ACCESS Twine™ for Car App Store launched to accelerate auto industry adoption of In-Vehicle Infotainment

 Oberhausen, July 28, 2020 – – ACCESS Europe GmbH announces that it has worked with sister company NetRange, a leading provider of Smart TV App Stores, to develop a car-centric App Store which is now part of the ACCESS Twine™ for Car (Twine4Car) in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system. The Twine4Car App Store is commercially available now and is currently part of trials globally with major automotive OEMs and Tier-1s. “The automotive industry is fully aware that the next generation of car buyers will want more connected content features built into the car, but how is this content going to efficiently reach the car?”, asked Dr. Neale Foster, CEO at ACCESS Europe. “The automotive OEMs need a content experience and services for a number of regions or even globally, but most automotive companies don’t have the expertise and initial volumes of vehicles to efficiently partner with content owners. Also, it needs a clear technical solution to minimise integration efforts for both content providers as well as OEMs. TV manufacturers were faced with the same dilemma when they were looking to launch Smart TV a decade or so ago: their answer was the App Store, and we believe that this is now a great solution for the automotive industry. To drive IVI forward we have launched a car-centric App Store as a critical element of the ACCESS Twine™ for Car solution,” concluded Foster.

ACCESS Twine™ for Car App Store

The ACCESS group company NetRange is a pioneer of this efficient Smart TV App Store approach for CE device manufactures and is now a global provider of white labelled, turnkey Smart TV and OTT ecosystems and App Stores for TV viewers in over 100 countries around the world. ACCESS has leveraged NetRange’s content relationships and expertise to bring the App Store approach to the automotive industry. By wrapping a car-centric App Store with the ACCESS Twine™ for Car (Twine4Car) In-Car Entertainment system, ACCESS provides a one-stop in-car entertainment solution for next-generation cars. The Twine4Car App Store has a wide range of IVI applications, including:

• Leading video streaming and live TV applications
• Leading streaming audio services
• News services
• Kids content
• Location-aware services for local information and retailer offers
• Weather
• Payment services, e.g. for parking and fuel
• Convenience apps, e.g. fast food or coffee purchases
• In-car games

Twine4Car for Car also supports Digital Rights Management (DRM) within the vehicle’s built-in devices and brought-in devices for secure playback. ACCESS’ experience from TV deployments around the world helps to guide car OEMs through enabling the DRM security that content owners require before they allow video to be distributed. ACCESS Twine™ for Car (Twine4Car) enables automotive OEMs to provide branded entertainment and information services on the car head unit (HU) and rear-seat entertainment (RSE) units. Twine4Car spans the gap between the automotive and the content industries by enabling a content portfolio and helps increase the safety, comfort, and flexibility of content consumption for drivers and passengers. Twine4Car, including its cloud-based approach, allows OEMs to start with the services they wish to deploy today and add new services over time as the industry moves towards the various levels of autonomous driving whilst minimizing integration efforts using standardised technology. Twine4Car connects the in-car infotainment system components seamlessly with BYOD devices via the in-car Wi-Fi network. It provides control of content that enables a multi-device user experience far beyond common single device streaming applications or screen mirroring technologies. A key value is that the solution fully supports the OEMs’ brand experience across all devices.