Liberty Puerto Rico turns to cloud to personalize service
Liberty Puerto Rico President Naji Khoury
Liberty Puerto Rico is partnering with technology provider ActiveVideo to launch of a cloud-based personalized user interface that uses real-time viewing metrics to display program popularity and offers insight into how viewers find television content in a social context.
Using the power of cloud user interfaces, Liberty Puerto Rico will deliver to existing set-top boxes a video-rich personalized mosaic, named Social Content Navigator, that enables content discovery based on what is trending across communities and in areas of personal interest.
The cloud-based mosaic overcomes the limitations of single-tuner set-top boxes to simultaneously display on a single screen up to eight different live video channels. Web-based metadata provides continuously updated rankings of viewership for each of the channels, company officials said,
“The cloud is enabling cable system operators to quickly and cost-effectively reinvent services to meet the expectations of consumers,” said Naji Khoury, president of Liberty Puerto Rico. “CloudTV is playing an essential role in our ability to combine unprecedented scale and service velocity in our deployment of new functionality, such as the Social Content Navigator.”
Liberty has partnered with ActiveVideo to use ActiveVideo’s CloudTV software platform to make the Social Content Navigator available at scale on existing guide and user interface platforms, regardless of device limitations.
By authoring the user interface in HTML5 language, rendering it in the cloud and streaming it to any set-top box, Liberty is delivering Social Content Navigator functionality to all set-tops, including those that lack browsers, executives explained.
“By using cloud TV’s capabilities we’re able to deploy our next-generation user interface to all our customers at once, enabling our entire base to enjoy a rich user experience without the need of set top box change,” said Waldo Hooker, vice president of new product development at Liberty Puerto Rico.
Rollout of the Social Content Navigator has begun in Liberty’s Puerto Rico system, with availability to all 250,000 subscribers in Puerto Rico anticipated by the end of 2014.
“Cloud user interfaces are expanding the breadth of new services — including video-on-demand, online video and others — that pay TV providers can offer on any device,” said Jeff Miller, president of ActiveVideo.
“Liberty Puerto Rico’s Social Content Navigator mosaic shows how CloudTV can increase engagement with every customer without the cost or time-to-market delays of deploying new devices,” he said.
