MOBITV: Leading the Pay TV Transition

Casey Fann, VP of Operations/Professional Services

‘How to build relevance and how to maintain it?’ This question has been troubling cable operators for many years. What makes this dilemma snowball into a massive headache for them is the rising cost associated with maintaining their multi-cast platform. MOBITV enables operators to rapidly launch a branded, thoroughly compliant, fully-featured app-based Pay TV service in a cost-efficient manner. By delivering an agile, SaaS platform, MOBITV allows cable providers to transition from their existing systems to a fully app-based IPTV platform. Operating as an agile shop, the company can create a new release every six-eight weeks from an app-based software development standpoint to update the operator's platform and keep them relevant. Following are the insights shared by Casey Fann, the VP of Operations/ Professional Services of MOBITV.

Please elaborate on the video platform that MOBITV delivers and how does it power a fully IP-based approach?

One of our key differentiators is that we leverage Agile. We consider various organizational elements within one Sprint. The elements are usually determined by customers and are driven by products and operations.

On the operational side, we help operators in reducing the costs by allowing them to directly connect to different locations across the country. This saves them the telco costs incurred due to sending the content to the data center. We assist the operators in designing and implementing the network, which cuts down their need for employing an expert team.

Many players who are transitioning from set-top boxes to an IPTV platform lack the understanding of the underlying technology, and to this end, we invest time with clients during the transition initiations and weekly meetings. This process helps them to understand the underlying transition technique and subsequently, we can initiate the deployment stage. We basically help them plan the implementation and adopt the best practices such that they can generate an effective ROI.

Please provide us with insights into the white-label and end-to-end streaming video solution that MOBITV delivers.

Fueled by frequent qualitative user research, quantitative data analysis, and A/B testing and the clients' feedback, the MOBITV solution is the result of years of fine-tuning and evolution.

Fueled by frequent qualitative user research, quantitative data analysis, A/B testing, and the clients' feedback, the MOBITV solution is the result of years of fine-tuning

The solution delivers highly flexible and performant APIs to power an extensive suite of apps across the most popular platforms. We ensure that the apps available within the platform are updated every six weeks with new features, which allows us to keep the service fresh and marketable for the operators.

Within the platform, a client can use our tool suite to manage users, curate content with our PROMOTIZR tool, customer support, offers and content policies in addition to configuring in and out of engagement campaigns. We can also integrate with their billing, authentication, in home checking and Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) systems, configure policies and brand their apps within 90 days. Further, the platform supports real-time, accurate, relevant, accessible, comprehensible reporting across quality of service and user behavior metrics, and a 24/7 Network Operations Center (NOC), comprehensive user guides, issue tracking, roadmap, and voting, all accessible through a centralized tool.

What are the different deployment models that MOBITV delivers?

MOBITV supports two different deployment models. The first is a managed services model which allows us to handle the operators' content processing, packaging, encryption, and delivery to the customer's network. We use a caching system to make this transition which allows us to minimize the bandwidth costs. Operators don't have to deploy a full-fledged system or a data center and warehouse management, as MOBITV delivers all those elements as a comprehensive service. The elements that the operators have to worry about is billing, level of integration, and inter-connectivity. Through our edge-caching system, the operators are further allowed to keep a constant view on updates to remove incurring costs.

For larger operators, we deliver our second deployment model where we design the architecture to be deployed, provide building material, and partnership with multiple vendors and stacks. This enables us to deliver specifications that an operator needs to support their existing platform. Next, we also assist the operators in system configuration and setup and managing the entire network.

We deliver a true end-to-end SaaS model whether the clients want us to support it through our infrastructure or the pre-existing one.

What does the future hold for your organization? Any footprint expansion plans or platform enhancement strategies that you can shed light upon?

We came from a mobile background and now are establishing ourselves as a key player in the IPTV arena. We believe in bringing novelty on a continual basis with respect to the new trends and technologies rising on the horizon, and our clients' demands. For the future, we will be continually developing our solutions and introduce new service lines according to the needs of the operators.

MOBITV aims to deliver even better low-cost solutions in the near future. Operators look at MOBITV as the experts and want us to stay connected with them to drive down their incurred costs and deployment time.