SmartLabs enabled MTS Home TV subscribers with Omlet.ru

May 20, 2011. – SmartLabs has announced that subscribers of interactive digital television MTS Home TV have now gained access to the Omlet.ru multimedia entertainment directory.

Since 2009, Omlet.ru offers access to a wide variety of multimedia content. It has gained popularity and earned the trust of its users by high video quality and wide choice of content. In view of this, MTS decided to integrate Omlet.ru into the MTS existing IPTV service to further enhance its digital TV offering actively promoted under the MTS Home TV brand.

To provide the Home TV services, MTS applies the SmartTUBE SDP converged platform from SmartLabs, a leading technology provider for IPTV operators. Hence Omlet.ru movies section merger with MTS Home TV required integration of SmartTUBE platform with this portal.

To solve this task, SmartLabs experts developed the mechanism to import the data from the Omlet.ru storage to MTS and to provide Home TV subscribers with access to the constantly updated catalogue of video content. Also, this involved embedding of the Omlet.ru access application into SmartTUBE UI application used in MTS Home TV set top boxes.

As a result of the project, the subscribers of MTS Home TV in Moscow and the Moscow region have got an access to a huge collection of Omlet.ru videos. MTS subscribers can pay for the service from their mobile accounts. For third party subscribers, SMS payments are supported. The new service runs on all set top boxes provided by the operator for the MTS Home TV service.

"The key goal of SmartLabs is to offer to our customers - IPTV operators- new opportunities to grow their business. With flexibility and power of the SmartTUBE SDP platform run by MTS, you can easily and quickly expand the list of available services, as again proven by embedding the Omlet.ru application into the MTS Home TV service,” SmartLabs CEO Mikhail Grachev says.

“Each user of MTS Home TV can now push a button and easily gain a legal access to Omlet.ru new and bestseller videos. More than 2.8 million families have become MTS TV viewers in Moscow and across Russia. We see a great potential in growing this audience by evangelizing digital TV, providing legal content and easy-to-use mobile payments, as well as telco’s bundled offerings,” MTS New Media Director Inna Shalyto said.”

About the companies

Mobile TeleSystems OJSC ("MTS") is the leading telecommunications group in Russia and CIS. MTS serves a total subscriber base of over 100M subscribers (MTS Belarus exclusive). MTS and its branches provide GSM services in 82 Russian regions, Armenia, Belarus, Ukraine and Uzbekistan; UMTS services in all Russian regions, Uzbekistan, Armenia and Belarus; CDMA-450 services in the Ukraine. Also, MTS offers fixed voice and cable TV services in all the federal regions of Russia, in Ukraine and Armenia. MTS pay TV audience has exceeded 2.8M households, and its broadband subscriber base is 1.8М. For the third year in a row, MTS was named Russia's most valuable brand, according to BRANDZ™ 2010 Top-100 list published by the Financial Times and Millward Brown, a leading global market research and consulting firm. Since July 2000, MTS has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker MBT. For more details, please visit www.mts.ru.

SmartLabs is the leading provider of multi-screen, multi-network solutions for the video streaming sector. SmartLabs’ solutions deliver content services to over 7 million subscribers around the globe on multiple devices from set-top boxes to mobile phones. Smartlabs' client base includes telcos (fixed and mobile), ISP's, cable operators, content and app service providers. SmartLabs partners with 25 IPTV market leaders including Widevine, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung and LG.  Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, Smartlabs has offices in USA, Canada,  UK, Cyprus and has been established for over 15 years, creating innovative solutions for the interactive TV market.