Kaltura powering sooka — Astro’s standalone streaming service

Going live across Malaysia in June 2021, the six-month old sooka, a standalone streaming service by Astro, is offering viewers a freemium package with a selection of ad-based content that can be expanded into broader content bundles based on multiple subscriptions plans.

To ensure the best viewing experience, Astro Malaysia chose the Kaltura TV Platform to power sooka, which is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to Astro, Kaltura was chosen due to its multiple worldwide reference cloud TV deployments, as well as the inherent flexibility of the Kaltura TV Platform.

This allowed Astro to incorporate multiple business models and payment methods, such as Google In-App Billing and Apple In-App Purchase, with Direct Carrier Billing soon to follow.

sooka delivers live sports events like the Premier League, Euro 2020, Olympics 2020, BWF badminton, NBA, and Formula 1 as well as over 4000 hours of Malaysia’s favourite Malay and Asian dramas, movies, and variety shows, with an upcoming pipeline of sooka originals and exclusives.

Euan Smith, CEO of Pay-TV and Group COO at Astro, said, “We created sooka as a standalone streaming service offering to capture the digital and mobile-first millennials with a unique value proposition in the face of an increasingly crowded over-the-top (OTT) space.

“The flexibility of Kaltura’s TV Platform allows us to quickly adapt to viewer preferences and engagement models, and it supports our business model.

“Kaltura was able to smoothly integrate the solution into our existing ecosystem, and very rapidly meet our tight timeline.”