Product update: Enhanced EPG functionality with AXIS

We’re pleased to announce a new EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) feature upgrade for AXIS, our market leading targeted UX management console and suite of multi-platform reference apps, The AXIS EPG feature addition utilizes our long-standing experience in creating new OTT and linear TV and combines them in order to create out-of-the-box EPG functionality.

The AXIS EPG feature addition is a result of our long-standing experience in creating new OTT and linear TV and combines them in order to create out-of-the-box EPG functionality.

This means that users can now create an EPG page for all types of apps that support a channel guide row*. The channel guide row can take ingested channels or lists of scheduled content and display it as a full screen guide that, as with all of AXIS’ functionality, can be customized to fit a customer’s branding.

The importance of the EPG

Although commonly associated with the linear era of television, the EPG remains an intuitive and popular way for providers to display live television via their OTT platform. As lines between set-top boxes and OTT continue to blur, EPGs will continue to be the go-to navigation choice for OTT providers.

This is especially exacerbated by the prominence of live sports and the natural overlap of content that multiple live fixtures or events being played at the same time brings, as well as the sheer size of on-demand libraries of content that some of the larger providers offer, each of which necessitates the need for more effective content discovery tools.

However, AXIS’ EPG functionality is designed to move past the legacy ‘grid’ system of traditional EPGs and create a new version that is intuitively suitable for the streaming era, and which allows operators to integrate seamlessly linear channel functionality alongside traditional SVOD content.

This approach has been carefully designed by leaning on our years of experience in creating and building bespoke EPG functionality for broadcast clients around the world and is now available ‘out-of-the box’ as part of AXIS’ updated suite of templates.

Personalization

Thanks to AXIS’ powerful segmentation tools, the EPG can also be personalized for different groups of users. This allows operators to offer different content and/or experiences depending on a user’s device, user profile or languages, or even manually allocated segmentation tags.

Variants can also be applied at row level, meaning the same page is displayed for all users but the row can be targeted for specific use cases, such as highlighting specific viewer preferences, or automatically displaying appropriate rights depending what country they are watching from.

Additional functionality

In addition to the EPG, we have also added:

• A new Channel Detail page, which offers configurable channel detail, branding, and feature.
• An ‘On now’ feature designed to showcase live content that is currently airing on a specific channel.
• And a channel schedule to showcase upcoming programming.

The latest version of AXIS also offers a new Channel Hero row, allowing platforms to automatically display a full-width stream of a specific live linear channel. This can be added as a hero header on standard category pages, or as a hero header on the Channel Detail Page and gives providers more ways to showcase key content.

To learn more about AXIS or any of Deltatre’s other areas of OTT expertise, get in touch

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* Except for Roku, which will follow later this year.