OSN ready to play

Pay TV operator OSN has once again upped the ante in the Middle East broadcast industry with the rollout of OSN Play, the region’s first online TV platform, enabling subscribers to watch select premium content over the internet on a variety of devices. The rollout is initially restricted to laptops and desktops and is free-of-charge to subscribers. The service will become available over the course of this year on iOS systems, Smart TV, Android tablets, mobile devices and game consoles. OSN worked closely with UK-based systems integrator KIT Digital to develop the platform and infrastructure for the OTT (over-the-top) rollout.

Emad Morcos, vice president of strategic and business development of the network’s third party channels, including Disney and Discovery channels, oversaw the new launch.

“Consumption of TV has changed dramatically across the world and in the Middle East, we have a huge youth population. This is compounded by the rollout of broadband in the region meaning that download activity is on the rise and many people are now viewing their content online. We undertook this project to establish a relationship with the younger audience who are downloading content from the web.”

OSN is in the process of negotiating deals with several others players in the market including Smart TV manufacturers and telcos. Three big-hitters in Smart TV manufacturing have been approached, Morcos reveals but declined to divulge names. Likewise, the pay TV operator is talking to telecommunication companies that want to participate in the web space and go beyond search engines.

“We are looking at some potential integration with telcos. There may be viewers who are not our regular customers but want to pay a premium for an individual event that we are broadcasting.”

Systems integrator Kit Digital was selected as the technical development partner for OSN Play after OSN sent out an RFP in April 2011. Nine competitors submitted interest; this then went to four before the final two slugged it for the winning contract. Kit Digital has undertaken similar projects for several broadcasters including Sky in the UK.

“The other competitor operated a cloud system and we run on servers here. We had spent a fortune on eliminating piracy so we didn’t want to expose our content on the cloud. It was about finding the sweet spot in delivering content to subscribers – we weren’t ready to use cloud,” says Morcos.

“Once we had selected our technology partner, Kit Digital came in with a number of approaches and then built on what we had existing, which saved us costs. Additional elements were needed – new servers, firewalls and some of the billing recognition systems needed altering. We also needed some add-ons for pay TV.”

The rollout involved substantial work from the systems integrator’s side.

Dave Berry, VP, Business Development at KIT Digital says such projects “require heavy integration into the client’s infrastructure”.

“When you do that, you have to be extremely sensitive to their day-to-day running operations. The daily heartbeat of OSN’s business must not be disrupted. At the same time, we wanted to bring changes where required into that infrastructure and also build out a new infrastructure to support OTT and then, join them both together. It was a lot of changes in a short space of time whilst also building out and integrating that platform,” he explains.

OSN procured the platform and KIT configured and fleshed it out. It then had to get a deployment process up and running across four environments  including development, testing, staging and production.

“All of this infrastructure had to be put in place and you had to get the processes running between each environment,” explains Berry.

Besides this, KIT’s user interface (UI) team worked to develop and customise the interface and provide multi-lingual support for the service.

“The KIT video platform is sort of the backbone but it is heavily customised for each customer as each has their own brand and unique features that they will want, to engage with their client base.

Don’t also forget that each customer has their own unique in-house systems with which we will have to integrate the platform. In the case of OSN, we had to tie it in with their programme management systems and provide additional features that they wanted for the future,” explains Berry.

From a content point of view as well, it meant OSN would have to seek permission and rights to broadcast the content on each specific device.

“We had to present the technology to the studios and gain approval for each device on which we would provide the service,” explains Morcos.

From a content point of view as well, it meant OSN would have to seek permission and rights to broadcast the content on each specific device.

“We had to present the technology to the studios and gain approval for each device on which we would provide the service,” explains Morcos.

Presently, the content is only available to those who subscribe directly to OSN and is geo-blocked for the 24 countries OSN broadcasts to, but the pay TV operator will eventually look at introducing content that goes beyond the network’s geographic area. Parental control can be leveraged by creating subscription accounts. Households will have access to content on OSN Play through a maximum of two devices.

At present, the content is being broadcast in SD online but Morcos defends this move saying that no local or international service presently offers HD. Moving ahead, the network plans to introduce live streaming through OSN Play by the end of the year.

“It’s all VOD (video on demand) now but we hope to introduce live streaming by the end of 2012. We are also exploring opportunities to work with other broadcasters in the region to look at OSN Play as the default player.

“We have already built the framework and we have looked at some of the best solutions in the world before putting this together so why reinvent the wheel. We have the encryption and the transactional systems and all are fundamental to what we do differently to any other operator,” explains Morcos.

OSN Play is being rolled out in phases across different devices. In the meantime, OSN is already looking at other new projects for 2013-2014. Working with different synergies of the company, the network is talking to global players, Morcos says and advertising streams will be explored “without compromising the smooth viewing experience”.

Box 1

OSN is the first pay TV broadcaster in the region to deploy an online player of this scale, size and complexity. Kit Digital is experienced in delivering VOD platforms and OSN is experienced in content delivery via satellite, and integrating its back-end customer care platform. This ensures a seamless user-experience. 

We set ourselves very high expectations for both deadline and with regards to the user-experience, which had to be simple and elegant, and trigger people to come back to use a very rich media-portal. 

Integration of the existing broadcast and IT systems and workflows with the new OSN Play infrastructure was key to the project and involved a steep learning curve for all involved. In addition, we had to port all of our existing customer-facing online services and the related infrastructure into a newly integrated platform.   

Various teams from across the whole of OSN were involved in the project. OSN Play is hosted within the IT infrastructure, although the content comes from the broadcast environment. A lot of cross-department integration was required to ensure the content delivery to the OSN Play platform worked smoothly and functioned correctly. Rather than create a new department with its own team, resources and equipment, we expanded our current systems to include the new workflows and requirements.

The unique element of this project is that we have the first DVB-quality subtitling features on the Silverlight player. This was developed for OSN Play by Screens and integrated by OSN and Kit Digital into their application to allow our subscriberas to experience the same level of subtitling functionality they currently experience on the OSN STB.

The manner in which we collect real-time data from the various internal/external platforms involved in the delivery from our head office to the customer is also unique in this region. This allows us to analyse the media-consumption behaviour at a very detailed level which, in turn, will help us in many of the business decisions we need to make in the near future. This can range from the type of media-licences to purchase to the order in which we will release new functionality into the OSN Play platform.

Lisa Robinson, head of CA operations, OSN