In Australia, only a handful of content publishers have made their way onto the Apple TV platform so far this year. To date, Network Ten and Cricket Australia both have Apple TV apps, offering content over the diminutive yet powerful set top box.
As of a fews weeks ago, Stan, the video-on-demand service co-owned by the Nine Network and Fairfax Media, was launched on Apple TV. It is an important milestone for the service as Stan brings its own catalogue of hundreds of TV shows and movies to Apple TV. With an Apple TV app, Stan is now available on an increasingly popular platform in many Australian households, making it even more accessible to the increasing number of viewers tuning into its video-on-demand services.
According to data from Nielsen and Screen Australia released earlier this year, half of all Australians with access to the internet are watching video content online. It’s even bigger news for Australian content itself — of VOD viewers, some 40 percent are watching local Aussie content online, and 20 percent are watching local Aussie films.
With Stan’s Apple TV app, that Aussie content is front and centre: there’s Jamie: Private Schoolgirl, Redfern Now, Rake, not to mention the productions that Stan has announced it will help co-produce exclusively for the service. And then, there is the the exclusive online content like Community, Dig and Transparent that makes Stan a standout in this competitive landscape with three other VOD players.
Brightcove partnered with Stan to provide the cloud-based transcoding firepower it needed to prepare thousands of hours of content quickly and at high quality - both prior to launch and as more content has been becoming available on Stan. Brightcove’s Zencoder solution provided Stan with scalable, transcoding capabilities with support for MPEG-DASH and HLS video formats, and Digital Rights Management technology that enables content protection on a multitude of devices and platforms.
With Brightcove’s Zencoder, the content delivered is crisp and clean — available at 1080p full high-definition video and 5.1 surround sound audio.
Device ubiquity is a strategic imperative for Stan — like other over-the-top and video-on-demand players, it needs to ensure availability on the most popular platforms for its target demographics to maximize its value proposition. With the addition of an Apple TV app, Stan is clearly on the right track.
Zencoder is the performance leader for live and file cloud encoding