom, and Eurosport.
Sat.tv is based on Wiztivi’s TimelessTouch HTML5 UI product, to develop front end and back end services, with a back office that enables channels to directly edit the program schedules – with broadcasters including CCTV, Channel One Russia Worldwide, Euronews, France 24, RT, and TV5Monde, among customers of TimelessTouch. Billon said Sat.tv currently hosts some 70 channels, but has the capabilities to increase this to as many as 400 channels. All current customers are based in Europe, aside from those reached via Eutelsat, but Billon said Wiztivi is working on some projects outside of Europe – many companies claim to be expanding outside of Europe, and many struggle to break out.
The EPG interface for Sat.tv is available in five languages (English, French, Russian, Italian, Arabic) and can access program details in up to 40 languages. The new app also has the capability to integrate recommendation software of the broadcaster’s choice, we asked Billon if he could reveal any companies that it had worked with in recommendations, but could only mention French recommendation software company CogniK – which handles the personalized content discovery for the MyMTV music video TV channel, built by Wiztivi.
Wiztivi has also this week combined its TimelessUI product with Alpha Networks’ Tucano CMS/CRM back end software, to offer multiscreen services to pay TV operators and OTT service providers – available on set tops, Android TV, Smart TVs, mobile devices, and desktops. Alpha Networks says Tucano allows an out-of-the-box integration with video infrastructure and metadata providers, and also handles billing services, with an open API interface which allows Wiztivi to handle front end implementations.
The Belgian business Alpha Networks, not to be confused with the giant Taiwanese DMS company of the same name, first caught our eye in 2013 when it put together the OTT video service Snow OTT for KPN in Belgium. Snow OTT was built to run over Belgacom VDSL2 lines, and used the Harmonic ProMedia Live encoders, ProMedia Origin services and Carbon coder to offer transcoding – integrated with the Verimatrix VCAS DRM. Last year, Alpha Networks had a change of strategy and became a product-based company.
The combined offering from Wiztivi with Alpha Networks was announced after our meeting with Wiztivi at TV Connect, so we are awaiting a response on some follow up questions.
“Tucano brings to the market the best user experience and backend features across all device types and all video technologies. This integration, fully based on API, has been done in couple of months, thanks to the complete alignments between the teams and technologies used,” said Guillaume Devezeaux, CTO at Alpha Networks.