YouSee planning out-of-home TV, full off-net offering

Danish cable operator YouSee aims to launch a service allowing access to content outside the home later this year and is also planning to launch a full off-network subscription service.

Speaking at the Connected TV World Summit yesterday, Anders Blauenfeldt, senior vice-president, development at YouSee, said YouSee was hoping to provide access to content outside the home later this year. “There are content restrictions on that and some capacity restrictions but that is a focus for us,” he said.

Blauenfeldt said obtaining rights for delivery outside the home was complex, and that YouSee would probably have to limit the service to a certain amount of concurrent streams on a certain number of devices. However, he said the company required the same range content providers on its existing offering to be on board.

Blauenfeldt said the company also plans to launch a full off-network subscription TV service later this year, complementing its existing off-net video-on-demand offering.

YouSee’s existing OTT offering within the home is available without the need for log-in, with the server able to identify subscribers via their IP addresses. “This is important for the customer experience,” said Blauenfeldt. The company started out offering a product for PCs via a dedicated website, yousee.tv, and complemented this with the launch of a dedicated player last year.

The company added an HD version this year for some channels, offering 2.5Mbps instead of the normal 1.2Mbps. The service is Flash based and is available across Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

YouSee offers unencrypted basic digital TV services over its cable network and only about 10% of its base takes its set-top box offering. Therefore, said Blauenfeldt, it was likely that tablets and other non-TV devices would become the prime distribution devices for its video-on-demand and other advanced services.