Release notes for OpenTV Platform

Release summary 

This release includes a large number of new features and enhancements, including enhanced trailer support (series and season trailers, trailer upload in OpCon, and trailers in rails and media cards), recommendation enhancements, personalised reviews, Rails Builder usability improvements, blueprint image handling improvements, head-end binge watching support, rails stats in OpCon, server-side enforcement for parental control PINs, time travel in Rails Builder’s Preview mode, webapp hosting for app vendors, and more.

Ateme packager integration for VOD

Ateme encoders (Titan File) and the Ateme packagers (NEA DVR) are two separate disjointed systems at the moment.

This feature is for packaging of assets using Ateme packager via a new Ateme Adapter that has been developed.

Multi-app support in DMM           

This feature is to facilitate OPF platform to send messages to multiple apps belonging to different tenants.

1. Provides a solution in DMM to be able to configure multiple apps for both ADM and Firebase devices and hence all devices registered to these apps get messages irrespective of tenants. 

2. Provide a solution in DMM to configure for multi-app if IoT has the same problem as ADM or any other problem.

NPVR – CIM TiVo – SeriesID bound to channel          

Several changes have been made to CIM-TiVo to address issues faced and support new use cases being introduced.

SeriesId needs to be channel specific.

Series/season/rails trailers         

This feature adds support for series trailers and season trailers, and support for trailers in OpCon (including upload), support for trailers in rails, and support for trailers in media cards (series and season – already covered for EditorialContent).

Device details update/sync

This feature resolves the problem where operators were not able to update a device once it had been created.

This feature supports the ability to update all device details from the client. Key cases are app upgrade and device upgrade.

Recommendation enhancements – activities

This feature reviews and improves the OpenTV Platform integration with Ncanto with respect to the existing activities that are being sent by clients.

This is to make recommendations more accurate by avoiding scoring all activities equally.  

Blueprints – localised field support         

This feature is to handle the localised field type separately from the rest of the UX improvements.

Personalized reviews – phase 1         

The purpose of this feature is to use an AI approach to enable reviews, descriptions, and text to be personalised to individual users or groups of users. The intent is to increase user engagement by personalising the text.

Notify consumers of next best offer – phase 1

This feature is to build a system based on AWS to promote an offer to a user. 

The offer will be the one that best matches (fits) the user. The user data and offer data will be available.

Offer data will not be limited to OPF data, it will also include operator service and physical products. 

AI was used to achieve this and it is a joint exercise with AWS. 

Blueprint image handling             

This feature addresses several improvements:

• Image service file upload size too small, image upload progress bar, image upload error

• Remove display images for image blueprints, Images sorted with newest at the top, picking an image is clunky

• Unify image upload screen in Rails Builder with the channel logo one

• Any image "manually uploaded" to OPF should be available in Rails Builder as an internal image.

• Show number of instances of the image in the image picker screen (e.g., for a picture of can of Coke, "2 image configurations reference this image" – click to see the filtered instances that you can CRUD), show external images on the same images screen

• Move image blueprints into the single image screen.

• Pick existing image -> use existing instance (pick or auto select if just one instance) or create new instance (new instance will need a name and sensible defaults) for internal/external/channel

• Image shown is not the one that was added.

• Internal image should pre-populate standard/light/dark images.

• Default image type: banner/background/logo (KVP groups → internal image default selection)

• Add image has no ability to add tags directly on the upload (have to add them afterwards)

• Collapse Internal Image and External Image blueprints into "Images".

Rails Builder usability feedback  

This feature is to address several improvements:

• Localised string type (filter using query param in rails response) – migration concerns (locale definition – system locale)

• Bypass layouts page when clicking a template.

• Save buttons should be sticky.

• Tenant ID should be a drop down.

• Need to make better use of screen space.

• Custom -> Feature Banner -> Add is all the way at the bottom.

• Custom -> Feature Banner -> no search/filter to pick from the available instances

• Promo Banner → default selection = template navigation rather than none

• Template ID – no search/filter

• No save and add button (to add to rail)

• KVP group selection is limited .

• Alt text – localised field

• Name – localised field

• When a blueprint instance is added, newest should be first and/or have a sort option (alphabetical, newest, most frequently used).

• Name should not be the unique reference, ID must be.

• Child tenant IDs should just inherit from the parent tenant – should not be possible to change.

• Rails Builder – review locale picker screen (new template creation, etc.)

• Fine-grained control over the layout (pattern, of a rail)

• Ability to switch between instances of the same type

• Ability to switch between instances of different type

• Custom rails – should be possible to add new fields

Binge-watching - support for cues

Binge watching provides the capability for a client to promote content from a series that the user has already commenced watching.

As part of this experience a user will be offered the ability to skip start/end credits via the use of cue-points within the content metadata.

