Tele Columbus Blends OTT with TV

Tele Columbus, the German MSO with about 3.6 million cable-connected homes, has introduced “advanceTV,” a multiscreen pay TV offering that will integrate over-the-top video, support 4K video and rely on RDK-based boxes from Humax with Espial’s ‘G4” client.

Espial, which is also baking in its cloud-based Media Services Platform, also served as the master system integrator for the platform, which is also powered by products from Cisco Systems, Verimatrix, and Elemental Technologies (now part of Amazon Web Services).

Update: Also tied to the advanceTV project is Metrological, which is helping to deliver several apps at launch, including Vimeo, Flickr, DailyMotion, Google Maps, wetter.com, Wikipedia, Deezer, TuneIn, and Deutsche Welle, among others. 

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advanceTV, a service that will become available in January 2017, will be integrated with maxdome, one of Germany’s top SVOD-OTT services, and tie in Web apps. The service’s new UI provides integrated access across the MSO’s live TV and VOD services, DVR recordings, and maxdome library.

Tele Columbus, which acquired PrimaCom last year, introduced the new offering Monday (Dec. 5) at a media event in Berlin.

Tele Columbus’s plan is to migrate to the new platform by making advanceTV available to all new customers and introduce campaigns aimed at upgrading legacy video subs to the new platform.

Tele Columbus is also the third European MSO in Europe to implement the Reference Design Kit (RDK), the preintegrated software platform for video and broadband gateways being managed by Comcast, Liberty Global and Charter Communications (via its acquisition of Time Warner Cable).  In Europe, Liberty Global is also deploying RDK, as is NOS of Portugal, which is also working with Espial. Tele Columbus’s rollout will include full unicast support of DVB-C

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