Industry | Data management and enhancement |
---|---|
Founded | Sydney, Australia (1974 | )
Founder |
|
Headquarters | , Australia |
Area served | Global |
Key people |
|
Number of employees |
|
Parent | Gracenote |
Website | www |
HWW was an Australian-based organisation which supplied television and movies metadata to a broad range of clients across new and traditional media including: online publishers, subscription television providers, IPTV providers, HbbTV providers and print publishers.
HWW data powered recording, navigation, discovery and recommendation functions across a range of devices and platforms including web, mobile and set top boxes. HWW was the official provider of Foxtel listings in Australia. Customers include Foxtel, Freeview, Samsung, Telstra and Beamly.
HWW also licenses its proprietary data management software, DataGenius, to operators internationally to customers including Integral and Multichoice.
HWW was founded by Philomena Horan and Stephen Wall in 1974 and first traded as Horan and Wall, The Information Agency in Peter Day's Kirk Gallery in Surry Hills, in the inner city of Sydney. Their first client was the then new youth radio station 2JJ. It was here that the founders met Tony Walker and he soon joined the partnership. The partnership began to trade as Horan Wall and Walker in 1974. The proprietary limited company became known as HWW Limited when it was floated on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) in 1999. HWW was acquired by Mi9 (previously ninemsn) under a scheme of arrangement in 2006 and was delisted on the ASX. . [1] HWW was purchased to support a focus on mobile content with HWW producing, aggregating and syndicating content to many of the major mobile carriers including Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. [2] In October 2014, HWW was acquired from Mi9 by Gracenote. [3]
HWW syndicated a range of national content including television listings, movies listings, live music listings, restaurant and bar listings, horoscopes and humour. HWW won the Foxtel EPG contract in 2004 and worked with the subscription television provider on the launch of its digital television service. [4]
In 2014, HWW was the leading supplier of movies and television data in Australia.
In October 2014, HWW was acquired by Gracenote, then a division of Tribune Media. [5]
Gracenote, Inc. provides music, video and sports metadata and automatic content recognition technologies to entertainment services and companies, worldwide. As of February 1, 2017, Gracenote became a Nielsen company.
HWW's first content management system was called SPACE (Sales Prospects And Client Environment). It grew into the basis for handling all of the company's data and content in all of its content domains. After HWW was taken over by NineMSN it built its next content management system, DataGenius, to manage schedule and metadata for its Australian clients. Content editors used DataGenius to standardise and enhance TV and movie metadata for display across a wide range of platforms. The data provided to clients in the Australian market included features such as real times for accurate recording, which were specific to local time zones and locations with, at that time, 718 unique channels configurations across Australia, series linking, and unique episode and program IDs.
Before its sale to Gracenote, HWW licensed DataGenius to international subscription television operators, including Integral and Multichoice. Installed locally and managed by their teams in-house, DataGenius allows operators to control and manage the quality of their metadata in their own environment. DataGenius features include the ability to receive data from multiple sources, supports management of both bound and unbound data and language translation.
Telstra Group Limited is an Australian telecommunications company that builds and operates telecommunications networks and markets related products and services. It is a member of the S&P/ASX 20 and Australia's largest telecommunications company by market share.
Singtel Optus Pty Limited is an Australian telecommunications company headquartered in Macquarie Park, a suburb in the Northern Sydney region of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singaporean telecommunications company Singtel.
NXE Australia Pty Limited, trading as the Foxtel Group, is an Australian pay television company—operating in cable television, direct broadcast satellite television, and IPTV streaming services. It was formed in April 2018, superseding an earlier company from 1995. The service was established as a 50/50 joint venture between News Corporation and Telstra, with News Corp and Telstra holding 65% and 35% ownership shares respectively.
iiNet Limited is an Australian internet service provider and telecommunications company that sells NBN plans, 4G and 5G Home Wireless Internet and services on its ULTRA Broadband Cable, FTTB and VDSL2 networks. It also sells mobile phone sim-only plans using the Vodafone network.
TPG is an Australian internet service provider that specialises in consumer and business internet services as well as mobile telephone services. As of August 2015, TPG is the second largest internet service provider in Australia and is the largest mobile virtual network operator. As such, it has over 671,000 ADSL2+ subscribers, 358,000 landline subscribers and 360,000 mobile subscribers, and owns the second largest ADSL2+ network in Australia, consisting of 391 ADSL2+ DSLAMs. It also operates in New Zealand.
Nielsen Holdings plc is an American information, data and market measurement firm. Nielsen operates in over 100 countries and employs approximately 44,000 people worldwide.
