Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Astro has introduced the next generation multilingual TV Guide, the first of its kind in Malaysia, which will be available to all Astro B.yond customers in phases nationwide beginning February 24, 2014 onwards.

Liew Swee Lin, Chief Commercial Officer of Astro, said, “At Astro, we recognise ours is a journey to be better, to evolve, and to embrace innovation in every aspect of our business to be our customers’ brand of choice. Astro’s brand promise is to continuously invest in our customers and content to evolve our value proposition and to bring the best of entertainment experience to our customers and viewers. As part of Astro’s key milestone, we are pleased to introduce the next generation multilingual TV Guide for a more personalised and improved viewing experience as well as to provide seamless integration from TV to Astro on the Go (AOTG) for our customers.”

Brian Lenz, Chief Innovation Officer, and Liew Swee Lin, Chief Commercial Officer, at Astro TV Guide launch.

“Customers and viewers will notice a new programming guide and AOTG with a fresh look and feel, as well as features that will enable a more personalised and localised TV experience that engages them in the language of their choice. The new Electronic Programming Guide (EPG) will make it even easier for the customers to find and watch the content they want, at the time of their choosing – LIVE, recorded on their PVR or in our thousands of hours of on-demand content. Among the key features of the new TV Guide they will enjoy are:-

• A Multilingual EPG to provide a richer and more meaningful experience for customers who prefer to find and watch their favourite programmes in a preferred language, whether in English, Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin or Tamil.
• A Video On Demand (VOD) catalogue that enables better browsing and search capabilities according to genre, title, season and episode, providing customers with more control and choice over how they enjoy entertainment.
• An improved recording experience which allows customers with connected PVRs, to manage and browse their PVR recordings and VOD purchases, all from one place. Customers will be able to view all recorded episodes from a series, filter and arrange titles according to date and season, as well as lock their library of recordings to prevent accidental deletion.
• An enhanced and more capable Search engine for easy navigation and content discovery, where recordings or titles are categorised according to language, year of release, broadcast date and time as well as filter and sort items according to alphabetical order, recorded duration, expiry, and more.

Brian Lenz, Chief Innovation Officer at Astro, added, “Astro continues to invest in our customers by giving them more content choices and a best in class entertainment experience. Today our VOD service offers close to 5,000 and growing titles ranging across movies, dramas, documentaries and more. As our VOD content increases, alongside more recorded programmes from our channels, our new multilingual EPG will simplify the user experience, thus enabling our customers to browse easily within their personal e-DVD store to find the programmes they want to watch.”

My Library for Astro B.yond

“We have over 470,000 PVR customers as at end October 2013. With all the improvements to the EPG, we expect to see an upward trend in ‘time shift’ viewing among our customers, as they take control of the TV schedule to record more programmes for watching at their convenience. Additionally, the clean integration of On Demand into the experience will encourage more customers to connect their box to their broadband service to take advantage of the wide library of catch up and pay-per-view titles available to them.”

“Astro is increasingly delivering content to any screen a customer has available to them via AOTG, with over 700k downloads of the service and a 75% increase in registered subscribers year on year. On an average, an Astro customer spends approximately 72 minutes weekly on AOTG, a 100% increase in time spent watching videos online over last year. In order to harmonise the viewing experience for customers across all screens, Astro has extended the same look and feel of our next generation TV Guide to AOTG. AOTG users will enjoy the multilingual EPG, easy access to live sports, On Demand TV and movies in addition to the 30 linear channels currently available. It will also now be even easier to access AOTG content, where viewers can start watching selected content from our NJOI offering for free without registering, thus simulating higher interest in the service.”