ShowMax, the new subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service that launched last month in South Africa, has added a blog where general manager John Kotsaftis is now speaking directly to users, saying in his first posting that ShowMax is closing in on 20 000 episodes.
At blog.showmax.com, John Kotsaftis writes that one of the "biggest surprises" the past few weeks has been the popularity of the smart TV apps - specifically the Samsung app for ShowMax.
That means that a lot of people are watching ShowMax in the traditional "lean back" way from the couch, instead of the new age "lean forward" approach of viewing on phones and tablets.
"Clearly lean-back viewing is also popular. For the lean-back crowd we were already busy on Chromecast support in our Android app and an Apple TV app," writes John Kotsaftis, saying its envisioned to become available before the end of this year.
ShowMax is working on adding features like watched indicators (what you've watched), suggested next episodes, and continuous play which will be added to the apps and browsers within weeks.
"We already have a huge library - we're closing in on the 20,000 episode mark – and our strength is in content curation and making sure we've always got fresh new shows for people to discover as well as the classics that people may have missed".
"For example, I recently discovered a show called Life with Damien Lewis (from Homeland and Band of Brothers fame). Bit of a shameless plug but I genuinely would have missed it if I'd not been on ShowMax."
John Kotsaftis writes about the few problems ShowMax experienced after launch which included sounds being out of sync and some minor buffering and pixelation.
"We went with the nuclear fix for the sync problem and re-encoded all 11,000+ hours of content. It was a mammoth task" writes John Kotsaftis. "The buffering and pixelation issue was tackled by lighting up some new front-end server caches in South Africa".