Rails stats screen in OpCon

This feature is the screen in OpCon to document A/B testing results:

• Comparison of rail performance with A/B tests

• Metrics / per period (Views (from Rails), Views (Globally), Clicks (from Rail), Clicks (Globally), Plays (from Rail), Plays (Globally), Completions (from Rail), Completions (Globally), Purchases (from Rail), Purchases (Globally), Engagement Time (from Rail), Engagement Time (Globally))

• Drill down by Rails Tests (A/B/Both), Device (Group/Model/Platform), Form Factor (Big Screen, Mobile, Desktop), Products Entitled / Not Entitled, Segments, Time, Country, App Version

• Range of visual presentation (graphs, tables)

• Conversion funnel (Visit, View, Click, Play)

• Tables of data: graphs

• Compare periods (compared to last day/week/month)

• Aware of TV peaks, e.g., compare this Saturday to last Saturday

• High performance

Binge watching API on head-end 

Binge watching provides the capability for a client to promote content from a series that the user has already commenced watching.

ION already provides some binge watching support. This feature will deliver a binge-watching capability from the head-end.

User recording requests from CDVR to DWH        

This feature is to have the source of user recording requests stored in the DWH be the head-end service rather than the client sending a activity. 

Ateme STCU URL generation

STCU URLs generated from the URL template at the service level understand a fixed list of templates that are per encoder/transcoder. In the case of Ateme, the following URL needs to be supported to be at service level and STCU generation use cases. 

The following list of use cases are supported for:

• DASH and HLS variants

• Template regex parsing for startTime and endTime

• Key recognition if required for begin and end

• Timestamp formatting for yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ssZ or epoch

• Hostname translation (if required from encoder to CDN)

Adapter for NPVR spec adoption for Ateme  / LTCU validation

For NPVR functionality to work with an Ateme system, we have created an adapter that maps the NAGRA PRI interface which has the APIs below to Ateme’s NPVR APIs:

• GET /cxf/pri/v1/capturedassets/{id}

• POST /cxf/pri/v1/capturedasset

• PUT /cxf/pri/v1/capturedassets/{id}

• DELETE /cxf/pri/v1/capturedassets/{id}

• POST /cxf/pri/v1/packagedassets

Separate content auth and OPF access token signing keys – IAS based solution        

This feature separates the signing/encryption key used by OPF to generate access tokens and contentAuthZ tokens.

Rails trailers – completion           

This feature is for extended trailer support for series and season content types, enabling trailer linking, display priority management, Operator Console administration, media card retrieval, and optional trailer delivery within RAILs responses – bringing trailers into modern, front-and-centre UX experiences.

Parental control PIN server side enforcement

This feature enforces mandatory PIN checks for nominated OPF service endpoints, such as changing a client user's user profile or purchasing a product. Deployment configuration enables PIN validation per API; when disabled, the service API skips PIN checks, allowing existing behavior to continue.

Productised webapp hosting solution for app vendors

The purpose of the feature is to deliver a productised and reusable website hosting solution for apps vendors.

Approved device limits on device groups

This feature is for the operator to upsell based on device groups. It also allows the operator to manage approved playout limits at a more granular level.

OPF’s current config allows operators to limit the number of concurrent approved devices. This feature extends this functionality to allow the limits to be set on device groups.

Non-UI locale support for metadata

This feature enables the next available locale to be displayed instead of blank titles.

Customer notifications from Grafana

This feature sends OPF service status (up/down) email notifications to customers, based on the "[UD01] Service API Status Dashboard" Grafana dashboard.

Outbound link to customers self-care with SSO

This attaches the user's device or account identifier to the outbound link sent to the self-service portal to enable automatic login.

This feature supports operators who want users to be auto‑logged in.

Blueprint banner enhancements (circle tiles, captions)

This feature simplifies blueprint configuration with support for composite (reusable "super") blueprints, banner caption/title text on promotional and advertisement banners, circle tile styles with configurable image fallback, relevance-based filtering of blueprint selections, improved information visibility, and removal of the unique name constraint on blueprints and instances.

Preview output – time travel

This feature is to allow the operator to set a date and time in Preview mode in OpCon.

The Preview displays rails and rail sections as per the scheduling at the selected date and time.

Trailer upload

This feature is to enable the operator to upload a trailer physically to an S3 location.

Caching, removal of snippets

The snippets approach to caching via values in the token causes issues for clients, especially those using browser caching, because the cache isn't cleared when the token changes but the URL stays the same.

This means that sometimes when a user switches profiles, the rails don't update to reflect the change, even when switching from an adult to a child profile.

This feature fixes this issue.

Audit logs – self-service OPF application audit logs for customers and security compliance (OpCon apps audit headers propagation)

This feature collects and shares OPF application audit logs with customers. Collecting these logs is a security requirement.

For forensic analysis, troubleshooting, and contractual purposes, we must collect logs of all operator actions that can modify OPF systems.

This feature will:

• Inventory all operations to be traced in audit logs.

• Define and implement application audit logs using a common format to enable routing and collection.

• Collect audit logs in the centralized self-service logging stack.

• Store them in an S3 bucket with tenant segmentation.

• Expose them in the AWS OpenSearch dashboard.

Compatibility matrix

List of known issues

List of open issues

API changes