Company contribution
Company contribution
The European television landscape is defined by a fundamental paradox: unprecedented demand for rich, seamless content experiences running directly into the reality of legacy infrastructure, spiralling costs, and fragmented technology stacks. While the linear TV and OTT worlds have fully converged in the eyes of the consumer, the back-office of many operators still work in silos.
The age of streaming has fundamentally redefined the challenges. Viewers no longer distinguish between the delivery method( IPTV, cable, satellite, or OTT); they simply demand instant access, seamless quality, and a personalized experience across every device. The pressure on operators to innovate, bundle, and monetise new formats— such as Free Ad- Supported Streaming TV( FAST) and UHD / HDR content— is immediate and relentless.
This requires operators to pivot from being simple content pipe providers to sophisticated entertainment aggregators. This pivot demands a new platform architecture built for:
• Agility to launch new content and features( e. g., FAST channels, 4K / UHD, AI personalisation) in weeks, not years. This velocity is crucial for staying on par and to partner with global streaming giants.
• Economic Control to shift from heavy CapEx spending on proprietary, monolithic systems to flexible, Total Cost of Ownership( TCO)-optimising modes of operation. This is key to sustainable, long-term growth.
• Integration Freedom to combine best-ofbreed components— a third-party analytics suite, and modern streaming tools— without a costly, rip-and-replace overhaul. This preserves sunk costs while maximising future innovation. For two decades, Zattoo converged technology and operational reality, powering over 30 European IPTV and OTT platforms. Our long-standing Zattoo End2End solution has been the successful answer for operators who prioritised speed and simplicity. However, the future demands platforms that reflect the dynamism of the market. This led to the strategic re-architecture of our entire B2B offering: a move from a unified, white-label service to a Composable TV Platform built on four core pillars.
The Composable TV Platform
Nicolas Westermann, VP Strategy B2B Product Portfolio at Zattoo, shares his thoughts on moving beyond monoliths to master the streaming economy.
The New Operating Model: Introducing Zattoo’ s Modular Suite
The future of TV-as-a-Service is not a single vendor solution; it is a collaborative ecosystem. Our new modular suite breaks down the complex TV stack into distinct, interoperable components that operators can select, integrate, and scale independently.
1. Zattoo Orchestrate( The Product and Business Control Plane) This is the intelligence layer and the true heart of the composable architecture. Zattoo Orchestrate manages the core product logic and business logic, including the product catalogue, user entitlements and authentication, metadata aggregation, advanced search / discovery tools, content management, UX and UI management, personalisation logic, and seamless BSS / OSS integration. It provides a unified view and management layer across content, subscribers, and commercial models.
• Strategic Value: Zattoo Orchestrate enables operators to completely decouple
the business logic from the underlying technical infrastructure. It facilitates nondisruptive, phased migration from a legacy system to a cloud-native model, ensuring commercial continuity while technology transformation proceeds step-by-step. Zattoo Orchestrate uniquely positions the product to handle complex hybrid environments, integrating seamlessly with existing operator infrastructure while providing a modern, API-first foundation for future feature rollouts, including options such as Frontend API, Frontend SDK and white label-apps- in essence, all that is needed to manage the complexity of a multi-platform, multi-vendor service- and optimise its commercial leverage. 2. Zattoo Ingest( The Content Gateway) This product abstracts the complexity of content acquisition and preparation. It is the fully managed, cloud-based headend, handling everything from channel ingest and satellite / fibre signal acquisition to high-volume encoding, transcoding, packaging( HLS,
DASH), and necessary DRM application for both live and video-on-demand assets. This is delivered as an elastic, carrier-grade SaaS.
• Strategic Value: Zattoo Ingest externalises the headend function, operators eliminate a massive, upfront CapEx burden associated with hardware acquisition and maintenance. This dramatically simplifies operational complexity across multiple regional or linguistic markets, enabling channel lineup adjustments or new market entries within days instead of months. For new revenue streams, such as launching dozens of thematic FAST channels, Ingest provides instant, scalable signal preparation and cloud-based content preparation without any on-premise hardware commitment, significantly reducing time-to-revenue. Furthermore, its unified management ensures consistent content quality and compliance across all distribution points. 3. Zattoo Stream( The Delivery Engine) With this element we add the highperformance delivery and playback layer, built on a robust, developer-friendly API structure. It handles adaptive-bitrate streaming protocols, multi-device playback( via flexible SDKs for all major platforms), detailed playback telemetry for Quality of Experience( QoE) monitoring, and, crucially, high-fidelity server-side ad insertion( SSAI).
• Strategic Value: Zattoo Stream is a direct driver of monetisation and qualityof-experience. With the industry rapidly moving towards hybrid and ad-supported tiers, the embedded, pre-integrated SSAI capabilities allow operators to generate new, high-value ad revenue through targeted, seamless ad experiences across linear and VOD content. Built as an API platform, Stream enables operators to connect their own custom front-ends, player logic, or third-party analytics tools while benefiting from Zattoo’ s proven, scalable cloud delivery infrastructure, which currently handles millions of simultaneous streams daily. This allows for total control over the consumer-facing user experience( UX) and offloading the heavy lifting of global streaming delivery. 4. Zattoo End2End( The Full-Service Classic) This remains Zattoo’ s proven, fully managed, white-label TV platform. It is a pre-integrated, comprehensive offering that encompasses all the functionalities of the modular components, from content ingestion and processing through to the fully-featured front-end applications.
• Strategic Value: For new market entrants, regional ISPs, or operators
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