ACCESS Europe

2017 was a great year for ACCESS. The industry has finally started to recognise that it needs to adopt a unified approach to connected entertainment, by ensuring that consumers can access all of their content via a single application from any device (including inside the car!). ACCESS has been at the forefront of this multiscreen revolution, which is exemplified by our collaborations with DTVKit, Foxxum, Hisense, JVC KENWOOD, Nintendo, Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio) and Zenterio.

We kicked off the year with the announcement that Jio had deployed ACCESS Twine™ to power its multiscreen service, targeting 100 million subscribers across India. As well as providing access to Jio’s own branded content (available in the cloud), the service incorporates the user’s own personal library and a full range of external sources such as YouTube, Dropbox, Google Drive and social media content in and out of the home. We always knew that we were breaking new ground with Jio, but it was fantastic to have our work recognised through two leading industry accolades: the ‘Multiscreen TV Award’ at the Content Innovation Awards, and a CSI Award for ‘Best TV Everywhere or Multi-screen Video’.

However, Jio was just the first in a number of milestones that we announced in this ground-breaking year. In March, Nintendo extended our long-standing partnership by selecting NetFront™ Browser for its new Nintendo Switch™ game console – the seventh model to use the ACCESS NetFront Browser series. Our family of browsers also found a home with Hisense, who deployed NetFront™ Browser BE to power its new 4K TV models and offer advanced web viewing on large high-definition screens.

We are strong believers in the use of open standards and the role they will play in transforming the industry – and we showed it once again at IBC, where we showcased some results of our ongoing partnership with Zenterio to provide a seamless experience across all screens for a range of tier 1 operators. The big news for us at the show was our brand new collaboration with DTVKit to offer open standards-based solutions to the connected entertainment industry for all kinds of services. The results of these two collaborations will help operators to differentiate themselves by deploying next generation, open-standard based multiscreen services in a market that is becoming increasingly crowded.

While we have celebrated some strong successes in the home entertainment industry, consumers now want to access content both in and out of the home. Moving forward, the connected car will become an extension of our home entertainment and we are already starting to join the dots between the two with our technologies. For example, JVC KENWOOD uses our NetFront™ Browser NX for its custom in-vehicle device, which can be deployed by car manufacturers as part of their in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. The IVI market will keep evolving and we have big ambitions for 2018, which you can discover in an eBook available for download on our website.

We look forward to continuing the transformation of the connected entertainment industry in 2018, with new partners and stronger ties with everyone who has supported us along the way. We’ll be attending the GENIVI reception at CES in January, so please get in touch if you would like to meet us at the show. Until then, from the entire ACCESS team and myself – have a wonderful time over this festive season.

At IBC 2017, multiscreen and TV Everywhere were some of the most talked about topics, although most companies in the industry are still looking for ways to address fast evolving consumer demand for content everywhere, at all times and on all platforms.

Since then, it’s become increasingly clear the industry needs to welcoming a new era of multiscreen that blurs the lines between the operator’s content catalogue, the subscriber’s personal library and external User Generated Content hosted on social media and YouTube. This is part of the reason we left the Content Innovation Awards ceremony on October 15 with ‘The Multiscreen Award’ – exactly one month after we brought home a CSI award for ‘Best TV Everywhere or multi-screen video’ for the deployment of ACCESS Twine™ for Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio)’s Jio Lifestyle service.

What is so different about this deployment, compared to all the multiscreen services out there?
Traditionally, multiscreen services have been confined to the operator’s own content. This results in end users having to remember which content to access from each service and device that they use to watch video. This fragmented experience is no longer valid as consumers expect easy access to all content everywhere and at all times – instead, operators today need to offer a one-stop solution for content consumption.

In addition, the mobile device is now the first screen for many consumers in the world. If we look specifically at India, the world’s second biggest smartphone country with 220 million users and 75% of Internet browsing carried out via mobile devices, broadcasters and content owners would struggle to enter the market via the big screen. While India is one of the world’ biggest – and mainly untapped – market, this move towards more mobile-friendly services is also present in the rest of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

However, the operator headache doesn’t end with devices: consumers also want to be able to store and share their personal content with friends and family. To date, the challenge of meeting this consumer demand has been considered too complex to solve due the plethora of content sources vying for the consumer’s attention and a lack of robust methods to ensure seamless remote access to content.

