What might appear a brand new win for Metrological at Portuguese operator NOS is actually a simple extension of a relationship which began back in 2017, using the same Metrological Application Platform product. What hasn’t been addressed, however, is why it has taken NOS four years to bring Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to market? This is an inexcusable timeframe for an operator of this caliber.

NOS has added Metrological’s unified TV App Store and back-office portfolio to integrate even more apps into the UI for users of UMA set tops in Portugal, devices which are manufactured by Arris (CommScope) and powered by Espial’s G4 set top client.

Initially, the announcement inferred that more devices in the NOS footprint have been upgraded with RDK video technology, with set top cost savings high on the agenda of operators like NOS, however, Faultline received confirmation that this is purely about having more apps. It is celebrating the achievement of onboarding Netflix and Amazon Prime Video onto UMA set tops, when these should be among the very first apps onboarded into any operator set top environment.

We appreciate that the technicalities of implementing these third-party streaming apps are anything but simple, as Netflix in particular is extremely strict on how the Netflix experience is implemented by operators. However, we would expect a lot more in the four years since Metrological arrived at NOS, in which time the Dutch app developer was acquired by Comcast.

Years of grinding open source R&D have given us the Lightning UI software development kit, making it easier for operators like NOS to onboard OTT video apps within their own set top environments, as well as improvements to the Firebolt application development platform, but you wouldn’t guess there has been much progress looking at NOS’s movements.

All NOS has achieved, according to the press release, is adding “more apps” to UMA set tops – namedropping niche and localized content from Euronews, Vimeo and Accuweather, as well as the two aforementioned US streaming heavyweights.

The reality is that more than a few pay TV subscribers will have churned as a direct result of not having Netflix and Amazon Prime Video available on their set tops. The DTH pay TV division has been hemorrhaging subscribers, losing 15,000 between Q1 2020 and Q2 2021, while the fixed access TV business (which includes customers served by the HFC, FTTH and ultra-low latency networks) has actually been growing quite steadily, at 13,000 subs over the same period to nearly 1.4 million.

When Metrological was tapped up by NOS in Q3 2017, there were 1.56 million total pay TV subscribers. Now, there are 1.64 million – hardly a dramatic turnaround.

With that said, NOS has been a long-term advocate of RDK as a tool for reducing both hardware cycles and time between software releases – providing it with an abstraction layer and a direct route to SoC makers for rapid transition from one set top generation to another. The real value of RDK is therefore in bringing the same contemporary viewing experiences to all devices across an operator’s footprint, and we said at the time of the major 2017 deployment that NOS may want to hurry up about rolling out the same UI onto the rest of its legacy set tops using the Metrological Framework. Unfortunately, we have been unable to establish if this has happened, as our query was left unanswered.

Metrological Media’s Application Platform has long been central to this deployment at NOS, alongside the WPE open source browser, bringing a new personalized multiscreen service to NOS with UMA TV. The system sits alongside the NOS RDK G4 set top software provided by Canadian firm Espial. G4 itself includes a version of RDK with an application framework and a UI framework, and it is being implemented using DevOps engineering by Espial itself. The separate WPE embedded browser enables full use of HTML5 rendering, so a new UI can be delivered from the cloud.

Now, the JavaScript-based Lightning UI development framework, currently in version 4, is evolving and becoming an equally integral part of the RDK stack.

We are surprised at the sluggishness of NOS to integrate Netflix and Amazon Prime Video because it was one of the early movers into multiscreen, kicking off back in 2012 using Harmonic ProMedia Carbon filed-based transcoders and ProStream 4000 transcoders for live and VoD streaming. Just a year later, in 2013, Envivio landed a deal at NOS for all multiscreen activity and what it called a software-based headend for both satellite, cable and OTT video in ABR, using Envivio Muse encoders on the Envivio 4Caster Intel-based appliance, with Envivio Spark receivers and multiplexers.

Then, in 2015, NOS also decided to use Thomson Video Networks (now part of Harmonic) for HEVC compression using its ViBE VS7000 platform to deliver HEVC-encoded UHD content. Swings and roundabouts.

The recommendations engine from ThinkAnalytics has been used for NOS TV for live and VoD since 2013 and is still in place today. This was integrated with the Cisco Snowflake UI at the time, which has obviously now been replaced with the Lightning-based UI. Set tops are secured using the Nagra anyCast Connect conditional access and DRM system.

Prior to this week’s Metrological upgrade, the most recent update at NOS came in early 2021 with the injection of Deep Content Understanding and EPG correction technology from another Dutch vendor, Media Distillery. This is used for the 70 most popular channels, to create linear on-demand channels, and the technology also opens up new monetization opportunities for NOS by allowing the operator to insert pre-roll ads into the linear on-demand experience.

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