44 OTT TV FILES Android TV
home screen and sceptical of Google’s true intentions around access to user and advertiser data. In what was presumably one of the most hard won but brilliant boardroom victories in the company’s history, Google came back in 2016 with a revised offer that addressed these issues. Sascha Prüter, the former head of product for Android TV, who is now chief product officer at OTT software provider Vewd, characterises Google’s change as an evolution. “Google was initially focused on OTT and addressing the smart TV market, with some success. To have tried to address the operator market at full speed would have become a capacity problem,” says Prüter, who worked directly with smart TV manufacturers, OTT providers and pay TV operators to help establish the platform globally. “Between 2014 and 2016, Google took time to focus on which policy framework would work for both Google and operators.” Perhaps Google’s core insight was to approach pay TV from a mobile OS perspective. The mobile industry being far bigger than TV, of course.
“The lack of functionality in the existing ecosystem of pay TV middleware was keeping second- and third-tier operators from getting a solution off the ground quickly,” Prüter says. “The big advantage of Android TV is that these operators are now able to call on a huge existing ecosystem of chipset manufacturers, content management systems and UI navigation developers. These suppliers can use the same technology they already built for mobile and quickly adapt it for TV, so there’s an immediate cost saving.” Blickensdörfer agrees: “The operator gets much more flexibility and greatly enhanced capabilities for branding. Android is by far the most used development platform in the world, with endless tools, libraries and frameworks you can cost effectively leverage. You can’t do this with a proprietary solution, making Operator Tier a game changer for service providers.” Nor did Google position Android TV as competition for the end-to-end platforms developed by companies who were dominating that space then, such as Cisco, Ericsson or Alcatel.
“Android TV is essentially an application framework for enabling development, which made it easier for other pay TV middleware providers to adopt it, because they didn’t see it as a threat,” Prüter says. SPECIALIST INTEGRATION Operator Tier is deliberately not a complete solution. There are many aspects of Android-based integrations the operator has to understand and manage. “The function of the middleware in an Android platform is significantly different than in traditional deployments,” explains Blickensdörfer. “The Android TV platform itself does a lot of the middleware’s ‘old’ job in that the Android OS enables many parts of the desired features set.” There are many things to orchestrate, from how to correctly integrate the Play Store and Google Assistant, to how to comply with all Google’s style guidelines for the remote control, such as the keys on the handset to output, and for the user interface. There is integration with the player to manage, and you need to ensure complete interoperability with all back-office functions. UI performance and optimisation are critical, whether using IPTV/OTT/DVB. And it all has to reliably function with DRM/conditional access. Operators wanting to integrate OTT and broadcast in the set-top box will need many of these additional components and functionality, which is where providers like 3SS, Technicolor, Vewd, Accedo, Synamedia, Amino and others come in. The added value Vewd OS provides, for example, is both turnkey experience and extensive product modules that adhere to core Android TV requirements. This, says Prüter, includes the integration of different regional standards and marrying hybrid linear TV scheduled with broadband on-demand (as with Europe’s HbbTV smart TV platform). Vewd OS augments the platform’s system experience, making it possible for operators to enable live A/B testing or to promote different content on the home screen each week. Vewd also provides back-end systems for management of promotions, app integration, ad insertions and so on. “What is good for the market is that operators are becoming more educated about middleware, and they are beginning to realise not all middleware is the same,” says Blickensdörfer. “In fact, the market is waiting for more middleware to emerge that has the robustness to support Android TV, particularly for projects based on set-top boxes and PVR platforms.”
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