Liberty Global’s subsidiary in Chile, VTR, has reported significant growth in customer numbers for the company’s enhanced services. The enhanced service includes VOD with enriched graphics, TV previews and the ability to browse and search by genre, actor or title. VTR, which is believed to be the largest cable operator in Chile, has seen an increase of 138% for the number of views of the company’s on-demand service year-on year. There has also been significant growth in the number of customers that access the service (11%), the number of views (44%) and views per subscriber (83%).
The new enhanced service is available via a cloud-based browser and sent to the set-top boxes of more than 95% of its customers with digital TV. It is believed that VTR is the first cable operator to launch a VOD service in South America which relies on cloud-based set-top box functionality. In order to offer this functionality, VTR partnered with ActiveVideo that virtualised the functionalities of the set top boxes.
Analyst Comment
Since I first heard abut the ActiveVideo Networks technology, in 2010 (Display Monitor Vol 17 #20 at the DisplaySearch TV Technology conference, I have thought that the cloud approach makes a lot of sense, allowing the development of more sophisticated interfaces and features without the need to upgrade clients beyond a basic level. (BR)
