Waoo - Danish fiber provider takes aggregator role with addition of Android TV STBs

Aggregation is everything: Android TV launch brings consumer convenience

Now owned by a single utility company, Fibia, Waoo continues to provide Pay TV services to the customers of power providers throughout Denmark. As part of their continuing efforts to stand out from the crowd, the company has recently launched a new generation of STBs that make use of Android TV Operator Tier. The boxes are driven by the 24i backend and feature a custom launcher built by the 24i team. 


“Aggregation is the keyword,” says Martin Jürgensen. “The Google Play app store allows us to preload the new TV boxes with apps from our many streaming services like Disney+, Discovery+, Viaplay and the national broadcaster DR. The user can also download apps for themselves like Spotify or games. This means the box becomes more versatile, more like a media hub in the home. Customers only have one place to go to get all their content. In many cases, they can even add the cost of the subscription to our partners’ services onto their Waoo bill to reduce their admin.”

There are also operational benefits for Waoo in making the switch to the new STBs: “If you are an operator of our size, Android TV brings many advantages, because Google provides the patches, security updates and development of the platform, so we don’t have to do that.”

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Simplifying content search and discovery for streaming

Of course, with content aggregation comes increased challenges around content discovery, and Waoo has tackled this by rolling out 24i’s Unified Search capabilities. Users can now get integrated search results from across the Waoo platform, including catch-up TV, the EPG (TV Guide) and more than 12,000 TV and Movie titles available to rent in the “Waoo Bio” VOD store. Martin Jürgensen says the feature is already proving popular: “As a viewer, you just have one place to go to search to find the content you’re looking for, so you don’t have to browse all kinds of catalogues and archives. You can just start typing the name of an actor or a show and then the result will pop up. It’s an easy way to discover content and it works across STB, web, mobile phones etc.”

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A cloud-hosted future awaits

For Waoo, the introduction of the cloud-based Unified Search is an indicator of their desire for a more virtual future that takes advantage of the benefits available with cloud hosting. “24i is helping us to move in the right direction here,” confirms Martin Jürgensen.“

We are definitely going all-in on the cloud based services and we do not want to have any local services or host servers in our data centres if we can avoid it, so we want to offload as much as we can to the cloud. We see our relationship with 24i as being much more of a partnership than a vendor-supplier-customer situation."