Ocilion boss Hans Kühberger: “We want to offer even greater variety around station packages”

Ocilion has its roots in its sister company Infotech, an IT system house and Internet service provider, in the early 2000s. Infotech was also founded in 1993 by Hans Kühberger. The IPTV pioneer and ocilion managing director recently interviewed DIGITAL TELEVISION.

But first, let’s take a quick look at the company’s history: In the course of the expansion of the fiber optic network and in connection with the endeavor to map all services for private customers via IP, Hans Kühberger developed the first IPTV solutions in 2002. Due to the increasing demand, he founded Ocilion IPTV Technologies GmbH in 2004 to offer operators of xDSL, HFC and FTTx networks on the German-speaking market individual complete IPTV solutions. The big breakthrough came in 2009 with a change in the law in Switzerland that enabled replay and network-side recording for network operators. As a pioneer in the IPTV market, ocilion was able to win numerous network operators in Switzerland for its solution.

IPTV for buildings (in-house)

In 2009 ocilion started a solution for the building sector. Hotels, hospitals, care facilities, media houses as well as stadiums, ships and oil platforms can be equipped with IPTV. It is a fully integrated IPTV system that can be flexibly adapted to individual requirements in the building and the respective network structure. Individuality, ease of use and many added value functions characterize the in-house solution for guests, patients and employees. Ocilion also makes the know-how from the in-house area available to network operators so that they can also serve hotels in their network in addition to private households.

Cloud solution

Since 2016 ocilion has been offering a comprehensive IPTV cloud solution (wholesale service) in Germany and Austria as a rental variant of the tried and tested on-premises variant – optimized for small and medium-sized network operators. The cloud solution is hosted directly by ocilion. Network operators receive a complete package for the operation of a turnkey IPTV platform (white-labeled) including set top boxes, apps and a customized user interface. TV channels, EPG data, video-on-demand, mobile integration and much more are transferred as a bundled signal at the transfer point – in Frankfurt, Vienna, Ried or Innsbruck. With this rapid implementation and the cost-effective start, even smaller operators can benefit from a high-quality and future-proof IPTV product for their customers.

Own 4k set top box family

At the end of 2018 ocilion launched its own 4K set top box family P400. The fourth generation of set top boxes was developed by ocilion and consists of four homogeneous models. They have identical software and can therefore be supplied with updates quickly and easily. Thanks to the modular system, ocilion can serve all common network infrastructures (HFC, FTTH, VDSL, OTT) and meet all requirements of network operators and building projects.

With over 16 years of experience and now 70 employees, ocilion has already won over 60 network operators in German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein) and thus supplies most providers. It was not until August that ten new customers were added, five each in Germany Austria (DF reported). In spite of the adverse circumstances, various improvements had already been made beforehand in 2020. Since April last year, network operators have been able to offer their end customers home cinema premieres with the “Premium Movie Package” from ocilion, parallel to the cinema release. According to Kühberger, the demand from end customers is very high. “In the first few months of the pandemic, we recorded a doubling of the film views, which speaks for the attractiveness of our VoD service.” In addition, several free TV channels from Discovery were added to the offer in June, and Sky Sport News also joined in the same month. Not to forget: the extensive system update from April – including a new user interface.

today

As the only provider, ocilion also offers network operators a local solution (on-premises system – directly in the network operator’s infrastructure) or a cloud variant (wholesale service) to choose from. In addition, according to the company, over 150 in-house projects have now been implemented. The new ocilion brand identity with a modernized appearance and the claim “See what is possible” is intended to reflect this development and underline further growth (DF also reported on this). In 2021, the company first announced a groundbreaking change:

“In addition, we have just expanded our content department, for which we were able to win an experienced expert, Thomas Bichlmeir (previously at Discovery and M-net), as” Head of Content “,” says Kühberger. “Under his leadership, we want to offer an even greater variety of content for everything to do with broadcaster and foreign language packages, pay TV, video-on-demand, apps and media libraries so that network operators don’t have to worry about it themselves.”

Read the entire interview with Ing. Hans Kühberger on DIGITAL FERNSEHEN at the weekend. In it he calls Ocilion managing director IPTV “the engine” for providers “to get even more end customers to connect”.