JungoTV to address U.S. Vietnamese population with Omai TV service

JungoTV recently announced the global launch of Omai TV, an OTT service offering 5,000 hours of Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean programming in Vietnamese, available throughout North America, Europe and Vietnam.

The service teamed with content partners including KVLA, VietTV 24, Viet Pho, Nguoi-Viet News, and YAN TV along with Korean partners KBS, MBC and JTBC. Taiwanese partner ETTV and Chinese entertainment giant Huace Media in order to build out the service’s library. 

Monthly subscriptions will be available in the U.S., Canada, and Vietnam, with Europe, Japan and the U.K. coming soon. The service is available online as well as through Android and iOS apps.

“Through our partnerships with top-tier global content partners we can provide superior quality programming for customers who have waited to reconnect with their culture and lifestyle,” said Mehmet Oz, M.D., co-founder of JungoTV, in a statement.

Omai TV is a standalone vertical that was built on the JungoTV platform.

George Chung, CEO of JungoTV, told FierceOnlineVideo that Omai TV could be considered a niche service, but that depends on the territory.

“In the U.S., you could look at it and say this is a niche product addressing three to four million people,” said Chung. “But then if you went over to Vietnam, it’s a general market product that addresses 100 million people.”

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JungoTV is similar to YipTV in that it provides an OTT service that broadens availability of foreign language channels and content.

Chung said JungoTV was designed to address both underserved foreign-language populations in multicultural territories like the U.S. and Canada as well as countries without robust services of their own. He said that the first choice for many consumers looking for foreign language content is typically a pay-TV operator, and that can be expensive as well as offer less in terms of high-quality content. He added that foreign language channels have little opportunity to grow within traditional pay-TV systems.

“We looked at the over-the-top proposition as being able to bring consumers a much larger breadth of content, on-demand, on multiple devices and at a much lower price point than cable and satellite. And that’s really where the heart of JungoTV began,” Chung said.

JungoTV has its own in-house engineering team that helped build the overarching platform used for its channels like Omai TV but the company also partnered with companies like Piksel. Piksel is a private OTT-building company that had constructed platforms for providers including AT&T U-verse and Sky Deutschland, according to Chung.

JungoTV also used Crunch, which is a video optimization/processing platform that allows the company to shrink video data containers while maintaining quality of service.

“It makes it much easier for the consumer to watch the file because it’s smaller and therefore they’re using less data and less bandwidth. And it’s good for providers like myself because I’m spending less money to deliver it. So all around, it’s a very high proposition,” Chung said.