Mediaset launches first OTT-TV offering on gaming console in Italy with AccentureDelivering high performance by increasing addressable market with an innovative application for Microsoft Xbox 360, featuring natively integrated voice and gesture control

Mediaset Group is the main commercial broadcaster in Italy and a major media company in Europe. The company operates a wide range of broadcast and related media, including free-to-air generalist and mini-generalist television, pay TV (Mediaset Premium), TV drama and film production, broadcast infrastructure management and home shopping. The company has expanded its business beyond Italy by becoming the major shareholder of Spanish broadcasters Telecinco and Cuatro. In 2010 Mediaset Group reported consolidated net revenues of over €4,292 billion.

Mediaset launches first OTT-TV offering on gaming console in Italy with Accenture 1

On the back of the success of Mediaset Premium, Mediaset’s subscription-based pay TV offering (2 million subscribers in September 2011, with 62 percent growth from September 2009), Mediaset decided in February 2011 to launch the innovative Premium Play service, with Accenture as end-to-end technology partner for this strategic program.

Premium Play is a pioneering over-the-top (OTT) TV service that complements Mediaset’s traditional linear TV offering. The service is delivered through the Accenture Video Solution (AVS) platform that leverages a reusable set of services for all devices and seamlessly delivers convergent digital video services over broadband networks to a wide range of devices, such as set top boxes, connected TVs, Tablets, smartphones and PCs.

Business challenge

2 Mediaset launches first OTT-TV offering on gaming console in Italy with Accenture

Premium Play has placed Mediaset at the forefront of innovation in its industry, with the first OTT-TV offering in Italy. The offering has grown both the company’s revenue and average revenue per user, helped it to attract new customers and increased its advertising value through better customer profiling and targeting. The service has been very successful:1

• The service launched on several set top box models and multiple PC browsers

• More than 430,000 customers have watched Mediaset content using Premium Play

• The average daily playback time per user is 80 to 100 minutes

• More than a million on-demand content items are played back per month

Premium Play’s success laid the founda-tion for future rollouts of new convergent devices. In May 2011, leading software and gaming platform vendor Microsoft announced plans to roll out the next

generation of TV entertainment on Xbox LIVE—the online entertainment service for the Xbox 360 gaming console. This opened the door for Mediaset to extend its range of addressable devices for the Premium Play offering, with the win-win benefit of providing Microsoft with additional quality content on its gaming console in Italy.

The opportunity was attractive given the high penetration of Xbox 360s in Italy (1.34 million consoles2) and the high propensity of Xbox LIVE subscribers to buy on-demand services. As with Mediaset’s strategy, the use of gaming consoles has played a big part in the Latin American success of Netflix (25 percent of the content provider’s video is streamed via the Xbox 360 platform3).

Mediaset accordingly decided to extend its on-demand OTT-TV offering with content delivery on the Xbox gaming platform, to further evolve its capabilities toward convergent, personalized, multi-device models, and improve customer loyalty with richer, higher-quality, “anytime and anywhere” digital services.

Accenture co-operated closely with Mediaset, overcoming several challenges, such as:

• An aggressive time frame of 12 weeks

• A completely new framework for Xbox, which saw Accenture delivering on a leading-edge technology

• Participation by several Accenture professionals, as well as five from Avanade—a company jointly owned by Accenture and Microsoft—in an intense certification program in Redmond, Washington, to acquire the right skills and release the application on Xbox LIVE marketplace in a severe race against time. Accenture and Avanade were among the world’s first to be certified on the platform.

• A complex three-phase Microsoft certification process to release the application on Xbox LIVE marketplace

• The requirement for the solution to offer convergence with existing Premium Play devices (PCs and STBs) without adding extra complexity

• Integration with the Kinect platform, to enable Mediaset Premium customers to naturally interact (using voice and gestures) with the Xbox application

1 Data updated on 31 December 2011 2 Source: ScreenDigest June 2011 3 According to a report by network management specialist Sandvine, titled Netflix Rising.

Mediaset launches first OTT-TV offering on gaming console in Italy with Accenture 3

Having successfully completed the delivery of Mediaset’s Premium Play service, Accenture has been awarded the contract to design and build the Xbox application under the guidance and expertise of Mediaset’s Direzione Tecnica (Engineering Department). As with Premium Play, the application leverages the Accenture Video Solution platform.

Offering a rich mix of linear and non-linear broadcast offerings to distinguish it from traditional time-dependent broadcasts, Accenture Video Solution gives broadcasters an interactive experience with known consumers and content personalization. It enables service providers to launch new services quickly and cost effectively while reducing risk and setup costs. This accelerated Mediaset’s project delivery and enabled execution of a complex, innovative initiative with a greater likelihood of success.

Accenture was supported in the development of the solution by Avanade. Avanade, thanks to its technical capabilities and leadership on Microsoft technology, was the ideal partner with which to co-develop the solution and achieve results on time and on budget.

