How Televarpið built a streaming platform that reaches almost 100% of Faroese households

Televarpið was established in the summer of 2002 as a subsidiary of Faroese Telecom (Føroya Tele) with a specific aspiration: to bring digitised television to the Faroese nation. The Faroe Islands — a self-governing territory of the Kingdom of Denmark in the North Atlantic with a population of approximately 54,000 spread across 18 islands — had been served by analogue terrestrial television prior to Televarpið's launch. In December 2002, just months after Televarpið's establishment, the Faroe Islands became the first country in the world to fully switch off analogue television in favour of the digital DVB-T standard. Televarpið's digital terrestrial network was the technical foundation of that transition.

In the two decades that followed, Televarpið grew into the principal commercial distributor of television in the Faroes, carrying the national public broadcaster Kringvarp Føroya alongside Scandinavian, British, and international channels — DR1, DR2, TV2 family, NRK1, BBC, Eurosport, Discovery, Disney, National Geographic, and many others. The parent company, Faroese Telecom Group, holds a market share of 75–80% across mobile, broadband, fixed line, and TV in the Faroese market and has been actively rolling out 5G mobile coverage alongside a nationwide fibre-to-the-home programme aimed at gigabit speeds for every Faroese household.

That national-infrastructure ambition is what shaped the TV-platform decision Televarpið needed to make in 2023–2024.

By 2024, Televarpið's TV service needed to evolve along several dimensions at once, against operational constraints specific to a small-market, geographically remote, multi-lingual environment.

Televarpið selected Smartlabs after evaluating the available IPTV/OTT platforms in the market. Three factors shaped the decision.

“Our collaboration with Smartlabs has produced great results. The combined digital transmission networks now reaches almost 100% of Faroese households. The updated system is designed for flexibility and interactivity, making content more accessible and engaging.”

Smartlabs delivered an end-to-end TV-as-a-Service platform built around five integrated layers, each addressing a specific dimension of the Faroese market requirement.

Service delivery (SmartTUBE Ultra)

SmartTUBE Ultra handles the core middleware functions for Televarpið's TV service: subscriber accounts, content metadata, electronic programme guide, entitlement checks at every playback request, multi-profile management, and concurrent-device session control. The platform supports integration with Televarpið's existing OSS and BSS systems through the SmartTUBE API set, and provides integration paths for third-party streaming content sources within the unified Televarpið experience. SmartTUBE's recommender subsystem provides personalisation across the catalogue.

Multi-device applications with Faroese-first localisation

The SmartTUBE Ultra applications cover every consumer device category Faroese households use:

• Set-top boxes — modern SML-5045W AOSP STBs running the SmartTUBE Ultra UI for new customer installations, alongside the SmartTUBE Ultra Browser Application running on the legacy set-top boxes that subscribers already have in their homes.
• Mobile — native iOS and Android applications for phones and tablets, with offline downloads, multi-profile support, and full state synchronisation through the SmartTUBE backend.
• Smart TVs — applications for Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, and Android TV televisions, distributed through the manufacturers' official TV stores.
• Web — browser-based access for desktop and laptop viewing.

Every screen presents the service in Faroese, Danish, and English, with logos, colours, text colour and sizing, and background imagery customised to Televarpið's visual identity. The user experience is consistent across all device classes — same content rails, same Continue Watching state, same recommendations — synchronised through the SmartTUBE backend.

Content delivery (SmartMEDIA)

SmartMEDIA handles content processing and delivery for the IP-delivered portion of the service. The deployment covers four functional areas: real-time transcoding of TV channels to adaptive-bitrate ladders (1080p / 720p / 576p output profiles); packaging and streaming for HLS and MPEG-DASH delivery to all device classes; recording infrastructure supporting Network DVR; and VoD ingest for on-demand content. The transcoding capacity is structured to scale as the linear lineup grows.

Quality of experience monitoring (SmartCARE)

SmartCARE was deployed alongside the rest of the platform to give Televarpið continuous visibility into service quality across the deployed estate. The system collects client-side metrics (buffering events, bitrate switches, startup time, MOS, device and network conditions) alongside server-side telemetry, and applies clustering analysis to identify groups of subscribers experiencing similar issues. For an operator delivering service across a geographically distributed island nation, that visibility is operationally valuable — issues can originate in any of several delivery paths and need to be diagnosed accordingly.

