Youfone delivery of The Netherlands’ First Android TV service powered by 24i and Amino

• Being the first Android TV service provides Youfone with a real differentiator in the highly competitive Dutch market
• Rather than the traditional 12 – 18 month engineering project, Youfone refreshed its user experience & consumer offering and reduced CAPEX and OPEX in a 5 month project
• This speed to market was enabled by the end-to-end 24i and Amino solution
• Nextgen consumer features included, such as Chromecast built-in to simplify casting from mobile or tablet to the TV

The Youfone service is powered by 24i's Smart Apps and Smart Video products plus devices from Amino, providing an end-to-end solution that enabled the Dutch MVNO to completely refresh its user experience and expand the reach of its TV service.

The unique power, flexibility and breadth of the integrated 24i and Amino solution meant that Youfone launched the Netherland’s first Android TV service in just 5 months, rather than embarking on a major engineering project of a year or more if we had followed another path,” said Valentijn Rensing, CEO of Youfone.

A key advantage of the 24i and Amino solution is that it is truly end-to-end: covering all the functions we need from content ingest, encoding and transcoding, management, customer care, content distribution, all the software required from front-end to back end and even the set-top boxes serving our TV viewing customers,” concluded Rensing.

Powered by the 24i Video Experience Platform, Amino 7x Android set-top boxes, and Amino OS, this is the first deployment of the joint 24i and Amino cloud-based solution which enables video delivery from any source to any device.

Youfone, whose TV service was initially launched in 2017, tapped 24i and Amino in December2019 to deliver an expanded TV and OTT offering. 24i and Amino partnered to provide everything the Youfone service required, from smart Set-Top-Box (STB) hardware, service management, a robust backend, and an intuitive UI layer. Functionality includes transcoding, middleware, CDN, and front-end applications for Android, iOS phones, and tablets; enabling live TV, catchup, restart and nPVR for approximately 100 channels. This is the first joint deployment announced since24i became an Amino Technologies group company in July 2019.

The turnkey, multiscreen solution provides Youfone with the operational flexibility to deliver local or hosted live and on-demand streaming content to any device and platform, including Linux and Android TV.The hardware product deployment runs on AminoOS, all managed through Amino SMEngage, Amino’s cloud-based service management platform.

The solution is a hybrid cloud deployment taking advantage of on-premise private cloud services for 24/7 headend services that minimize infrastructure cost and public cloud services to maximize flexibility. It provides Youfone with nimble, modular operational services, ranging from content ingest, infrastructure, capacity, load, API and front-end monitoring, to change management and 3rd party support.

The innovative 24i and Amino solutions combined with the expertise of our teams enabled Youfone to launch an advanced Android TV service powered by 24i's Smart Apps and Smart Video products, and replace their existing set-tops with the advanced Amino 7x devices,” said Donald McGarva, Amino Group Chief Executive Officer.

Traditionally, launching an advanced modern converged OTT, VoD and Live TV service would take a year or more and would be technically demanding. Until now, companies such as Youfone were faced with the choice between over-engineered single vendor systems, smaller single-vendor solutions with gaps in functionality, or the complications and delays associated in dealing with multiple vendors. Getting Youfone up and running with the Netherland’s first major Android TV service so quickly proves that 24i's end-to-end solutions are ideal for today’s multiscreen market conditions,” concluded McGarva.