Objectives of the service
The objective of the service is to enhance the existing product by enabling slow motion and zoom along with providing the user a mechanism to generate stills of their favourite actor or sports star. Having a zoom feature on their phone enables the user view close up action of a clip of streaming in real time. Similarly, the user can enable slow motion of the stream when it is on their phone.
The objective is also to automate the process of capturing the stream from the satellite. At the moment this process is manual and takes a number of seconds to capture and make available to the user. Automating this process makes the content available to the user in near real time. The user see’s the content in real time.
The objective is achieved through partnerships with content owners who take a revenue share from the funds paid by the subscriber. At the moment a number of partnerships are in place to reach the potential subscriber base.
The solution being provided is in the form of a mobile app. The app is the delivery mechanism for the content.
The technology developed will be a performance enhancement to the product technology as it adds attractive features to users who are viewing the content. Viewers will be able to zoom and slow motion the content as well as generate stills.
Users and their needs
The initial target community is the labourer community from South Asia in the Middle East. This community is price sensitive and needs affordable offering’s in terms of content. The target community and their needs are summarized as follows;
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The labourer community live and work in the Middle East
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They are primarily expat south Asian
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They work long hours and their leisure activity is restricted due to their low wages
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The community is price sensitive because a significant portion of their wages is remitted to their homeland
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They are interested in entertainment from their homeland
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The technology on offer is focused on south Asia entertainment; Bollywood movies etc
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The entertainment concept is delivered directly to their smart phone
The challenges for the project are;
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Assembling the content in a way that that it can be viewed on a mobile app
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Instructions to the user as to how to use the zoom and slow motion and generate stills from their phone.
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Development and deployment of payment mechanisms so that the payment can be taken from the phone credit
Content is key to attracting users to the service and the business has currently negotiated content from B4U. This is content from South Asia and is of interest to this community.
The business is also negotiating with content owners in the sports area as the content from B4U needs to be enhanced. Cricket or football content from premier competitions is of significant interest to this community.
Service/ system concept
The information supplied to the user is as follows;
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The system delivers entertainment in the form of movies and shows direct from one of the content leaders in South Asia
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Specific features include the category of films; thrillers; action; romance etc
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User can select the language of their choice
When the system is deployed, the user will have the opportunity to view content from their homeland in their own language from many different categories. This will include the technology features of zoom and slow motion and will also allow the user generate a still on their phone.
The content is taken from the B4U Satellite and converted to the HLS stream. The system automatically catches the live broadcast feed from the satellite and consumes it into the cloud storage at AWS. From there it is converted to a web application and enabled for advertisers to place their ad’s. From there the advertisement is processed by an automated set of rules.
Space Added Value
The space assets that are used primarily consists of the feed from B4U broadcasted by Asia-Sat satellite. This allows the full catalogue of content from the B4U operation to be made available to the customer. The B4U entertainment business is focused on Indian content only. If the technology content is not available from the B4U satellite, then the end user has no access to the catalogue of content and thus is deprived of entertainment that is of relevance to him.
Current Status
The final review took place in Dec 2021. While the technical concept has been proved, the conditions set by the content owner did not allow to have a sustainable service in the market that was originally conceived.
