Kaltura & Vodafone joined forces and brought TV to the cloud
The future is called ‘Cloud TV’ content delivery. If you think OTT then you must think Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ … the way we will all consume our content or actually do now – no matter what device. But, how do we meet that demand?
This is how Nuno Sanches, General Manager of Media and Telecom at Kaltura begins to ‘unbox’ his vision of TV content delivery today and in the future.
Two years of Covid constraints and living at home have played their part in this explosion in demand. But according to Sanches, this seismic change in the way we would come to consume video content was inevitable. It just needed the content creators, the distributors, and facilitators to break free from the chains of linear programming and linear thinking.
Sanches says Kaltura’s long standing and every deepening relationship with the telecoms giant Vodafone was instrumental in forcing the disparate video content industry to embrace the change.
‘When Vodafone came to us, they had a revolutionary vision of becoming a global multi-device cloud TV service,’ says Sanches. It was an advanced product concept at the time, especially since Vodafone came from a fragmented TV user experience and a costly and unwieldy environment to manage, built through a collection of different legacy infrastructures and technology solutions.’
Kaltura was able to refresh and re-invent Vodafone’s TV service to provide its customers – the end users – with a far more streamlined, seamless solution cloud TV platform. In a nutshell all Vodafone subscribers see is a unified content catalog they can watch on any device. As for Vodafone, this shift also means they no longer need to be wrapped up in the complex array of platforms needed to deliver content. By moving all their TV services to a single platform in the cloud, everything is a lot easier to operate and manage. Kaltura’s solution takes the hard work out for them.
Historically Vodafone needed to run its own data centres and manage its own content distribution. It was a model which simply did not fit into the demands that Vodafone anticipated its consumers would have in the future. That is why they took a bet for change..’
Kaltura’s approach to the TV business was dramatically different. It had already adopted the approach of software as a service (SaaS) and applied it to video for enterprise and education. With Vodafone it expanded this approach to media and telecoms – the most demanding domain.
Kaltura’s cloud TV solution – fine-tuned with astonishing success at Vodafone – is now available to any video content provider, whether telecom, media company or digital publisher, on any device and across any business model.
The key to this, in case you hadn’t worked it out, is Kaltura’s solution which resides in its robust TV platform and cloud infrastructure.
‘This means our customers no longer need to worry about infrastructure or scalability servers or networks. We take on that responsibility and they just know that what we provide works flawlessly,’ says Sanches. ‘It means our customers can experiment with all the content aggregation, delivery and analytical capabilities we provide – without any “heavy lifting.”’
Kaltura’s Cloud TV solution is used by millions of users worldwide every day. Irrespective of the device or country. No matter how the end users prefer to watch their favourite shows, series, or movies they are guarantee access to any type of video content.
