GO is launching the first phase of a television migration exercise which will offer “enhanced experience” for thousands of customers, the service provider says in a press statement sent to Business Malta. GO will gradually phase out DTTV in favour of IPTV.
The new features include a new TV home screen offering a more user-friendly layout which is predominantly image-driven, the service provider says, providing immediate access to one’s favourite TV content from one screen. This development is being undertaken by GO in a bid to deliver an enhanced customer experience and to give customers more content at their fingertips, the press statement sent to BM says.
“For the past year, our engineers have worked round the clock to deliver a whole new TV experience for our customers. Our focus has remained that of connecting people to the content they love, and what better way of doing this than investing in our systems to deliver a platform that can support increased interactivity, push content based on users’ preferences, and which can also deliver TV content over mobile devices at the click of a button,” said Nikhil Patil, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at GO.
“What is even better is that we have replicated this experience on our TV Anywhere APP that allows our customers to enjoy their most favourite TV content outside the comfort of their home, without consuming data from their bundle,” Mr Patil added.
Phasing out DTTV
Furthermore, Chris Attard, Senior Manager of TV Systems at GO, explained that GO has been simultaneously managing two TV networks for a number of years. Its digital terrestrial network, more commonly known as digital terrestrial television (DTTV), will be slowly phased out over the coming year, but through further investment, its internet protocol television (IPTV) network, branded GO interactive TV, will continue to deliver rich content to esteemed customers by means of this latest upgrade.
“TV technology is a fast-changing game and we felt that now is the right time to reinvent ourselves, invest and reconfirm GO as the TV leader in Malta,” said Mr Attard.
The main features offered by GO’s IPTV platform remain centred on interactivity such as program restart, pause-live capabilities, and a network digital video recorder (DVR) which means that customers can record multiple channels at the same time, amongst a host of other enriched features.
“The system is intelligent enough to capture and recognise what the users are watching and will eventually start providing them with recommendations on what content they are likely to love the most. Furthermore, the user also has the ability to create multiple profiles directly to get TV recommendations that reflect the users’ TV preferences,” Mr Attard added.
“We have been listening to our customers to understand what they want and how best they want our product delivered. Of course, this would never have been possible without GO’s heavy investment in true fibre technology which enables ultra-speeds and reliability, as well as 4G network which adds the portability aspect,” Mr Patil said.
“Now with the network enablers in place, we can push the next generation applications to our customers, starting from a rich TV experience in terms of choice of content, modern environment and content quality. Indeed, I can safely say that when it comes to features and functionality, GO has the edge and remains unrivalled in its service offering,” Mr Patil added.
This upgrade will be undertaken over the course of a number of weeks, therefore GO warns that customers will be upgraded in different phases in order to ensure a smooth change. GO promised to notify customers in advance.