Espial and RDK power advanceTV from Tele Columbus

Tele Columbus and Espial Transform Viewing Experience in Germany

OTTAWA, Ontario & BERLIN — Transforming the viewing experience worldwide, Espial and Tele Columbus, Germany’s third largest cable operator with about 3.6 million connected cable households, today announced the commercial availability of advanceTV, a next-generation, 4k, hybrid IP video service next January. advanceTV brings Tele Columbus subscribers an unmatched television and mobile-device experience featuring the latest TV, movies, apps, OTT video, and web content including seamless integration with maxdome, one of Germany’s leading SVOD services.

Espial and Tele Columbus created this next-generation 4K video service including a seamless multiscreen experience across live, video-on-demand, maxdome subscription VOD, a rich set of web apps, and DVR content. At the heart of the solution is the Espial Media Service Platform – a cloud-based back-office platform unifying the video experience across content, devices and networks – which provides advanced policy management, content management and a seamless cross-device experience. Paired with the Espial G4 STB Client – based on RDK and HTML5 – it powers advanceTV’s intuitive content navigation and discovery with a fast, immersive interface, recommendations and unified search across all content and devices. With the powerful, agile Espial multiscreen solution, Tele Columbus can drive continuous innovation on their advanceTV platform to match the pace of their subscribers’ expectations.

Espial Elite professional services drove the implementation of this breakthrough video service in record time as master system integrator. The team integrated leading components from Cisco Systems, Verimatrix, Elemental, Humax and others using the latest agile integration and development techniques. This allowed the advanceTV service to achieve a range of market firsts for Germany and Europe with fully integrated OTT subscription VOD, traditional pay VOD, full unicast DVB-C support in RDK and an open, transparent agile development approach.

“Our strategy is to deliver an unsurpassed video experience to German subscribers. We see the fragmentation OTT services are driving into the marketplace and resolved to provide a compelling one-stop shop for the widest range of content available to any cable connection in Germany: 4K TV, VOD, maxdome SVOD, a rich universe of web apps, and timeshift viewing via an integrated DVR”, said Ronny Verhelst, CEO of Tele Columbus Group. “Espial has proven to be an exceptional integration and solution partner, and we’re excited to deploy advanceTV beginning next month.”

“To continue on their exceptional growth path, Tele Columbus wanted to set a milestone in the market to deploy a state-of-the-art video service that delivers premium value to their subscribers,” said Jaison Dolvane, CEO, Espial. “The Espial Elite services team collaborated with Tele Columbus’ technology group to create advanceTV, which is powered by Espial’s client and cloud-based solutions.”

“Tele Columbus is at the forefront of bringing next-generation TV services to the German market with advanceTV,” said Steve Heeb, President and General Manager of RDK Management, LLC. “This new TV experience, created with the assistance of Espial, demonstrates the kind of innovation, customization, and accelerated service delivery that can be built upon the RDK software framework.”