Technology required to underpin expansion plans
Nessma TV is a commercial TV channel, located in Tunisia and launched in spring 2007 by the Karoui & Karoui World Group.
The channel is mainly watched in North Africa: Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia, and reaches more than 7.5 million households. This makes it the leading entertainment channel targeted specifically at the Mediterranean Arab world.
These markets share common languages, cultures and geography, and are undergoing a rapid economic and demographic expansion. The region is populated by 80 million people with an average age of 25.
Plans are also underway to make the channel available on the European side of the Mediterranean where there is a North African diaspora community of more than 10 million.
This potential for expansion for Nessma TV in these markets is considerable and as such, the company looked at new opportunities for widening the spread of the channel, increasing revenues and enhancing the offer for subscribers.
Enabling the development of new video streaming service
Nessma TV identified a key target market for its next move – mobile subscribers. The company has created Nessma Mobile and can differentiate itself in the competitive mobile service provider space thanks to the rich bank of content in the Nessma TV business. To create this offering, Nessma Mobile needed to create an OTT streaming service optimized for the mobile audience.
Video streaming services have long been the domain of larger providers but content owners such as Nessma TV are finding that innovations in OTT technology can help them to realize their business aims by deploying new, value-driven models rapidly and at low-cost.
Successful services are popping up all over the globe and there are a growing number of examples of creative and proactive organizations embracing the new technology solutions to bring their video-on-demand service to market.
To deliver its streaming video network, Nessma Mobile turned to SotalCloud, an innovative global provider of OTT online video platform technology for VOD and Linear TV.
Haykel Abdelwahed, Technical Director at Nessma Mobile said:
“We consulted with a number of larger video-on-demand service providers from the USA, Italy, Canada, France and the UK before we selected SotalCloud as our supplier for the new streaming service. Of all of the suppliers that we spoke to, SotalCloud were by far the most competitive and reactive, and their rapid deployment timescales for the project were unique.”
Utilizing technological expertise from global experts
SotalCloud managed all technical aspects of the service such as Content Delivery Network (CDN) media servers, asset management infrastructure and tailored APIs to deliver a comprehensive OTT service. This ‘TV-as-a-Service’ model is one of SotalCloud’s advantages – the company doesn’t just innovate in technology, it is also offering a different kind of business model with revenue-sharing and other options on the table.
SotalCloud was also able to tailor an app for Nessma Mobile’s subscribers in just a few days, using Nessma Mobile’s branding and user interface requirements. The app draws on the talents of top producers, writers, actors and artists for exclusive content, which is in addition to the Nessma TV channel content, including soap operas and sitcoms.
Cloud encoding was supplied by SotalCloud partner organization, NoisyPeak, which converted video formats to meet the technical specifications for all possible end devices and networks.
Significant reductions achieved in development times
Nessma Mobile’s OTT video service was launched after a very short period of development to enable the company to go to market quickly to Tunisian consumers and retain its competitive advantage.
Haykel Abdelwahed continued:
“The support from SotalCloud has been invaluable and their innovation and expertise has enabled us to go live with our new app within just three weeks, a significant reduction on the traditional three-to-six months for similar development projects.
Thanks to SotalCloud, we’ve been able to go to market much quicker to stay ahead of our competitors and to provide our subscribers with a fresh, content-rich service that will continue to create new revenue streams for the organization.”
Opportunities provided by ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model
Haykel Abdelwahed concluded:
“The aim of the service is to create a bridge between the TV, device or smartphone, and the end user.
As we continue to develop and strengthen the content of the service with games embedded within the application, targeted and exclusive offers for subscribers and more rich content, we will broaden the spread of the channel and change from a cost-driven to a value-driven model.
“We now have a low cost service that can easily be scaled up, managed and evolved over time – a real ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model.”