Sure Universal Eyes MVPDs With Platform-as-a-Service Smart Home Software

Israel-based Sure Universal pitched its Open Connectivity Foundation-compliant software as a missing piece for MVPDs to make smart home deployments. MVPDs are well-positioned to dominate smart home/IoT because of their broad residential penetration with hardware and services, said CEO Viktor Ariel in Friday's statement. Smart speakers based on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are getting headlines, but are “dwarfed by the number of mobile phones, internet routers, and set top boxes," said Ariel. Operators can choose their own IoT hardware based on existing radio protocols: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Lora or NB-IoT, he said, with Sure providing the application programming interface between the OCF application layer and the smart device radio protocol. The approach enables MVPDs to “avoid the hardware supplier lock,” gaining interoperability and security of the OCF standard, he said.