ABOX42 and Zattoo highlight benefits of turnkey approach

TV operators can benefit from adopting turnkey solutions to get services up and running quickly and at a reduced cost, according to ABOX42 and Zattoo. The pair are using IBC to promote a joint solution, and teamed up to discuss operator requirements in a show-floor panel debate yesterday.

Matthias Greve, CEO, ABOX42 said that operators had different types of networks, some multicast enabled and some not, some being one-way and others birectional. They therefore need solutions that takes into account multiple variations in their networks and the flexibility of rights to be distributed over them.

“For operators it is a business decision whether to focus on marketing and preventing churn or becoming a technology company,” said Greve. To make the latter choice takes huge resources, he said.

Greve said that operators now have an opportunity to extend and evolve their services much more quickly than before, avoiding the need for long lead times for new services.

Gernot Jaeger, CEO, Zattoo, speaking on the same panel, said that his company stood squarely behind the turnkey approach to TV projects. Zattoo provides “the engine behind everything”, he said. Operators still have an opportunity to choose a customised front end even though a number may be using the same back-end engine, said Jaeger.

Operators have different rights form market to market so products can be adapted to whether the publisher has the rights to content in a particular market, but with the same underlying architecture supporting their delivery of services, he added.

Jaeger said it makes little sense for operators to work out everything themselves and the growing complexity of content distribution means that even big operators are increasingly looking for turnkey solutions rather than trying to put together their own systems.

He said that using a turnkey solution meanwhile enables small operators not only to keep up with but sometimes to overtake big players that have their own technology divisions.

Jaeger said he believed development cycles would become even shorter in the future.

“Now even the bigger guys are reconsidering having everything in-house,” he said, particularly because the operators are now finding themselves “up against…Netflix.”

ABOX42 and Zattoo are exhibiting at IBC on stand 14.C17