“My secret mission is to give power back to service providers and content owners so they can decide who gets on a platform rather than the company that owns the silicon or the television set.”
Those are the words of Nick Thexton, EVP, Media Cloud Services at Synamedia, as his company looks to rip up the economics of media company-supplied hardware with its Senza innovation – a combination of cloud connector hardware and cloud-based application platform.
The Senza cloud connector, which has a six-dollar hardware bill of materials, acts like a set-top box (IP-only, up to HDTV resolution) but removes all application and UX rendering to the cloud. Synamedia estimates the device could have a ten-year lifespan.
The Senza cloud platform hosts the HTML5 applications and the user experience behind the services that consumers will see. These are rendered in the cloud and delivered in real-time (there is no rendering in the device). Content owners develop apps for the platform and Synamedia creates and manages the UX.
Senza comes with such a low hardware cost that a streaming service provider, like an AVOD or D2C sports provider, could potentially offer their own device to consumers. That means they ‘own’ the sovereign application and home screen, can guarantee their prominence and can choose to include other streaming services to make their offer more sticky. Synamedia believes the ad-funded streaming market is a strong candidate for Senza.
Alternatively, a Pay TV provider working to low margins in a large market, or in low ARPU markets, could provide a typical aggregation offer, including with onboarded streaming app partners. Synamedia has highlighted broadband-only providers as a potential market – those wanting the ability to offer a low-cost television service as a value-add to customers.
Other potential markets for Senza include hospitality – such as bars, hotels and even stadia.
Thexton is aware that a number of global OS/UX providers and television set manufacturers want to be the gateway to the content universe. He is concerned that device economics should not determine the shape of the television industry.
He adds: “We are not creating a walled-garden – we just enable the cloud services. The content providers own their own data. Nobody can interfere with prominence. We are not taking advertising revenue splits or subscription shares.” Synamedia talks about helping customers “avoid ecosystem taxes”.
The first publicly named Senza customer is SuperCloud International, which offers the UMAXX.TV Internet and 350-channel live TV service over a proprietary 5G network, with in-home televisions one of the key viewing devices. A far better known service provider is also signed up.
Synamedia is acting as a B2B2C solution vendor and Senza is a trade brand that is not intended for consumers. The company has no intention of staying in the hardware business – it will license the device software and hardware design without profit in order to grow the market for Senza the platform. It hopes that devices could even be shipped to consumers free as part of service offers.
Senza customers (e.g. service providers or streamers) will be charged using a classic SaaS model for the application/UX hosting, rendering and delivery.
With Senza, two separate streams are sent to the cloud connector device, one being the rendered UX/applications from the Synamedia cloud and the other being the video stream from the content provider via its CDN. Video playout or distribution is not a part of the solution, but the Senza service does manage the integration of UX and video and the ultra-fast switching between the two.
Thexton characterizes today’s set-top box and Smart TV device market as a thick-client world and says Senza represents a move to a thin client architecture that exploits the compute and graphics capabilities found in the cloud. This has been made possible for TV by tackling a number of challenges, especially reducing latency and avoiding congestion where there is concurrent demand for the UX streams.
“This will scale – that is the clever part. You must have scale in mind when you launch a platform like this,” Thexton observes.” Among other things, he is referring to the smart management of processing loads across cloud instances. Synamedia has drawn on its expertise working with low-latency protocols in video conferencing, and has focused strongly on Wi-Fi optimization, too.
Senza uses Google Widevine L1 content security (the highest available, fit for UHD) so does not have to rely on a trusted execution environment in the device chipset. This is one of the ways cost has been stripped from the device. Each device is uniquely serialized and tracked through the supply chain, and devices are authenticated and can be revoked. “We can guarantee the nature of the trusted relationship between content partners and those delivering the content,” Thexton comments.
The use of HTML5 is viewed as a way to dramatically reduce the cost of applications development and apps lifecycle management for content owners. Synamedia says Senza slashes TV application onboarding costs by up to 90%. The solution will help more specialized content owners enter the market (as content providers on other people’s Senza-enabled offers, if not with their own devices). Onboarding is also fast.
The tiny device – comparable in size to an earbuds case – is powered via its USB-C socket, so can be run from a USB outlet on the television or using almost any USB socket/plug (it needs a 5V USB supply capable of delivering 500mA). The Senza hardware technology could be integrated into other devices – and Synamedia has been talking to a soundbar manufacturer, for example.
Synamedia believes peripheral devices still have a place in a world where more people own Smart TVs, partly because of the vast number of non-smart televisions still in homes, and partly because software updates do not last forever. Thexton notes: “My 2017 model television had its last update in 2021. The software life for a television is far shorter than the display technology.”
Ben Keen, independent analyst, concludes: “For many years a debate has raged about whether the set-top box has a future. Now Synamedia has redrawn the terms of that debate by radically rethinking the role of the in-home device using a cloud-first design that promises to fundamentally change the economics of TV delivery.”
One Senza reseller, AMT, has a clear focus on the service provider market. Brian Fallon, Senior Vice President of Go to Market, AMT, declares: “We’ve built a solid track record for delivering innovative options to our broadband, cable and telco customers in North America, South America and Europe – and we’re energized to get them onboarded to Senza.”
Editor’s comment
As with all groundbreaking technology launches, we will be able to judge the strength of Senza over time as customers sign up.
In theory it has the potential to revolutionize the streaming market if it enables app providers, like a brand-name AVOD service, to own their own device. You can imagine a fan of a thematic or special interest streaming service switching to HDMI2 to gain instant access into their favourite streaming service, especially if that service has low prominence on their Smart TV interface.
Meanwhile, on the service provider side of the market, Senza could create a new go-to-market option for video services beyond a classic set-top box or the app-among-apps approach where a service provider sits inside a Smart TV app store. An STB future may be considered too expensive for some, but app-among-apps removes the ability to be the sovereign application that consumers see first and return to between content journeys.
Another possible service provider strategy is to partner with a Smart TV manufacturer and become the sovereign application on their television set, probably using HbbTV Operator App. This requires a sophisticated business partnership and may only work for service provider brands with clear consumer appeal – sufficient to help sell televisions in retail.
The Senza cloud connector is more in keeping with the STB model: the service provider is the sovereign application that a user sees first and last, with control of the UX and the services that appear on it. The key difference is that the hardware economics are re-set.
