Over-The-Top TV

With projects carried out over the past two years, Reply has consolidated its position as a reliable technological partner in Over The Top architectures, boasting a dual core: one is highly technological, with proven competency in client development for the enjoyment of videos and services, while the other is oriented towards management and project delivery.

We achieved these goals thanks to a detailed, long-term Roadmap on leading mobile market platforms: iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. These developments have reinforced relations with key-players worldwide, like Samsung and Microsoft, while enriching Reply offerings with a wide range of products that are now available to tech-savvy clients. Particularly worth of note is the first 2011 release, which brought to light the first adaptive streaming applications for the Google Honeycomb platform. The application made use of the HTTP protocol thanks to a targeted interventions by Samsung that integrated, with the support of the Reply client development team, the Google operating system to anticipate the extent to which it would be supported internally by the successive version.

This solution made it possible to manage a single video stream compatible on all the mobile terminals, enabling the end user to enjoy the best quality video possible given the actual capacity of his/her own tablet/smartphone and leaving the player with the capacity to select the correct qualitative layer in function of the available band and the calculation capacity of the device.

All the developments have had to take into consideration issues concerning Digital Rights Protection, in that all the major film studios and recording labels pay the utmost attention to protecting their contents. While developing various product upgrades, Reply has had to deal with the main Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, like Cisco’s NDS and Microsoft’s PlayReady. Another particularly sensitive issue concerns the quality of the video being reproduced, for which Reply has succeeded in confirming itself a consolidated technological partner, supporting the teams in charge with prompt test results on the conformity of product formats.

Shortly after this development in the Mobile world, it was possible to extend the same applicative logic to new terminals that, year after year, are found more and more frequently in everyone's living rooms. Reply has in fact succeeded in investing in the expertise required for the development of Game Consoles and Connected TVs, making it possible to adapt what has already been seen in a mobile setting on next-generation connected terminals, like Samsung CTv 2012 & 2013, Connected TV LG, Sony PlayStation 3 & 4, and XBOX360.

For these platforms it was necessary to integrate new video formats, passing from the Apple-oriented HLS-Adaptive Streaming typical of mobile devices, to a solution based on Microsoft-oriented SmoothStreaming, typical of the web. It was also necessary to embark on new integration logics with the DRM system, and work closely with application logics typical of the web. This latter extension actually consolidated the presence of Reply in the New Media sector, covering various aspects of interactive video use on the various Internet channels now present on the market.