TVPlayer set to enhance its viewing experience with TVPlayer Plus

Media Excel’s HERO encoding platform provides the reliability needed to bring audiences more of the channels they crave

London, UK(11 Aug 2015)

This August, TVPlayer — an over-the-top (OTT) live streaming provider for broadcast TV channels — will launch TVPlayer Plus. At the core of this live-streaming and CatchUp TV service is Media Excel’s HERO platform provided by Garland.

TVPlayer already successfully live streams over 60 free-to-air channels in the UK, with more than 1.3 million app downloads and over 500,000 weekly users.

The new TVPlayer Plus will give audiences more of the TV they love, providing a low-cost, enhanced viewing experience to subscribers. It will offer viewers an additional 25 premium channels (offering over 80 in total) from popular broadcasters including UKTV, Discovery Networks, A+E Networks UK, Turner Broadcasting, National Geographic Channel Europe, and Sony Pictures Television Networks.

"TVPlayer has seen significant success to date, with over half a million people now watching TV over-the-top each week on our service,” says Adam Smith, founder and CEO of TVPlayer. “Similar to what Netflix has done for movies and Spotify for music, TVPlayer Plus aims to offer a simplified viewing experience of traditional and premium television content —one that works with the devices people already have."

TVPlayer selected the HERO encoding platform from Media Excel to power its TVPlayer and TVPlayer Plus service. The HERO DS9 is a powerful 1RU, 8 x HD-SDI channel, adaptive bitrate, multi-format encoder.

“Its proven reliability, channel density, on-board DRM, and archiving capabilities have made it the perfect solution,” explains Lorna Garrett, Director of Garland.

TVPlayer is available on iOS, Android, Amazon Fire TV, Mac and PC. Viewers of the new TVPlayer Plus service will also be able to watch their enhanced channel lineup on some Smart TVs, the Amazon Fire TV Stick and others.