thePlatform unveils next-gen TV Everywhere suite for TV service providers

White-label video publishing company and pioneer in TVE services, thePlatform today announced an advanced new suite of features, enabling operators to create new and highly tailored content packages and promotions. The new features enable pay TV providers to reinforce and extend the value of their current TV subscription packages across more devices.

“TV operators are seeking ways to unlock the potential of larger content libraries, extend the value of their subscriptions, and create tailored viewing experiences for their customers,” said Ian Blaine, CEO and co-founder of thePlatform. “Our new TV Everywhere features provide powerful tools to make that possible. With the challenge of authentication largely behind us, and more content available than ever before, the industry can shift to creating even more customized entertainment packages. These dynamic new mpx tools enable operators to create their own criteria for grouping content and subscribers — from history buffs to fans of a particular series — and will create innovative marketing opportunities.”

At the core of the suite are two new features of thePlatform’s mpx video publishing system, Subscription Packages and Subscriber Groups, which can be variously combined to create entirely new entertainment experiences for consumers. Subscription Packages are collections of content, defined by the operators, such as those that mirror their basic, extended, or premium channel TV line ups, which can be viewed on devices beyond TVs. thePlatform’s new TVE features allow operators to create highly customized extras or subgroups of content packages around genres, TV series, actors, holidays, and much more. These extra content packages can draw from much larger content catalogs than are currently available on linear TV or video-on-demand (VOD) catalogs, in order to be viewed on tablets, PCs, or other IP-connected devices.

Subscriber Groups enable operators to segment customers, based on a wide range of operator-defined filters, such as their paid TV subscription package, geography, acceptable content rating, device type, content viewing preferences, and more. Within thePlatform’s system, subscribers can belong to multiple Subscriber Groups, and can be offered a variety of Subscription Packages to create highly tailored offerings. Both new features are now available for free to mpx customers, and are in early trials with multiple TV operators around the globe.

The key technical underpinning for today’s announcement stems from thePlatform’s advancements with metadata management. Metadata has historically been used to enable better content discovery, search and recommendations. Now, operators will be able to leverage metadata to set new business policies that take advantage of their vast content libraries, to create better services for their subscribers.

thePlatform’s mpx system includes a central repository for metadata surrounding a video including categories, keywords, tags, asset types and more. This collection of data enables operators to easily create dynamic filters via mpx’s intuitive console to create any combination of Subscription Package. Once a package is defined, specific viewing rights can be assigned with enforcement by stream encryption or a DRM such as Microsoft PlayReady or Adobe Flash Access. This same repository enabled thePlatform to improve the efficiency of its previous TVE solutions for operators. For example, thePlatform’s TVE solutions previously relied on a series of manual channel mapping exercises with linear TV channels, which can now be streamlined within mpx using metadata policies.