Video delivery to the home is more important than ever with the rise of retail devices enabling consumers to consume video in the home and on the go. However, this presents a challenge to service providers who are often the recipient of support calls when live or on-demand video does not perform as expected.

OEC Fiber, with headquarters in Norman, Oklahoma, launched OTT TV services in 2020. A subsidiary of Oklahoma Electric Cooperative, their mission is to improve their subscribers’ quality of life through the safe delivery of highly reliable, reasonably priced fiber services and exceptional customer service. OEC Fiber TV delivers a combination of local and national channels to a customer base that is both rural and urban.

The average subscriber is over 45 years old. Of their current subscribers, approximately 70% have elected to have a set-top box in the home, while 30% use a retail device such as a smart TV or dongle (e.g., Amazon Fire Stick, Roku, Chromecast).

When OEC started investigating set-top box options, they became aware of Amino Engage. Amino Engage was the driver for OEC’s selection of Amino’s Amigo 7X Android TV device. They saw the SaaS platform as a key enabler of their goals to eliminate consumer frustration, provide stellar customer support and streamline device management.

Amino Engage is integrated with OEC’s customer support platform – giving their customer support reps visibility into what the subscriber is seeing on their TV screen. Diagnostic data about the set-top box and the TV to which it is connected is available to help CSRs (customer service reps) pinpoint and resolve issues. In addition, it is possible to check the in-home Wi-Fi score.

This is important as 90% of the set-top boxes deployed use Wi-Fi rather than ethernet connectivity. OEC’s service reps have been able to save a lot of time by remotely taking control of the subscribers remote control to resolve issues, while simultaneously helping the subscriber understand what buttons to push.

Amino Engage even helps OEC validate video delivery to unmanaged devices in a subscriber’s home. To work around the limitations of unmanaged retail devices, OEC Fiber use a managed Amino device to know that the device can receive and play good quality video therefore confirming that the video delivery path is good and issues with the “BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)” devices are not related to the OEC network. Without this OEC Fiber would be blind to issues reported from their subscribers and be unable to achieve their stated goal of providing stellar customer support.

Behind the scenes - OEC uses Amino Engage from a centralized location to:

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• Manage STB firmware
• Establish alarm thresholds to maintain QoS
• Customize remote control button functionality
• Manage TV app updates

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Managing updates is an area where OEC sees a distinct diüerence between managed set-top boxes and retail devices. OEC recently updated their splash screen. Using Engage, they were easily able point managed devices to the new splash screen file. When each of these boxes were pinged, Amino Engage automatically enabled the update. On the other hand, subscribers using retail devices had to uninstall the OEC app and reinstall the updated app with the new splash screen.

With the help of Amino Engage, OEC has been able to reduce the time to resolve support calls by minutes. And when it comes to customer support, every minute counts.