Vimond Media Platform Powers Newly Designed Sumo Online TV Portal for Norway's TV 2
Advanced Features Allow Viewers to Customize Their Viewing Experience
Bergen, Norway(08 Jan 2013)
Vimond Media Solutions today announced that its flagship customer, Norway's TV 2, has launched a new version of its award-winning Sumo online TV service powered by the Vimond Media Platform, the most advanced platform for monetizing live and on-demand content online and delivering it to multiple screens. TV 2 Sumo - whose new design was unveiled at the Nordic launch of Windows 8 on Oct. 26 - is Scandinavia's largest commercial Web TV service, offering a comprehensive library of TV 2 programs that viewers can watch on demand using their platform of choice.
Vimond helped TV 2 create the new Sumo, which has a completely new design featuring easy content-browsing and personalized channels.
"We worked with TV 2 to build the new Sumo portal with advanced capabilities from our platform, so that the end users can be the directors of their own channels," said Helge Høibraaten, CEO of Vimond Media Solutions. "Controlling what content they see and when they see it helps keep viewers engaged, which in turn helps TV 2 attract revenue and capitalize on its content library. In a sense, Vimond 'grew up' with TV 2; likewise, TV 2 Sumo has grown up with us."
TV 2 Sumo's "My Sumo" feature gives viewers the ability to schedule and plan as many channels as they like with personalized content. The redesigned Sumo also offers features such as shortcuts to favorites and next episodes, a program guide for the last and coming seven days, and navigation between episodes from the video player. Users have the ability to open video in an external window in order to change the size and use their computer while watching, view a program guide for a given channel while watching it so they can see what's next, open and navigate their own channels from the video player, and share links to Facebook and TwitterTM.
The Sumo portal is built on Vimond's action-based Web framework developed on Ruby on Rails®, which makes the portal solid and scalable without sacrificing flexibility or performance. The advanced Vimond platform provides a comprehensive environment for managing and delivering multiformat over-the-top (OTT) services, with full facilities for all creative, logistical, and business aspects of the operation. With its modular architecture, Vimond offers sophisticated tools and controls for every aspect of an OTT service, from ingest and encoding through conditional access to business intelligence reporting.
The new Sumo design has been implemented on the Web, for Windows 8, and as a set-top box (STB) application running on RiksTV Extra. The solution will also be available on all other Sumo platforms including iPad® and the Altibox STB.
Further information on Vimond Media Solutions and its products is available at www.vimond.com or by phone at +47 93 22 95 70.
About Vimond Media Solutions
Vimond Media Solutions AS (www.vimond.com) develops and markets the Vimond online TV platform. Based in Bergen, Norway, Vimond is one of a number of successful technology companies spun off from national broadcaster TV 2, together with Vizrt, StormGeo, and Mosart Medialab. After more than 10 years of technology development and use in production at Scandinavia's biggest commercial online video enterprise, TV 2 Sumo, Vimond was established in 2011 to make advanced solutions available to other broadcasters launching multiscreen over-the-top services. The Vimond platform provides a comprehensive environment for managing highly efficient streaming of content to cellphones, tablet computers, gaming consoles, connected TVs, and Blu-ray players. With its depth of experience and expertise, Vimond is a leading player in the field, serving a rapidly growing roster of customers that includes TV4 in Sweden, MTV3 in Finland, TV 2 in Norway, and pan-Nordic distributor C More.