IBC365 Q&A with Metrological CEO Jeroen Ghijsen: making it possible to integrate premium OTT services into a unified user experience.

Based in Rotterdam, Metrological helps MVPDs to embrace OTT programming apps instead of being afraid of eroding customer loyalty.

What is new in the Over The Top and app space?

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Jeroen Ghijsen, Chief Executive Officer, Metrological

Unification of content into the guide is more important than ever. We are seeing that multichannel video programme distributors (MVPDs) that eliminate the silos of individual apps and bring them into the guide have customers with much higher key performance indicators (KPIs). This unification allows MVPDs to simultaneously satisfy both the younger, OTT consuming market and the traditional pay TV subscriber. Integrating all content in one guide offers the added benefit of being able to enhance the customer user experience through new functionality such as universal search, voice control, IoT integration, integrated billing and contextualisation for better recommendations across all content sources.

What do you think are the key developments in, or threats to, the OTT and TV app market sector at the current time?

At Metrological we are very excited about the technological strides of the last 12 months that now make it possible to integrate premium OTT services into a unified user experience, like in the MVPD’s guide. Our Application Platform in combination with the open source WPE browser can now support premium OTT services and the MVPDs UI that run mainly in the cloud as an alternative to native app deployment.

”Attendees should come see for themselves that the traditional technological barriers to OTT have been eliminated”

It requires less memory and other resources showing a similar or better visual fidelity and graphics performance – until now only reserved for native deployed apps. With our hybrid architecture we are now able to bring full support for quick on-boarding of premium OTTs, delivering a premium service like Netflix to the STB in weeks instead of years.

Why should delegates visit your stand at IBC?

Attendees should come see for themselves that the traditional technological barriers to OTT have been eliminated. Metrological helps MVPDs to embrace OTT programming apps instead of being afraid of eroding customer loyalty. MVPDs can integrate linear TV, EPG, VoD, apps and OTT into a single viewer experience, keeping their customers within the MVPDs offering.

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MVPDs can integrate linear TV, EPG, VoD, apps and OTT into a single viewer experience

For our content partners, we encourage them to come and see how they can reach 40+ million homes with a single app. With a single upload of content, our next-generation app store eliminates the challenge of updating and maintaining current versions of each piece of content on so many different STBs.

Metrological will be exhibiting at IBC2017 on stand 14.E20