Tango TV and the technical elements of VOD delivery in East Africa.
One major issue that needs to be addressed by any company aiming to deliver VOD in East Africa is Data access, both data costs and connection speeds. As I have mentioned in my other posts, we have it particularly good in East Africa compared to other African countries, but still, things are not exactly ideal. This was one of the first issues I thought from the very beginning, and every solution we have implemented and are looking to implement at Tango TV is aimed at giving our users the best possible experience while using our service.
First off, compromise between quality and file size, as any viewer of the TV show Silicon Valley would know, this is a big issue, how do we make the video file smaller while keeping the picture quality reasonably high, we have been looking to implement the best compression algorithms to enable streaming even on really shitty connections, based on tests we are running this seems particularly promising.
And of course we have done user testing trying to see how low the video resolution can go before they start complaining about quality; I figured we can go as low as 360p for viewing on mobile, the movie plays well on any decent 3G connection and the file size almost always stays below 300MB, sometimes as low as 190mb.
On the matter of slow data connections, we aim at using progressive downloads and caching, this is a great way to deal with slow Internet speeds, what we are setting up here is for users with really slow speeds, they just indicate the movies they want to watch and these start downloading or buffering, this is great because the users can begin watching the movie even if the video file has not finished downloading.
And then there is the little matter of Data costs, I have done some quick maths ahead of the imminent launch of the Tango Mobile app, we are looking to experiment with subscription first, its what they call SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand), I found without a doubt, with a Tango Subscription, plus whatever the data costs the user incurs to watch a movie, even for the movies with the largest file sizes (300mb), Tango will always be cheaper compared to going out and buying or even rentingDVDs.
Our approach at Tango TV centers on giving our users the content they love through great technology, but this will only work if our users can easily adopt our technology, we want to make our technology very easy to adopt even for the least tech savvy people, and our user interfaces makes it very easy for users to discover and watch content.
Look out for the Launch of the Tango Mobile App in a few days, we are launching on mobile ahead of the launch of the Tango Boxes in a few months.
I am posting this article ahead of the launch of the Tango Mobile app in a few days.
