Ovation said Ovation Now, its authenticated OTT app, is now offered on Apple TV boxes (4th generation) and Android and iOS mobile devices, in addition to Roku players and Roku TVs.

The Ovation Now app was deployed on Float Left’s Flicast platform.

RELATED: Fragmentation Remains a Major Factor in OTT Video World

The app’s platform expansion enables Ovation subs to view the network’s live linear feed and a VOD library.

Starting today, those subs can connect to the app to watch the season two premiere of X Company, the series inspired by the true story of a top-secret Allied spy training facility, as well as episodes from The Wine Show, The Bletchley Circle, The Artful Detective, Landscape Artist of the Year, and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, among others, Ovation noted.

MVPDs with rights to support the app include DirecTV/DirecTV Now, AT&T U-verse, Comcast, Verizon, Frontier, CenturyLink, Google Fiber, WOW! and RCN, as well as via more than 30 operators affiliated with the National Cable Television Cooperative.

Though there are lingering questions about pricing, packaging and a precise launch date for an OTT TV service being developed by Vidgo, the company has revealed two key technology partners – Float Left and Harmonic – in tandem with this week’s NAB show in Las Vegas.  

Among them, Float Left and its Flicast platform will help Vidgo bring its coming virtual MVPD service to major platforms such as Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, web browsers, and iOS and Android mobile phones.  

RELATED: Fragmentation Remains a Major Factor in OTT Video World 

Vidgo has also tapped Harmonic’s VOS media processing platform, including encoding and transcoding via the vendor’s VOS SW Cluster, to help underpin its OTT services. It will also use Harmonic’s PURE Compression Engine, a software-based media processing technology that will help Vidgo deliver high video quality across screens at the “lowest possible bitrates.”  

Though specifics about Vidgo’s offerings are yet to come, it does plan to offer a lineup of more than 40 linear channels and a “robust” VOD library under a no-contract model that’s also free of box fees. Vidgo, which had once planned to introduce services sometime in 2016, currently expects to launch a beta version of the service this summer across “all major platforms.”  

Still unclear is how Vidgo will be able to differentiate amid a competitive mix of virtual MVPDs that includes Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, DirecTV Now, fuboTV, and Hulu.  

After cutting its teeth on the Roku platform, Float Left, a privately held company founded in 2009 that specializes in developing and deploying TV apps, has extended a bridge to several other major streaming platforms. The list included Apple TV, mobile, smart TVs, Amazon Fire TV and Vewd (formerly known as Opera TV).

In addition to developing custom apps for major brands such as Crackle, NBC Sports and AMC, Float Left has also created a white-label TV apps product called Flicast that can help mid-tier brands and smaller players extend onto a growing ecosystem.

While the process of hitting all of those platforms has gotten easier, video publishers are still faced with a fragmented platform market that makes it a challenge to bring a high-performance “native” experience to all (or most) of them.

Related > TV Apps: The Last Mile

Multichannel News technology editor Jeff Baumgartner recently caught up with Float Left CEO Tom Schaeffer to discuss how those challenges are being overcome along with other trends that are affecting the multiscreen video sector. An edited transcript follows.

MCN: Let’s start with the name. What does Float Left refer to in the context of TV apps and your business?
Tom Schaeffer: Unfortunately, it really doesn’t. [Laughs.] When I founded the company, for a very brief time we were a web applications business. We were building web apps. Float Left is a reference to an HTML styling paradigm. It’s a way to lay out items on a web page. We were just sitting around and it was the least terrible name we could think of.

MCN: You develop on a bunch of platforms. Fragmentation has always been seen as a long pole in the tent. Is that still the case when it comes to the biggest tech or operational challenges faced by the industry today?
TS: For companies that are doing this what I’d argue is the right way, which is pure, native development for all of these different platforms, yes, [fragmentation] still presents a huge challenge. You do make up some ground with the smart TV ecosystem, where everything is based in HTML5. But for the platforms that are driving a lot of the ROI for the brand — Apple TV and Roku and [Amazon] Fire TV — those are absolutely independent platforms and require different code and different skill sets.

Part of the strategy we’ve put forth is we want to invest in native. Yes, it’s going to take longer, and yes, it’s going to be more of a technical challenge, but we know the end product and the result that the publishers get when they get that complete suite of apps. It’s an overall better experience. It’s easier for [the publishers] to manage, and it’s easier for us to manage on behalf of them.

We thought with the Smart TV Alliance that this was the first step in a unification of code to make the TV experience better, but really everyone is going in their own direction. And we don’t see that getting better, at least with respect to the platforms that matter to publishers today.

That’s what Flicast is … underneath that is a technology that helps to make this process manageable for us and for the publishers.

MCN: So we’re not yet at a point where it’s code once, deploy everywhere, because there are still enough nuances between these platforms?
TS: If you’re doing one code and you’re deploying everywhere, you’re not truly going native. That does impact performance at the end of the day. From our perspective, it’s still very fragmented. We’re not at a place now, and I don’t think we’ll ever be at a place, where you hit a button and it kind of goes everywhere. It’s more managed in frameworks and tools that we’re developing underneath the surface.

