Norigin Media announced a deal recently with TV Sumo, the streaming service from Norwegian broadcaster TV2, to build and launch new TV applications across select large-screen devices. An Oslo-based company that offers streaming TV tech solutions, Norigin brings to its work an interesting awareness of both the demands of television and the trends of modern software development.
Norigin’s engagement with open source software is one differentiator. According to Norigin COO Espen Erikstad, who oversees the company’s technology initiatives, its applications development framework is a unique combination of both in-house built components and open-source frameworks, including React and Redux. Both are JavaScript libraries; React is used for building user interfaces (UIs) and Redux, for maintaining application state.
As often happens with open source, users in turn reciprocate. In June, Norigin announced that it was contributing parts of its TV app framework to the open source community, “in an effort to reduce fragmentation and encourage reuse of quality code.” In particular, it published on Github the documentation for a project on spatial navigation for remote controls on Smart TVs.
Norigin also touts its “one codebase” and “micro modular” approach. This enables them to build applications once and deploy them natively – and quickly – on every device, using a productised SDK; and to take advantage of a large repository of video-specific UI and user experience (UX) components.
Erikstad said the modular approach allows them to use best-of-breed technologies for the front-end stack and replace parts when new and better solutions come to market, similar to how microservices work. Indeed, as it happens, the Norigin team builds their solutions with microservices and relies heavily on containers, which allows for deployment in any public or private clouds.
Amidst the savvy coding, what also distinguishes Norigin is its focus on the TV domain. “Building a cross-device application is not rocket science, but when you need to support advanced features such as encrypted and DRM-protected content, subtitles, and integration with tracking and statistical solutions across a wide range of devices, developers will soon face major challenges,” Erikstad said. “These are some of the problems our solution solves.”
On another TV-related note, Norigin announced in July that it had been selected to build out the front-end for a new streaming service by Nenda, a company aiming to disrupt the hospitality TV market. In particular, Norigin was tasked with developing Nenda’s UI, including apps for AndroidTV, Samsung Tizen and WebOS, as well as adaptations and integrations with the backend and the hotels’ systems.
“We are basically developing an OTT service similar to what Pay TV operators offer and enable this for hotel guests,” Erikstad said. “It has proven to be a perfect fit.”
In addition to TV apps, Norigin also offers a TV hosting and transcoding platform. In September 2018, Get, a leading cable company in Norway, announced that it had chosen Norigin to manage its OTT streaming service in Scandinavia and had migrated all its linear TV channels from Amazon’s AWS to the Norigin Cloudncoder platform.
