The Foxtel Group is Australia’s leading, next-generation subscription television company with over 4 million subscribers covering news, entertainment, and sports. The Foxtel Group began its journey with Vimond in 2017 when they were looking for a cloud-native and modern OVP aligned with its architectural principles.
In implementing Vimond’s solutions, The Foxtel Group’s Streaming Over-the-top business has benefited in a way that allows them to reach the market quickly and customize workflow to fit its business and operational model.
Since 2017, Vimond's relationship with the Foxtel Group spans across multiple retail services:
WATCH AFL and NRL - subscription-based international services delivering LIVE matches and on-demand replays of the Australian Football League and the National Rugby League to fans worldwide.
Kayo Sports - Dubbed the "Netflix of Sports", Kayo Sport is a first-of-its-kind, multi-streaming sports service with 50+ live and on-demand sports from around the world. Launched in 2018, Kayo Sports has amassed over 1.3 million customers (as of September 30, 2022) providing an unrivalled line-up of sports to Australian sports fans.
BINGE: BINGE is a dedicated entertainment streaming service offering the world’s best entertainment. Nothing gets on your screen unless it's binge-worthy, award-worthy, share-worthy, or all-time-favourite-worthy. BINGE has reached over 1.4 million Australian customers since launching in 2020.
Flash: Flash is a first-of-its-kind aggregated news streaming service offering more than 30 local and global premium news channels, streamed live and on-demand and providing one of the most convenient ways to stay informed and connected across various sources, opinions and perspectives.
Vimond VIA products and features used:
VIA Monetise is used to manage products and content package access. The Products in the Monetise module handle listing, editing and creating products and payment plans for managing subscriptions/payment models for purchase by end-users.
The monetisation module allows the creation of a product with a title, description, geo regions (where it is available) and sale status (defines whether it is made available and bought in the portal). The content packages decide what content the end user gets access to when accessing a subscription.
The Curation module in VIA helps the editorial teams promote featured content on the services. The editorial team can quickly organise content in carousels, menus and featured lists. The user-friendly interface and advanced search options ensure that carousels, menus and featured lists are quick to create and straightforward to manage. The editorial team can also bookmark their favourite views to make regular adjustments easier.
VIA Content Management System.
Vimond’s user-friendly interface, available via a web browser, provides graphical interface access to all the core products and the optional add-ons. Via Vimond VIA the Foxtel Group can manage license Windows, schedule publishing content, images with multiple locations, related assets (linked asset relations) for relating extras and trailers and similar and chapters and index points
End-user services
The various brands also leverage the end-user services available through the Vimond VIA SaaS product to manage the delivery of their video content. These include Content Delivery, Content Discovery, the Play Service, Sub-profile Service and Playlist service.
Content Delivery provides a single interface to retrieve all information about the content. It allows you to do direct lookups or searches in all your metadata to present the content in your applications. It also auto-scales, removing the worry that your backend system cannot cope with sudden spikes in traffic.
The Play Service lets them play out the content as part of the Content Delivery interface. The Play Service will verify if the user can play the content they are trying to access based on their subscription and the access level set on the content.
In addition, the Play service helps adhere to the rules set by the Rights-owners, including geoblocking, stream count and device management.
The Play Service will adhere to the rules you set up based on the contract with the Rights-owners. In general, the Play Service provides the end-users with "resume playback" functionality, letting the user pick up where they left off across devices. The Content Delivery interface also has a Playlist feature, where your users can build lists of their favourite content.
Another component used for end-user services is the sub-profile services. The value of the sub-profile service is to create personalised user experiences where favourite assets are presented to individual sub-profiles of the same primary account.
Kayo Sports uses this service to save a favourite team as a sub-profile property so that users can access their team’s content at the top of the portal when they log in. The above functionality is done by querying content discovery and searching all assets with specific team IDs as metadata.
Cora Spear, Executive Director Operations, says:
We’ve launched five streaming services in five years working with the Vimond team. Their approach to implementation, allowing us to partner with a modern OVP that aligned with our architectural principles and was cloud-native built, has meant we are able to quickly and efficiently develop our products and services to provide our customers a world-class entertainment experience - the ability to watch live sports, breaking news as well as premium shows and movies on demand.
Letting the customer focus on what's important
By utilizing Vimond VIA, Foxtel gets to focus its time on the right areas that affect its business needs while still having the features and functionality they need in an Online Video Platform.
Foxtel Group’s streaming businesses have benefitted through the flexibility to customize workflow to fit their business and operational model.