A1 Telekom Austria Group, a leading provider of digital services and communications solutions in Central and Eastern Europe, has selected XroadMedia, leading specialists in building innovative and ground-breaking content discovery and recommendations solutions, to enable personal recommendations in their A1 Xplore TV service in multiple markets in Central and Eastern Europe.
A1 Xplore TV – rethinking television
A1 Xplore TV is a new and innovative TV platform, that today serves customers in Austria, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Croatia. A1 Xplore TV provides a fully integrated multiscreen approach – starting in the customer’s living room with a high-end Linux based IPTV & DVB-C KAON 4K set-top-box and continuing on all major mobile device platforms (iOS & Android) as well as on the Web and via Google Chromecast.
With A1 Xplore TV the users are in complete control to catch-up with TV or to consume content from the A1 Video on Demand (VoD) platform, according to their preferences and whenever they want. As an add on, the universal channel feature, which automatically provides content in the best quality available (up to 4K/UHD) to the user, was also integrated. Furthermore, A1 Telekom Austria Group has opened its platform to 3rd-party content providers and has integrate those into their innovative user interface. In addition, A1 has introduced a powerful AI-driven recommendation engine based on the Ncanto solution provided by XroadMedia. As an example, to users of the A1 Xplore TV service in Austria the Ncanto based recommendation service delivers more than 3.6 million recommendations during the primetime hour (7.30pm to 8.30pm) every day.
“By integrating XroadMedia’s cloud based Ncanto solution, we are now able to offer a real-time, scalable, fully automated and comprehensive multi-content platform, which ensures a seamless customer experience across all devices. As a result, personalized and bespoke recommendations, based on the customer’s interests and viewing behavior, are now the primary way for our users to consume linear, video on demand and third-party content. This approach directly leads to a higher customer satisfaction rate, increased viewing time and improved uptake rates of purchased Video on Demand assets.” says Alexander Kuchar, Director Group Technology and Future Services at A1 Telekom Austria Group.
Adolf Proidl, Co-Founder and CEO of XroadMedia, adds “We are very excited to be working with A1 Telekom Austria Group on their new A1 Xplore TV services. Particularly the multi-country, single-service rollout strategy of A1 plays to the strength of our solution, where A1’s operational teams can simply customize our solution to their local specifics by using an easy-to-use management tool rather than by adjusting the integration between the different platforms. This allows A1 Telekom Austria Group to embrace local strategies and business KPIs and deliver an even more localized and personalized service to their users in different countries in Europe.”
XroadMedia is delivering its products and services via the existing pre-integration of Ncanto into Zappware’s advanced TV solution and award winning NeXX 4.0 platform.