Six things you didn’t know about SmartLabs

The ability to remain agile is a crucial requirement for any business, but now more than ever. For SmartLabs, this is not a new feeling. Since we entered the IPTV/OTT market 12 years ago, we have seen changes in consumer behaviour and tech developments as well as people and places.

Mikhail Grachev, CEO at SmartLabs, explains: “We started as a platform provider, and over many years developing and enhancing our product suite, have evolved into a leading end-to-end, interactive, multi-screen TV solution. Today, this includes content delivery, apps for mobile and SmartTVs and evolution options for legacy systems, including hi-end STBs.

“Our heritage and broad experience means that we are well positioned to breathe new life into operator platforms and analytics for a best in class outcome.”

We figured it might be good to tell you more about us and what we have lived through, so here are six things you didn’t know about SmartLabs.

1. We are bigger than you realise. Every day, over 6.5 million demanding customers rely on our multi-screen, interactive offering with our STBs and apps. Our solutions have been deployed in managed and unmanaged IP, Hybrid DVB+ IP and mobile networks.
   
   We have offices in Berlin, Moscow and London and have an international team of 50 employees. Our customers are based all over the world and include Baltcom, O2, Starnet, Primetel and Rostelecom to name a few. You can read more about our projects and what it is like working with us on the testimonials page on our site.
    
2. We cut our teeth in the world of set top boxes, but only moved into this market because we were let down by hardware suppliers that couldn’t keep up with our tech. This has worked well for us over the years, as we truly understand the market demands and also the different technologies on offer.
   
   We also understand the importance of working with a trusted supplier who understands legacy systems. The last thing you want to do is to upgrade your tech offering and lose all the value in your existing infrastructure.
    
3. We are in close partnership with more than 40 leading interactive TV solutions vendors and suppliers including Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and LG. We are also a strategic partner with Google on its Widevine CAS/DRM solution. This means we are able to certify other 3^rd party devices.
   
   Widevine’s DRM solution enables licensing, secure distribution and protected playback of content on any consumer device. Content owners, multiple service operators and digital media providers can use it to ensure revenue-generating, royalty-free services keep flowing to whatever device consumers want to use. If you want to know more specifically about Widevine, please get in touch via sales@smartlabs.tv.
    
4. Our team are highly experienced engineers and we are able to offer a level of customisation that sets us above our competition. In our deployments to date, we have created many bespoke customisations for customers, and we do this in house.
   
   We have experience in migrating legacy systems from Linux, implementing Android, including being certified for Android Operator Tier, and handling the largest IPTV implementation ever done. We also know a lot about AVOD, Cloud and multi-service environments, for both operators and service providers.
    
5. We are focused on offering exceptional customer service, and offer a 24 hour trouble ticketing hotline. Whether it is a question about a bug fix, consultation about the next steps, or a request for a particular feature, we guarantee we will be on it ASAP. Current response times are a couple of hours and we like to think that we can be the first point of contact to help you solve any issues before your customers even notice.
   
   Our SmartCARE tool provides service status data in your IPTV and OTT networks 24х7, allowing you to proactively resolve issues and anomalies, helping you to offer top-notch customer service and monitor content viewing behaviours.
    
6. We are financially secure. In our time, we have seen large and smaller players disappear from the market. Our entire focus is our multi-screen, multi-networks video streaming solution. Unlike other businesses, this is not a side line for us. We are privately owned and the board directors are the founders of the business.
   
   If you are of the mindset of ‘no-one ever got fired for buying IBM’ and are looking for a supplier that has a trusted legacy, experience, expertise, a portfolio to boast of and who will be around for the foreseeable future, we should be having a conversation.

If you have got a question about your next move, get in touch with our team. We guarantee we will be able to point you in the right direction and answer any question you may have in this space. Or if you want to do a bit more research, download our white paper or watch the recent webinar we did with Dataxis.

We are SmartLabs, one of the largest and most successful companies in the IPTV OTT world and we are looking forward to getting to know you better.