Austar was an Australian telecommunications company founded in 1995 as Community Entertainment Television (CETV). Its main business activity was subscription television. It was also involved with internet access and mobile phones.
MultiChoice is a South African company that operates DStv, a major satellite television service in Sub-Saharan Africa, and GOtv, a minor service operating in over nine countries of this area and Showmax service. MultiChoice was formed out of the subscriber-management branch of the M-Net terrestrial pay television company, and broadcasts the full range of M-Net channels on the DStv service. MultiChoice is owned by the media conglomerate of the same name. One of the subsidiaries of MultiChoice is DStv Stream, formally DStv Now then DStv App, a service that delivers television transmission to mobile devices such as laptops, smart phones and notebooks.
Subscription television in Australia is provided using technologies such as cable television, satellite television and internet television by a number of companies unified in their provision of a subscription television service. Notable actors in the sector include Foxtel, Netflix and Stan. Regulation of the sector is assured by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Exetel is an Australian ISP which provides ADSL, web hosting, VoIP, and other internet services to customers across Australia. Exetel's headquarters are in offices in Sydney, and its switching centres are distributed in capital city secure data centre facilities around mainland Australia.
Nine.com.au is an Australian news website, owned by ASX-listed company, Nine Entertainment Co. It was originally established as a 50:50 joint venture between Microsoft and PBL Media in 1997 as "Ninemsn." Microsoft sold its stake in the venture to Nine Entertainment in 2013 and the company was rebranded as Nine Digital in 2016. The website was rebranded to its current name Nine.com.au on 28 June 2016.
tvtv Services, trading as tvtv, is a consumer-oriented pan-European electronic programme guide (EPG) service provider, owned by the arvato AG subsidiary rtv media group GmbH since January 2013. It was formerly broadcast on Freeview channel 304 until 30 October 2008.
MOG was a paid subscription online music service and blog network, where subscribers could listen to and read about music. Subscribers could play tracks available in its catalog on a variety of digital devices, including computers, handheld devices, Sonos systems and television. MOG also allowed users to access aggregated editorial content from music blogs, user posts, and in-house editors.
Gracenote, Inc. is a company and service that provides music, video, and sports metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services and companies worldwide. Formerly CDDB, Gracenote maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio compact discs and vinyl records. From 2008 to 2014, it was owned by Sony, later sold to Tribune Media, and has been owned since 2017 by Nielsen Holdings. In 2019, Nielsen Holdings announced plans to split into two separate publicly traded companies, Nielsen Global Connect and Nielsen Global Media. In October 2022, Nielsen Holdings completed the sale of Global Media, including the Gracenote subsidiary, to a private equity consortium.
Internet television in Australia is the digital distribution of movies and television content via the Internet. In Australia, internet television is provided by a number of generalist, subscription-based streaming service providers, in addition to several niche providers that focus on specific genres. Australia's five major free-to-air television networks also all offer catch up TV of previously broadcast content to watch via their webpages and apps, and a number of ISPs and other companies offer IPTV – the live streaming of television channels sourced from Australia and elsewhere.
Red Bee Media Ltd., formerly Ericsson Broadcast and Media Services (EBMS), is an international broadcasting and media services company and the largest access provider in Europe. Red Bee has its headquarters in London, England, with branch offices in Glasgow, Cardiff, MediaCityUK in Salford and Newcastle upon Tyne, and international offices in Australia, France, Spain, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Canada, United States and Abu Dhabi. It has 2,500 employees worldwide across eight media hubs and distributes over 2.7 million hours of programming each year worldwide. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ericsson.
TPG Telecom Limited, formerly Vodafone Hutchison Australia and renamed following the merger with TPG, is an Australian telecommunications company. It is the second-largest telecommunications company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. TPG Telecom is the third-largest wireless carrier in Australia, with 5.8 million subscribers as of 2020.
Fetch TV is an Australian IPTV provider that offers a subscription television service over a user's regular internet connection. It is majority owned by Telstra, who acquired a 51.4% stake in the company on the 2nd of August 2022. Fetch TV was initially launched in July 2010 by Malaysian Astro Malaysia Holdings.
Foxtel Now is an Australian internet television service which offers subscriptions to over 50 live channels and hundreds of video on-demand titles. The service is owned by Foxtel, and officially launched on 11 August 2013 as Foxtel Play.
Kayo Sports is an over-the-top video streaming subscription service available in Australia, owned by Hubbl. The service offers sports live and on demand from Fox Sports, ESPN and Racing.com.