Astro taps Kaltura to power standalone streaming service
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Editor
| 21 December 2021
Leading Malaysian content and entertainment company Astro has chosen Kaltura TV Platform to power sooka, its standalone streaming service offering that is targeted at digital and mobile-first millennials.
Astro sooka 21Dec2021
Astro is Malaysia’s leading content and entertainment company, serving 5.7 million homes or 73% of Malaysian TV households. sooka offers its viewers a freemium package with a selection of ad-based content that can be expanded into broader content bundles based on multiple subscription plans. It delivers live sports events like the Premier League, Euro 2020, Olympics 2020, BWF badminton, NBA, and Formula 1 as well as over 4000 hours of Malaysia’s favourite Malay and Asian dramas, movies, and variety shows, with an upcoming pipeline of sooka originals and exclusives.

sooka went live in June 2021 across Malaysia on web, iOS, and Android mobile devices and was ranked as the number one entertainment app on Google Play within two weeks of launch. The service features a hybrid ad-based (AVOD) and subscription-based (SVOD) business model to encourage increased customer acquisition and convergence.

Astro is also aiming to take advantage of the benefits of delivering TV from the cloud, with a feature rich, flexible, scalable and resilient platform based on Kaltura Cloud TV technology, along with hosting on AWS.

Astro is said to have selected the Kaltura TV Platform for sooka following a competitive Request for Proposals (RFP). The Kaltura technology also enables Astro to deliver linear channels, live events and on-demand viewing experiences on web and iOS and Android mobile devices. Another reason cited Kaltura’s multiple worldwide reference cloud TV deployments with another facet being the flexibility of the Kaltura TV Platform. This allowed Astro to incorporate multiple business models and payment methods such as Google In-App Billing, and Apple In-App Purchase, with Direct Carrier Billing soon to follow.

Kaltura delivered its productised cloud solution for sooka in under six months, enabling the service to be live in time to stream UEFA EURO 2020. This resulted in a high-impact debut for sooka, which ranked the number one entertainment app on Google Play within two weeks of launch.

“We created sooka as a standalone streaming service offering to capture the digital and mobile-first millennials with a unique value proposition in the face of an increasingly crowded OTT space,” said Euan Smith, Astro chief executive officer of pay-TV and group COO. “The flexibility of Kaltura’s TV Platform allows us to quickly adapt to viewer preferences and engagement models and it supports our business model. Kaltura was able to smoothly integrate the solution into our existing ecosystem, and very rapidly meet our tight timeline.”