Netgem to develop smart home products for telcos

Telco TV technology provider Netgem is to widen its product offering to deliver smart home products in response to what it says is demand from some of its customers.

The move comes as the French company posted a 6% decline in revenues for the full year to €74.3 million and a 15% decline in Q4 revenues to €15.5 million.

Netgem will focus its incremental R&D investments on its Cloud Service Platform, focusing on a single-app user experience, secure management and analytical tools, interoperability with the proprietary offerings of larger players in the space and a limited range of digital devices targeted at Netgem’s core telecom market clients.

Netgem said that the development of the new connected devices would make use of existing technological assets and be complemented by appropriate partnerships. The company will initially focus on voice control, connected sound, surveillance and home automation.

Netgem said it would debut its new product line at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February.

Despite its fall in revenues, Netgem said that it would report gross profit growth on a full year basis, as revenue from its cloud-based TV platform and the software-as-as-service model was already more than compensating downward pressure on device prices.

Last year saw Netgem launch Vitis, a separate ‘fibre virtual network operator’ with the aim of offering high-speed broadband services in five underserved French departments, headed by former Videofutur chief Mathias Hautefort, with Netgem taking a 55% stake in the venture. Vitis results were not consolidated for the last two months of 2016.

Netgem has separately secured a raft of additional content partnerships to take its total content partners to more than 60 at the end of last year.

Sylvain Thevenot

Netgem, which packages content for service providers as well as providing technology, has signed partnerships with content providers including Hayu, Cool School, Plex, Smart Kids TV Gamefly, SPI and Couchplay Games.

“The telecoms market is an incredibly competitive space, with a range of service providers competing for hard to maintain revenue streams and gain new customers” said Sylvain Thevenot, managing director of Netgem.

“By signing agreements with leading content providers on our #TelcoTV platform, we are enabling telcos to save both in terms of cost and time-to-market as they deploy engaging TV programming to their customers. Operators can then focus on delivering the best customer experience, rather than having to deal with the challenges of securing and maintaining content services and building out content management infrastructure.”