BT Sport, the pay-TV offering of the UK’s largest telecommunication company, has chosen Paywizard, the subscription, billing and customer relationship management (CRM) specialist, to deliver pay-per-view purchase and entitlement management and support for its PPV events broadcast via the Sky UKpay-TV service.
The solution is currently live, and deployed to support a number of high-profile PPV events from BT Sport’s brand-new dedicated pay-per-view channel, BT Sport Box Office HD. Paywizard has already played a vital role in supporting the blockbuster boxing bouts between Canelo Álvarez and Gennady Golovkin, the recent heavyweight world title showdown between Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury and world featherweight clash between Josh Warrington and Carl Frampton.
The service, leveraging the Paywizard Agile platform, enables both BT Sport existing subscribers and non-BT Sport subscribers with a Sky Box to sign up for sporting events that will be available via PPV. Paywizard’s Agile platform, built with over 20 years’ experience in delivering high-profile PPV events, delivers rapid scaling to allow for the processing of large transactional volumes that can often occur due to last-minute sign-up for high profile PPV events. Paywizard will also provide BT Sport with a full subscriber onboarding service including Conditional Access management, billing, and multi-channel technical support across telephone, webchat and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
“We ran our first PPV event almost 20 years ago and over that time have built an amazing understanding of what it takes to manage events where the majority of buys come in the last few hours,” says Bhavesh Vaghela, Paywizard’s Chief Executive. “With growing consumer demand for new PPV events, we look forward to working closely with BT Sport to acquire more customers, drive revenue and deliver success into the future.”
“Ensuring a great customer experience is a critical part of our PPV offering and Paywizard’s experience as a leader in delivering these type of streamlined enablement services made them a natural fit for this partnership,” said Jamie Hindhaugh, Chief Operating Officer BT Sport. “Their scalable platform and deep technical capabilities provide us with a seamless experience for both our own subscribers and Sky customers to access high quality PPV with ease.”
ABOUT KAUSER KANJI
Kauser Kanji has been working in online video for 19 years, formerly at Virgin Media, ITN and NBC Universal, and founded VOD Professional in 2011. He has since completed major OTT projects for, amongst others, A+E Networks, the BBC, BBC Studios, Channel 4, DR (Denmark), Liberty Global, Netflix, Sony Pictures, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation and UKTV. He now writes industry analyses, hosts an online debate show, OTT Question Time, as well as its in-person sister event, OTT Question Time Live.