Q&A: Gernot Jaeger, Zattoo

Gernot Jaeger, Chief Officer, B2B TV solutions at Zattoo, talks about the disruptive TV solution Salt has introduced in Switzerland with Zattoo and Apple

What are the cornerstones of the TV service that Zattoo implemented together with Apple for Swiss Service provider Salt?
Zattoo has been operating a leading end-to-end white label TV and OTT platform for many years. This platform has now been leveraged to implement the new service for Salt – this time in close co-operation with Apple. As a result, for the first time outside of the US, Apple TV has been made the central TV device, even with an operator login. This means that the consumer does not even have to enter complicated login credentials but can start using the service right away.

The entire service is nevertheless of course a multiscreen service, i.e. it comes with apps for mobile devices (iOS, Android) and browser-based access. The service is deeply integrated across all these devices and gives access to the full feature set in all use cases. This of course includes live TV in SD, HD and soon 4K, but also non-linear features such as live-pause, seven day catch-up or replay TV, VOD and a cloud based personal video recorder for all customers.

In this service setup, Zattoo hosts, manages and provides the entire TV service end-to-end. Salt leverages its own network, thus ensuring the quality of the customer experience with their own infrastructure and service orientation. This combined with the great product that Apple provides, we can make a cutting edge TV and entertainment experience become reality.

This service and this experience then enables Salt to market its TV offerings comprising various product bundles, thus raising ARPU, retaining existing customers and attracting new ones.

What makes the solution ‘disruptive’ and what makes this unique outside the US?
Zattoo is the first end-to-end platform to partner with Apple leveraging the new Apple TV 4K Box as a set-top box. What makes it disruptive is the fact, that Salt does not deploy a classical set-top box anymore but fully relies on the Apple TV Box. Furthermore, it is the first TV service outside the US where Apple allows the automatic installation of the Salt TV application for the Apple TV 4K Box as well as for other iOS devices using operator login.

Thus, Salt customers do not have to enter any login data and can easily switch between Salt TV and Salt Video. This was implemented by Zattoo in a very short time-frame and was only possible with the strong support of Apple.

How does Salt benefit from using Zattoo’s platform?
First of all, we are able to leverage a market proven, standard setting, fully (geo-) redundant platform. This is an approach that is completely different from starting from scratch by integrating various vendors and components into something that will hopefully work and perform. In other words: we are able to provide a ready-for-market product which can be heavily adapted and customised to the needs of an operator, in this case Salt. It comes with a proven track record, short time to market, operator grade availability and cost efficiency. On top of this, we guarantee ongoing further developments of the entire IPTV solution – we call this the Zattoo ‘Evergreening Roadmap’.

How has the implementation been received in the Swiss market?
Besides a tremendous response in the national and international media, new and existing customers reward the new Salt IPTV offer with sales figures even better than expected. This makes us very happy. And we are of course also happy to see that there are many other operators in Europe, the US and Asia showing increased interest in the Zattoo platform and in the disruptive service we built around Apple TV.

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This Q&A is sponsored content