Regional broadcaster goes live on Italian HbbTV-enabled Smart TVs in under three months, with targeted advertising and audience measurement from day one
Sofia Digital Ltd, the Finnish Smart TV and HbbTV technology specialist, today announced the successful deployment of a full HbbTV and OTT platform for Milano Pavia TV (Media Team Communication Srl), a regional broadcaster serving the Milan and Pavia areas of northern Italy. The project brought Milano Pavia TV to a live, advertising-enabled HbbTV service in three months, opening an entirely new distribution channel and revenue stream for the broadcaster.
The broadcaster did not have a centralized content management system capable of handling live TV, VOD and event streaming in a single workflow, and had no reliable audience measurement data to present to potential advertisers. The project brief was to deliver world-class quality HbbTV fast, bring advertising with it, and build a platform that could grow.
Sofia Digital responded with a phased deployment built on its proven white-label OTT platform. Rather than developing from scratch, the approach reused Sofia Digital’s production-ready components — covering the HbbTV application, Red Button launcher, advertising integration, content management system and audience measurement — and customised them for Milano Pavia TV’s brand, language and Italian market requirements.
The five elements of the platform work as an integrated system:
- HbbTV Application — a white-label OTT platform with Milano Pavia TV branding, full Italian localisation, Live TV, VOD, EPG, and pre/mid/post-roll advertising, delivering a connected-TV presence on Smart TVs.
- Red Button Launcher — consent collection and main app launcher via the broadcast signal, with the ability to trigger the L-banner ad player based on live broadcast metadata and stream events, creating a seamless broadcast to connected TV transition.
- Linear Broadcast L-banner Advertising — the Sofia TA Player integrated with the broadcaster’s ad server and audience measurement client, unlocking new ad revenue directly from the live broadcast audience.
- Content Management System — a full OTT CMS covering live channels, VOD, events, transcoding, multi-CDN delivery, FAST channels, analytics and ad management, giving the team one platform to manage all content and monetization.
- Audience Measurement — a dedicated measurement platform capturing live and VOD viewing data across HbbTV devices, producing verifiable audience figures required by advertisers.
The project was structured in two phases to keep time-to-value short and investment risk low. Phase 1 — covering branding and translation, backend configuration, Red Button integration and CMS training — was delivered first, giving the broadcaster immediate working visibility of the platform. Phase 2 brings in linear broadcast advertising integration, with the L-banner ad integration.
The platform draws on Sofia Digital’s full technology stack, including:
- White-label OTT platform with configurable content rail styles, multilingual support and hybrid DVB/IP live channel playback
- DVB-I service discovery specification for hybrid linear TV and EPG data ingestion
- Multi-CDN content delivery pre-integrated with major CDN providers
- Pre/mid/post-roll video ads and L-banner display advertising, integrated with DSP/SSP platforms and ad servers
- Built-in transcoding supporting HLS and MPEG-DASH with optional multi-DRM
- Audience measurement client verified across ~200 television models in Sofia Digital’s dedicated HbbTV testing laboratory
For viewers, the result is a fully branded Smart TV experience — Live TV, VOD, events and EPG all accessible from the remote, with consistent playback across the web and HbbTV. For Milano Pavia TV, the project delivers a new distribution channel with minimal time-to-market, a new advertising revenue stream from L-banner broadcast ads, centralized content management across all platforms, and audience data strong enough to support advertiser conversations.
Sofia Digital brought a combination of capabilities that few vendors can match for a project of this type:
- 25 years of Smart TV and broadcast technology expertise across European markets
- A dedicated device testing laboratory with ~250 televisions and a specialist QA team, ensuring flawless HbbTV compatibility across the Italian device estate
- A white-label OTT platform that dramatically reduces integration effort and compresses time to first broadcast
- Proven ability to combine HbbTV, broadcast advertising and OTT content delivery into a single managed platform
- Full SLA and cloud hosting included — a single vendor relationship covering the entire technology stack
About Sofia Digital
Sofia Digital is an international high-tech company headquartered in Tampere, Finland, with 25 years of expertise delivering innovative applications for Smart TVs, web platforms and mobile devices. The company specialises in HbbTV, DVB broadcasting (including DVB-I), end-to-end OTT solutions, targeted advertising, metadata aggregation and Smart TV testing services, working with broadcasters and operators across Europe and beyond.
sales@sofiadigital.com | +358 10 850 5550
Media Contact
Juho Mäyränpää
Sales Director, Sofia Digital Ltd
juho.mayranpaa@sofiadigital.com | +358 50 522 5420
