Astro partners with Synamedia for new video services

Synamedia and Astro Malaysia Holdings (Astro), today announced they have entered into a strategic partnership to deliver a seamless premium video experience to Astro subscribers across all devices.

Synamedia is the largest independent video software provider while Astro is Malaysia’s leading content and consumer company.

Synamedia’s cloud-based Infinite video platform will enable Astro to secure, distribute and monetise premium video experiences across all screens while deepening viewer engagement.

Importantly, Infinite will deliver the same high-quality viewing experience on one-way and two-way connected devices, and Astro customers will continue to have access to all stored and scheduled recordings on the new platform.

The partnership has resulted in a major improvement to the user experience (UX) across the existing DVR and Astro Go video streaming services.

Astro customers can enjoy the next generation UI/UX which includes an intuitive seamless experience; a uniform look-and-feel across multi-devices; enhanced search; enriched metadata; and instantaneous playback using Synamedia’s adaptive bit rate streaming.

Customers can upgrade to new hybrid DTH and IP enabled 4K UHD set-top boxes with the new UX and cloud-based recording (cDVR) features. This allows users to access the recordings on their DVR at home as well as using the Astro Go app.

Henry Tan, CEO of Astro said, “The adoption of a seamless user interface and the deployment of the new 4K UHD set-top-boxes with cloud-based recording will improve the customer experience substantially. We believe this improvement will spur growth opportunities in our SVOD, TVOD and OTT services.”

Yves Padrines, CEO, Synamedia, said, “We understand how important it is for Astro to embrace the cloud while protecting its existing hybrid broadcast technology investments and ensuring the customer experience remains second to none.

“Our experienced systems integration team is doing just that – delivering a smooth transition path that will allow Astro to embrace the myriad new opportunities that Infinite offers.”

Using Synamedia’s Infinite platform, Astro customers will enjoy a personalized UX incorporating multi-screen recommendation, multi-lingual search and discovery capability across 40,000 hours of content.

This will make it easy to find relevant content quickly, enhancing engagement, and opening up new revenue opportunities for premium content. The new look and feel will be introduced in the following months.