Serving rural communities in South Texas, Valley Telephone Cooperative, Inc. (VTCI) has selected the FusionTV platform from Entone to enable the delivery of hybrid TV services to subscribers of the VTCI IPTV service. VTCI was first in the world to deliver DSL Broadband service to 100 percent of its subscribers, and was also the first in South Texas to offer Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) connectivity.
The move is critical as with the increase of OTT services, consumers expect and demand a more integrated video experience, according to Ameer Karim, vice president of Hybrid TV Solutions at Entone.
Entone’s FusionTV solution allows VTCI to offer the live HDTV, DVR and cloud services via a single TV input, remote control and user interface. The more than 50 content and cloud-based services that are available instantly include video on demand (VOD) content from VUDU, photo sharing from Flickr and Picasa, and popular social media apps like Facebook and Twitter.
“By leveraging our existing broadband infrastructure to offer a television service that blends linear HDTV with the best of on-demand and cloud services, we are able to keep pace with consumer demand without exceeding budgetary constraints,” said Dave Osborn, CEO at VTCI.
Entone’s FusionTV solution allows VTCI to roll out a unique pay-TV service that can increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) and bolster subscriber satisfaction, all without the upfront capital investment and content acquisition complexities of proprietary VOD systems. FusionTV is seamlessly integrated with leading IPTV middleware and digital rights management (DRM) solutions. With a simple software update, VTCI subscribers can instantly access and enjoy VUDU's streaming library of more than 30,000 titles and popular Web applications and services without a truck roll.
