TStv Africa, through its parent company, is on the verge of launching a new over-the-top video streaming service which promises to rival Netflix.
Bright Echefu, TStv’s Managing Director, announced the product (Briech.tv) during a parley with media professionals at the company’s headquarters located at Idu Industrial Estate, Abuja, on Wednesday.
Echefu said TStv’s OTT (over-the-top video streaming) app was currently being tested and could compete with the likes of Netflix when it’s finally released to subscribers.
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“We all know that the world is moving toward the direction of OTT. TStv also has an OTT app called Briech which is currently being tested.
“You’re able to watch movies on it just like Netflix, and you’re able to view all the TStv channels on it as well.”
Our correspondent, alongside other media professionals, took an exclusive tour of TStv’s facilities, which included the sensitive areas housing a 200ft data center and a network operating center with about 100 screens being used to transmit TStv’s in-house and licensed channels to viewers.
The data center manager, Jenifer Ogbanor, explained that besides hosting their inhouse data, TStv also helps other organizations to reduce cost by hosting their apps and data at the center.
“Here we maintain data integrity, which means whatever data we store here is secured. Apart from our customers, we host data centre services for other organizations. This means that if you have an office, applications and servers…we take up those capital and operation expenditures from you by hosting those servers here while you work in your office seamlessly. So those are some of the services we give you from here,” she said.
The CEO, Echefu, had earlier said that subscribers to TStv’s Smart Decoder were currently enjoying ‘pay as you go’ high-definition channels for as low as N1.00 and a maximum of N2.00 per channel.
He added that TStv’s “A La Carte feature allows our subscribers to choose only the channels they want, the Pay As You Go feature ensures they pay only for the channels they have chosen while Pay Per View feature means they pay only for the time their Set Top Box is on and connected, within a reasonable period unless they activate the pause subscription option.”
Echefu further said, “We can confirm to the representatives of the Nigeria Broadcasting Commission and members of the press that our plan and promise to provide Nigerians with a Direct to Home television service that allows consumers have total control over the choice of what they watch and pay for has been delivered and proven to be workable.
“This is unprecedented in Nigeria and TStv Africa is proud to lead this innovation. We are further delighted that we are able to reduce our prices per channels for the coming celebration periods from Valentine all through Easter and to Ramadan for subscribers to premium television content such as the Cinemachi channels, 1 Movies, Fox News, Al-Jazeera, ESPN and so many others.”