As the premiere pay television broadcast company in Southern Africa, DSTV looked to take advantage of the ever-increasing popularity of fast internet connectivity within South Africa.

With the gradual spread of the broadband internet infrastructure over the last two to three years, more and more DSTV subscribers can now stream and download their favourite TV shows and sports highlights from M-Net, kykNET, SuperSport, Channel O and other top broadcast channels.

GenXml was comissioned to provide a content management framework (using the GenXml Media CMS) to manage the hierarchy of channels, programs, episodes, sports categories and tournament highlights. All display of meta data, images, channel-specific styles and website navigation is handled by the GenXml Distributed CMS (formerly Media CMS 2.0).
 

As well as setting up the content management infrastructure to manage the displaying of data within the website, I integrated the website content and functionality with the Entriq video encryption service which is used to license the streamed and downloaded video files.

For the DSTV Broadband video content, Entriq uses Microsoft's Windows Media DRM licensing service to encrypt the video files. The website integrates the content captured into the CMS with Entriq's 3^rd party services to authenticate and authorize registered members, enabling them to view the encrypted files.

Using MWEB's hosting infrastructure, the DSTV Broadband website and encrypted video content will both be served from MWEB's high end, state-of-the-art servers. This ensures uninterrupted enjoyment of this new premium internet TV experience.

Since this service will only be available to current DSTV subscribers, another layer of integration was added to the website. Anyone registering or logging in is checked against the Multichoice subscriber database to check the validity of the member's current subscription status.

Together with the systems integration and website architecture services performed on this project, I also worked closely with DSTV's design team to ensure that the website is built around good website layout and user-centric design. This helped make DSTV Broadband a simple to use and content-rich website, giving the subscribers exactly what they're looking for right at their fingertips. I'll continue to assist this client whenever and wherever necessary, making sure this website remains a premium web service.

DSTV Broadband will be open for use to the public later this year and is currently in an internal testing phase. Come back to this page to check whether you too can enjoy this all new, all South African internet entertainment experience.