How to build an award-winning TV platform?

Operators, ISPs and others stand in local competition with telco incumbents. Especially in Europe, this often takes them into a commercial squeeze. Promises of abstract “innovation” and hollow “best-of-breed” simply do not cut it anymore in this landscape. Neither does mere stacking-up of technology.

Find out, what we recommend!

A European wake-up

If you are Swedish, Belgian or Dutch you may have recently noted our social and podcast ads. This is because our research shows that we can fill a gap in these countries with fundamentally comparable market conditions in telco, Internet and TV markets.

Wait a minute! Mobile contracts, fixed and broadband access at different prices and stages of digitalization - how can these markets be the same?

An admittedly controversial view. But let's have a closer look:

Beyond patchworks of regulation, content and viewer preferences, one finds quite similar stand-offs between operators, ISPs, local energy providers or housing companies and local incumbents:

Subscribers, meanwhile, long for everything boosting their customer experience. All while consuming ever bigger quantities of content at increasing demand for bandwidth, device mobility and unbundled play. And all while expecting to be able to switch between or even stack individual or aggregated TV offerings.

Experience beats best-of-breed

This evidently creates an immense price sensitivity towards those able to build TV platform technology for them: Best–of-breed here means that components from different suppliers are bought at lowest price vs. performance. Today. But what about the inevitable evolution of tech development and the innovation cycles that follow? Even assuming that the ideal suppliers in this scenario stay on top of this, the need to react to diverging compatibility among heterogeneous frontend, middleware and backend components grows - causing original price calculations to easily evaporate. Here, experience in building integrated and scalable approaches in much more calculable cost development beats best-of-breed.

TV-as-a-service providers that field the long and commercially adept experience needed for this are still a rarity - almost one and a half decades after the IPTV revolution started. Yet, it is especially medium-sized and runner-up telco players in tough local competition who need it.

Zattoo’s B2B business was born in this environment as early as 2012, operating first in Switzerland, then Germany, Austria and today an ever faster growing number of European markets from Ireland over Monaco to Malta and Cyprus. Already before Youtube was founded, we learned how to build efficient, carrier-grade TV in a way that today marks out two of our customers - besides over 30 others across Europe - as winners of prestigious awards across almost every marker of platform, service and delivery quality.

Outclassing their incumbents and other competitors. Making a distinct stand in a highly competitive market that long regarded them as second class. Yet always with the help of Zattoo towards a class-act subscriber experience.

That's streamwork!

But what are the distinct technological steps towards this, what is the strategic homework to be done and what should be brought on its way already as this happens to load such a platform with the things that glue subscribers?

Let us show you at IBC and find out more here!

Hands-on, not glitter!

Hanns Schempp

Head of Marketing TVP, Zattoo