Telefónica Invests in MediaKind’s Aquila On-Demand to Enhance Movistar+ VOD Experience

MediaKind has been selected by Telefónica to enhance the video-on-demand (VOD) offerings of Movistar+, the Spanish telco’s pay-TV subscription service. MediaKind’s Aquila On-Demand solution will be deployed to deliver rapid asset processing of Movistar+’s on-demand OTT and IPTV content, encompassing transcoding, transformation, packaging and delivery capabilities.

“This past year has demonstrated the insatiable consumer demand for premium quality on-demand video streaming, a trend that will continue,” says Eugenio Lojo, head of transmission and conditional access, Telefónica. “We are continuously looking for new ways to pioneer and deliver the best quality service to our customers. MediaKind’s Aquila On-Demand solution provides us with the ideal tools to ensure Movistar+ provides a consistently exceptional viewing experience. The deployment means that Movistar+’s on-demand content can be made available faster and reach more devices, with an improved video and audio quality. Such a deployment is key to delivering a truly next-generation VOD experience that exceeds our viewers’ expectations.”

Aquila On-Demand will enable Telefónica to add several new VOD offerings to the Movistar+ platform, supported by a range of digital rights management platforms, including HLS/Fairplay and DASH/CENC. Movistar+ will benefit from video quality up to 4K, enabled by MediaKind’s latest HEVC/H264 codec implementations. The deployment will also give Movistar+ a dramatic performance increase, with a microservices architecture allowing the platform to process the media more than twice as fast as previously, greatly improving the user experience. Furthermore, Telefónica’s operations will be significantly simplified thanks to a unification of the graphical user interface with the VOD controller.

“We are delighted to help Telefónica enhance its Movistar+ service with Aquila On-Demand,” says Stuart Boorn, VP product management, MediaKind. “The solution’s innovative microservices design provides Telefónica with the flexibility and scale required to meet increasing on-demand video streaming requirements, exacerbated by the recent global lockdowns. Relying on our robust in-house processing and delivery software, we can help Telefónica deliver a premium viewing experience to its subscribers that exceeds consumer expectations for a modern VOD service, such as premium picture quality and reach on even more devices.”