TV 2 launches new version of Vimond’s Sumo

Vimond Media Solutions has confirmed that Norway’s TV 2 has launched a new version of its award-winning Sumo online TV service powered by the Vimond Media Platform.

TV 2 Sumo — whose new design was unveiled at the Nordic launch of Windows 8 on 26 October — is Scandinavia’s largest commercial Web TV service, offering a comprehensive library of TV 2 programmes that viewers can watch on demand using their platform of choice.

Vimond helped TV 2 create the new Sumo, which has a completely new design featuring easy content-browsing and personalised channels.

“We worked with TV 2 to build the new Sumo portal with advanced capabilities from our platform, so that the end users can be the directors of their own channels,” says Helge Høibraaten, CEO of Vimond Media Solutions. “Controlling what content they see and when they see it helps keep viewers engaged, which in turn helps TV 2 attract revenue and capitalize on its content library. In a sense, Vimond ‘grew up’ with TV 2; likewise, TV 2 Sumo has grown up with us.”

TV 2 Sumo’s ‘My Sumo’ feature gives viewers the ability to schedule and plan as many channels as they like with personalised content. The redesigned Sumo also offers features such as shortcuts to favourites and next episodes, a programme guide for the last and coming seven days, and navigation between episodes from the video player. Users have the ability to open video in an external window in order to change the size and use their computer while watching, view a programme guide for a given channel while watching it so they can see what’s next, open and navigate their own channels from the video player, and share links to Facebook and Twitter.

The Sumo portal is built on Vimond’s action-based Web framework developed on Ruby on Rails. The advanced Vimond platform provides a comprehensive environment for managing and delivering multiformat over-the-top (OTT) services, with full facilities for all creative, logistical, and business aspects of the operation. With its modular architecture, Vimond offers sophisticated tools and controls for every aspect of an OTT service, from ingest and encoding through conditional access to business intelligence reporting.