MCN: What platform is the most grueling to develop for in terms of certification? Do they all represent a degree of pain?
TS: They all definitely have their own degree of pain at certain times. Roku certainly has been a challenge. You’d sometimes have a brand that was developed on Apple TV with a rich experience here, but they also love Roku. We would have to build our own screens and make it do things that it wasn’t initially designed to do.

That was back then. Today, it’s become more difficult in just the sheer number of platforms that are required. When you get an app certified on Roku, it’s being tested against dozens of different models and versions. When we develop an app, we go through our own process of quality assurance before we even submit to Roku’s app store.

Just by the nature of those things, that’s still the most challenging platform, but it’s also the most worthwhile, we believe, and the publishers should still be leading with that platform.

MCN: Is there any platform that’s making some recent gains in terms of gravity and interest?
TS: We’re seeing a lot of that with Amazon Fire TV. We think that that’s becoming a platform that publishers [are using] to go direct to consumer. [Amazon has] a wonderful development relationship team that supports the development community, so it’s become a lot better for companies to deploy there. From a publisher’s perspective, Amazon is definitely up there now, whereas a year or two ago they were unsure how it was going to play out.

Apple TV is such a powerful platform. I think the concern there is that the channels, unless you’re a big brand, are just getting lost. And that’s a concern across the board. As far as deploying, and deploying on that platform, tvOS has become one where you can do anything you want nowadays. When we’re talking to folks about where you should distribute, I think that’s a big factor.

The smart TVs are also making big strides. Samsung is doubling down with Tizen, [and] the LG webOS platform is still solid, and I think that’s going to start having a bigger impact next year.

MCN: For your company, where do you see the most growth coming from? Is it from virtual MVPDs, SVOD services or even TV everywhere?
TS: Maybe two years ago, anybody who had a VOD library was trying to get into the game. I think nowadays they’re becoming more savvy and more aware of the challenges. That group of folks is starting to subside. Now we’re starting to see a push by the virtual [multichannel video programming distributors] and operators, and they are now targets of ours. That’s not something we’ve traditionally been targeting, but we are going to be targeting that market now and in the future.

And you’re still seeing a lot of the pay TV programmers that are still trying to figure this out [with] TV everywhere. We’ve just deployed Ovation Now, which is the Ovation network’s direct-to-consumer offering for TV everywhere, and they are on our Flicast platform.

MCN: What sorts of features or enhancements are on the roadmap?
TS: Especially because we’re starting to target the MVPDs, I think [electronic program guides] are going to be something we’ll really start to focus on. We have a solid one that’s a base feature that we’ll start rolling out. We’re taking a lot of lessons learned from big brands.

For example, Crackle has a great feature...an always-on feature, which is basically live video playing in the background with the user interface basically hidden, or brought back into focus depending on if you want to navigate content.

It’s a pattern we’re seeing that [consumers] just want to sit down and watch something. Having to browse endlessly, I think, creates a little bit of friction. Now we’re showing video, and if they want to browse, they can browse, but there’s video playing with the always-on feature. That’s also something we’re integrating into Flicast.

Programming distributor and OTT service provider Olympusat and Float Left, a maker of TV Everywhere and OTT video app systems, said they have scuttled their merger and will now pursue their longer-term business goals independently.

They didn’t specify why they killed the merger, but noted that the decision followed a six-month trial period. Olympusat and Float Left announced their merger agreement in April.

“Float Left and Olympusat will continue informal collaborations as opportunities are identified. This decision will allow each organization to remain focused on its core mission,” they said.

In tandem with the merger-related announcement, Float Left also announced that its opening an office in Toronto, and has appointed Scott Murrow to VP of sales for the North America region. Morrow most recently was VP, distribution for AMC Networks.

Float Left counts clients such as AMC Networks, Red Bull, Crackle, CBS Sports, and Viacom. It used the INTX 2016 show to debut Flicast, an interface/UI for connected devcies.

Get more #INTX2016 news.

Float Left, a TV app development division of Olympusat, has unleashed Flicast, an interface/user experience platform targeted to content publishers that are looking to launch direct-to-consumer video streaming services.

Float Left said Flicast pairs a customizable and unified UX with a cloud-based content discovery platform, noting that it’s compatible with TV Everywhere, subscription and ad-supported VOD services, and TV on demand service models, and enables discovery through a mix of recommendations, watchlists, and video browsing history.

Flicast, the company added, supports several streaming platforms, including Roku, Apple TV, iOS and Android mobile devices, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Xbox consoles, Opera TV, and LG and Samsung smart TVs.

At the show, Float Left will demo Flicast at the Olympusat booth (#360).

“With the number of streaming video services growing every day, consumers are overwhelmed with choice,” Float Left CEO Tom Schaeffer said, in a statement .“Content publishers have been struggling to figure out how to keep viewers engaged, drive loyalty, and remain competitive. We developed Flicast to not only help brands reach their audience across the connected ecosystem, but also to engage and retain their viewers through innovative personalized experiences.”

Float Left said it has launched over 250 TV Everywhere and OTT apps across more than 30 devices, and counts clients such as AMC Networks, Fox, CBS Sports, Red Bull, and Viacom.