Econet Media, which serves southern Africa, is to be the recipient of the Judges Prize at IBC 2018 for its initiatives with streaming service Kwesé Play. The IBC 2018 Judges Prize will be presented to Econet Media as part of the awards ceremony on Sunday 15 September at 18:30 in the RAI Auditorium. Kwesé Play […]
Econet Media, which serves southern Africa, is to be the recipient of the Judges Prize at IBC 2018 for its initiatives with streaming service Kwesé Play. The IBC 2018 Judges Prize will be presented to Econet Media as part of the awards ceremony on Sunday 15 September at 18:30 in the RAI Auditorium.
Kwesé Play is a streaming service which is widely available and offers a mix of local and international content, including an exclusive partnership with Netflix. The challenge for Econet Media was to develop a service which provided access across all types of OTT devices, but particularly to mobile devices in a geography in which fixed broadband is very limited. It needed to present this in a form that was accessible, secure to protect the owners of the intellectual property, affordable in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, and practical to use.
Commenting on the innovation, Michael Lumley, Chair of the IBC Judging Panel, said: Kwesé Play is a game-changer, bringing sport and entertainment to viewers in a part of the world which has been hard to serve. In our discussions, we recognised that the way the technology partners had collaborated on this project was innovative and successful, but we also felt that the outcome transcended the technology, delivering social change by connecting local people to global content.
The technology partners that worked with Econet to develop the Kwesé Play platform include Verimatrix for its security technology, AWS Elemental for encoding the content to a single streaming format and DRM, and Roku for developing a player which would interpret this unified stream on any device.
The IBC Awards are highly regarded across the broad sweep of our industry, Lumley added. We are pleased to recognise the social as well as technical importance of this project.
The ceremony, which will also see the IBC International Honour for Excellence presented to a very special guest from Sesame Street, is free to all IBC visitors.