Jio proved that these challenges could be overcome by providing its 100 million (and counting!) subscribers with a single sign-on to access premium content, store and share personal content and external sources such as YouTube, Dropbox and social media platforms. To do so, the operator used our ACCESS Twine™ 360° smart media platform for operators and content owners.

Through ACCESS Twine™, consumers can access the operator’s and personal content from set-top boxes, Android, iOS, Mac and Windows-powered devices both in-home and remotely out of the home. This is complemented by providing access to external sources such as Dropbox, Google Drive, YouTube, and social media platforms via the Jio User Interface. This way, subscribers experience a single user interface catering for all their needs.

Using the single service approach provided by ACCESS Twine™, operators such as Jio can also better understand the end-user needs and habits through a number of modules, including:

• Remote Access to content at home
• Aggregated content and search
• “Follow-me” functionality, enabling consumers to continue watching from where they left off on another device.

By launching a single service that provides access for all media consumption to its subscribers managed by ACCESS Twine™, Jio has demonstrated that there are easy, robust ways to combine a branded content catalogue with the consumer’s personal content stored in the cloud and external sources – without ever risking losing eyeballs to the competition.

Jio is a first mover in an emerging market. However, operators in mature, highly sophisticated regions can also take note of this creative approach to multiscreen to develop the next generation of multiscreen services. In the future, content, devices and sources will all be merged for the consumer – creating an opportunity for operators to regain the viewer’s undivided attention and trust.

Soon, even more devices will enter the multiscreen mix – from the connected car to IoT enabled screens – and operators need to get ready for this evolution. Winning the Content Innovation and CSI awards enables us to show that there is more to multiscreen than simply enabling media sharing between devices. As we prepare for a more integrated future, we are proud to show the way to the next stop in the multiscreen journey to the industry.

This year’s IBC Show clearly demonstrated the critical need to securely integrate IoT with the broadcast world: from the IoT solution and chipset combinations, to fitting multiple services together for efficiency purposes − everyone needs to have IoT integrated with their broadcast stack and do it without compromising the consumer experience.

In the multiscreen world, integration means combining a variety of platforms, ensuring better delivery across multiple devices and securing it all to comply with the studios’ requirement for content protection.

This notion of ‘bringing it all together’ is fantastic for us as two years ago we innovatively launched ACCESS Twine™ as a multiscreen management platform. Since then, the market has evolved and our platform has expanded to become a 360° smart media platform for operators and content owners. This means that customers and consumers powered by our platform are now able to process content across even more devices – from the living room to the connected car and the Internet of Things – while collating multiple content sources together.

Our deployment for Reliance Jio Infocomm’s multiscreen serice, which targets 100 million consumers across India is an exciting proof point for this concept. A truly groundbreaking development, the service was recognised through us winning the ‘Best TV Everywhere or multi-screen video’ at this year’s CSI Awards, which took place on September 15.

As strong believers in the importance of sharing knowledge and insight, we also took part in the “Service design considerations for the multi-screen OTT world” panel discussion in the Content Everywhere Hub on September 17. If you missed the session, it is available to watch on VOD by following this link.

Finally, we would like to thank our partners for enabling us to make the show such a success. We have expanded on our partnerships through:

• The start of our relationship with DTVKit to reduce development time with pre-integrated Chromium browsers and DVB components for HbbTV and HTML5 connected applications
• A new white paper entitled “Multiscreen in 2017: delivering best-in-class experiences across all devices”, which is downloadable from our website, and includes insight from Verimatrix
• A stronger partnership with Zenterio to offer turnkey multiscreen solutions to tier 1 operators in Europe such as Deutsche Telekom, Hrvatski Telekom, OTE Group and M7 Group.

As the convergence between the media, automotive and IoT industries accelerates and becomes more tangible, we look forward to our products and solutions acting as a connectivity hub increasing consumer usability and operator profitability.