A further key determinant of the project’s success was Mediaset’s access to the Accenture Broadband Innovation Center (ABIC) in Rome. With more than 500 professionals who are deeply knowledge-able and experienced in the requirements of digital TV projects, the center is ideally positioned to help companies seize the opportunities of digital transformation.

A team of Accenture Video Solution specialists was mobilized along with resources from Avanade to closely collaborate with the Mediaset Engineering Department to deliver this challenging service.

The application has been designed to be instantly accessible to Xbox LIVE Gold subscribers, and to combine gaming features and hardware capabilities to enrich the television experience. Seamless authentication to Premium Play service via Xbox LIVE, coupled with powerful usability-driven User Interface (UI) design, allows even non-technical users the ability to easily access their favorite content.

Leveraging innovative Kinect features, Voice User Interface and Natural User Interface, the service has been designed to enable users to control video content delivery with gestures and voice commands and enjoy a personalized viewing and entertainment experience.

By speaking commands, viewers can request content, play, fast forward, pause and stop movie playback, receive recom-mendations or search and retrieve any TV program, series or soccer match among more than 2,000 titles available online.

High Definition content has been made available through the IP delivery network and optimized with adaptive streaming technology that dynamically monitors local bandwidth and video rendering performance, switching video quality in real time.

Integration of the service with Bing allows search for Mediaset content in the integrated Xbox LIVE ecosystem. Strong real-time parental control enforcement has been designed and delivered through a powerful and efficient face recognition system, thus enriching and protecting the experience of Mediaset Premium customers.

Accenture also worked to set up the 24x7 operations and maintenance service for the new device for the next three years, including real-time monitoring of service availability and customer-perceived quality of service, Content Delivery Network (CDN) balancing and monitoring, real-time traffic monitoring and analytics, predictive maintenance and all the required processes to grant a premium service level agreement to Mediaset Premium customers.

How Accenture Helped

Mediaset launches first OTT-TV offering on gaming console in Italy with Accenture 5

High Performance Delivered Despite the challenges, Mediaset reached its Christmas 2011 target of launching the new service. The company has strengthened its position as an innovator in the Italian and world broadcasting markets, and remains the only one in the Italian industry to offer video on demand on the gaming console platform, and one of the first eight in the world at launch date. This has been made possible thanks to the strong partnership between Accenture and Mediaset.

The device has boosted Mediaset’s customer acquisition, continuing the company on the path of high performance by increasing its addressable market of 1.5 million devices for premium non-linear services. The broadcaster succeeded in introducing a new device leveraging existing Accenture Video Solution-based infrastructure, and reusing the same content already available for its Web TV offering (no re-encoding of content has been necessary) without increasing total cost of ownership.

The broadcaster’s entire Premium Play catalogue is available on Xbox, comprising more than 2,000 content items—even those in High Definition—with 200 new additions every week. Xbox players now have access to more than 250 movies, 300 Warner and Universal TV Series, 70 Discovery and BBC documentaries, 500 cartoon episodes, 50 fiction episodes, 370 TV programs, episodes from the best of free and pay Mediaset channels, 430 soccer matches (Premier League, Champions League and Europa League), and more than 75 Motorcycle Grand Prix (MotoGP) races.

In the first four days after its launch, more than 60,000 Xbox LIVE subscribers downloaded the application and started watching content through their gaming console. The entertainment service has increased lock-in of Mediaset’s existing customer base, with a strong decrease in churn of new Premium Play subscribers.

According to Accenture’s Global Lead for Broadcasting, Francesco Venturini, “This was another major success in the Mediaset Premium roadmap, made possible by the flexibility and scalability of Accenture Video Solution. As it did for PLAY, this platform allowed Mediaset to provide its subscribers with access to thousands of non-linear HD content items within weeks, through the innovative gaming console Xbox 360 Kinect. Thanks to Accenture Video Solution, the project team has been able to reduce risks, maximize the performance of the service and impressively accelerate time to market for Mediaset, allowing it to reach its goal of launching by December 6, 2011, after a project lasting only 12 weeks.”

“Thanks to the deep industry knowledge and skills of Accenture as well as its Accenture Video Solution, Mediaset has the right partner and technology to ride the evolving OTT-TV wave.”Franco Ricci Managing Director Operations and Pay Business at Mediaset RTI

ContactsFrancesco Venturini Global Broadcast Industry Lead Accenture francesco.venturini@accenture.com

Giovanni F. Sorace Premium Play XBOX Solution Architect & Project Manager Accenture giovanni.f.sorace@accenture.com

Gino Galassi Premium Play Program Manager Accenture gino.galassi@accenture.com

About AccentureAccenture is a global management consulting, technology services and out-sourcing company, with approximately 246,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2011. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

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