Content protection (Smartlabs UDRM)

Universal DRM provides hardware-rooted content protection across the device fleet: Google Widevine for Android STBs and Chromecast-compatible devices, Apple FairPlay for iOS and macOS Safari. A single integration layer covers both systems, eliminating the per-DRM operational overhead that fragmented protection stacks impose. The unified DRM coverage is what allows Televarpið to carry premium content from Scandinavian and international licensors across all the devices the platform reaches.

Modern STB (SML-5045W)

New customer installations receive the SML-5045W — a compact Android-based set-top box built around the Amlogic S905Y4 SoC, with 2GB RAM, 8GB eMMC, dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11n/ac with Bluetooth 5.0, HDMI 2.0 output with HDCP 2.x, and Widevine L1 hardware-level DRM. The device is certified for CE and RoHS2 and ships with full Televarpið customisation including branded packaging, branded remote control, and a branded quick-start guide. The dual-track hardware architecture — legacy STBs retained for the installed base, SML-5045W for new growth — is the same pattern Smartlabs has executed at other operators (see the StarNet Moldova case study) and is the cost-effective alternative to a national device-replacement programme.

Televarpið's deployment is structured as TV-as-a-Service — a commercial and operational model in which platform delivery, ongoing operations, and support are bundled into a managed service rather than purchased as separate capital and operational components. For an operator with Televarpið's profile, that structure carries specific advantages:

• Predictable per-subscriber economics. Platform cost scales with the active subscriber base on a known per-account basis, rather than requiring large upfront capital investment followed by uncertain operational costs.
• Vendor-side operational depth. Day-to-day platform operations — version upgrades, security patches, capacity tuning, monitoring against the SmartCARE telemetry — leverage Smartlabs' operational experience across deployments in 15+ countries, rather than requiring Televarpið to build the operational expertise in-house at a scale that the Faroese market alone could not justify.
• Roadmap inheritance. New SmartTUBE features — AI-driven recommendations, predictive churn detection, FAST channel monetisation, refreshed UX patterns — become available to Televarpið through the standard upgrade path rather than as bespoke development projects.
• Faster time-to-value. TVaaS removed the months of platform-procurement, hardware-sizing, and integration ramp that a self-hosted deployment would have required, compressing the timeline from contract to subscriber-facing service.

“We are happy to serve Televarpið and deliver a comprehensive video streaming solution to Faroe households supporting existing legacy devices as well as modern set-top-boxes, web browsers, SmartTVs, iOS and Android mobiles.”

• Streaming TV service reaching almost 100% of Faroese households — as stated by Televarpið's CEO in the public announcement: "the combined digital transmission networks now reaches almost 100% of Faroese households."
• Multi-device coverage across every consumer surface. Modern Android STBs, legacy STBs preserved through browser integration, iOS and Android mobile, web, and three Smart TV platforms (Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, Android TV) — all from a single platform.
• Native Faroese-Danish-English UI delivered across every device class. Faroese — a national language with roughly 70,000 speakers — is treated as a first-class platform language, not as an afterthought.
• Legacy STB fleet preserved and integrated, not replaced. Existing subscribers retained the set-top boxes they already had; only new customers receive the modern SML-5045W. No national truck-roll programme was required for the platform transition.
• Premium content protected through Widevine and FairPlay across the device fleet — enabling integration with licensed content sources without per-device DRM fragmentation.
• Operational efficiency achieved through TV-as-a-Service. Televarpið's CEO publicly attributed the deployment outcome to outcome-based goals rather than capability-driven procurement: "By prioritizing outcome-based goals, Televarpið has achieved excellent performance and operational efficiency."

Televarpið's roadmap on the SmartTUBE platform follows the standard release cycle. New capabilities — refreshed UI/UX patterns, AI-driven recommendations, FAST channel monetisation as they become commercially relevant in the Faroese market — become available through the standard upgrade path. The TVaaS model means each new capability lands as a service-tier evolution rather than a procurement event, allowing Televarpið to evolve the offering against subscriber needs in step with how the wider streaming market evolves around it.