Introduction

DNA wanted to modernize their TV platform and cut long-term costs by reducing the number of suppliers. They wanted to focus on providing a great unlimited NPVR experience as a way for customers to collect content and reduce churn.

Furthermore, they wanted to make brand new mobile and Android TV applications and add catch-up TV as a new feature.

Customer

DNA Plc.

DNA is a Finnish telecommunications group providing high-quality voice, data and TV services for communication, entertainment and working. DNA is Finland's largest cable operator and one of the leading pay TV providers.

DNA is owned by the Norwegian-based Telenor Group, which is a leading telecommunications company across the Nordics and Asia with 183 million customers, annual sales of around USD 13 billion (2018) and more than 19,000 employees. Telenor has a significant market position in most of their markets, which include Norway, Finland, Bangladesh, Denmark, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sweden and Thailand.

The solution

The Hibox Aura TV platform

Hibox Aura provided a lot of the features that were required by DNA off the shelf. The basic business logic was already in place and the platform comes with excellent interfaces for content management. The Client APIs are very mature and well tested as they are used by Hibox’s own client applications.

Hibox Aura had already been integrated with the Content Delivery Network (CDN) solution provided by Edgeware and with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution provided by Verimatrix. During the project these integrations were further extended to provide all the advanced functionality that DNA was looking for.

Features

The following components were provided by Hibox and through Hibox integrations in the project:

• Live TV - 100+ channels OTT, IPTV and DVB on hybrid STB
• NPVR - Unlimited NPVR, keep for 2 years
• Catch-up TV
• TVOD / SVOD
• Timeshift
• Rich metadata
• Content provider integrations - automatic login to other apps
• Personalized recommendations
• Favorites
• Search
• Single sign on
• Passwordless login via code/email/other device
• Multi DRM

Project delivery

The project was a multi-year project from POC installation to 100% migration, involving several backend changes on the DNA side, as well as apps developed 100% from scratch by a 3rd party. Hibox provided development resources and professional services during the entire project and has been involved in most parts of it. In the beginning of the project a Hibox representative was on site most days of the week, later once a week. The production rollout was done 100% remotely due to the Covid-19 situation. All existing subscribers, packages and recordings from DNA’s old platforms were migrated to the new platform.

As part of the project delivery, Hibox provided several 3rd party components that were integrated with the Aura TV platform:

• Envoy edge gateway for delegating and masking requests to the underlying services and APIs
• Prometheus monitoring system for advanced monitoring and alerting of tens of thousands of data points
• ElasticSearch cluster for indexing all media with per client searchable media
• Distributed client cache using Redis
• Oauth 2.0 authentication for issuing and verifying client tokens

The challenge

One single platform to manage all IPTV & OTT services

DNA used to operate two different platforms for providing IPTV & OTT services to their customers. One platform was used to manage the Live TV and Network Personal Video Recorder (NPVR) content, while another platform was handling the Video-On-Demand (VOD) services. This approach had several practical downsides, and it was very inconvenient from an operations standpoint.

Furthermore, DNA required robust API interfaces for building brand new mobile and Android TV applications. The applications were going to be developed from scratch, by a consultancy firm based in Helsinki, against the platform APIs. The business logic needed to be implemented on the platform side to keep the clients as simple as possible

In addition to flexible integration possibilities, DNA had the following main requirements:

• Unify all TV services into one single platform
• Build and integrate new mobile, web and Android TV applications
• Add catch-up TV
• Unlimited NPVR experience
• Integrate with other backend systems, e.g., Single sign-on, DRM solution and recommendation engine

The result

A modern and competitive TV platform

The project has been regarded as a big success by stakeholders, providing DNA with a modern competitive TV platform that is easy to develop further.

With this new TV platform, DNA can continue to develop its TV services to stay competitive and to keep up with rights holders’ demands. DNA has been very happy with the stability and scalability of the new platform, and they have noticed that the number of bugs reported by end-users have decreased dramatically.