Media Press Group has completed the acquisition of the Electronic Programme Guide and content discovery business previously operated by InfoPortugal, part of Impresa Group. The transaction makes us the number one provider of TV metadata and EPG services in Portugal, and gives the Group a direct presence in an eighteenth national market.
The news is Portugal. The longer story is the strategy it continues: building a European metadata platform that is staffed locally, market by market.
What local presence changes
Metadata looks universal until you put two markets side by side.
A title is not one title. A film that travels across Europe carries a different official release name in every market, and the name a Portuguese viewer searches for is the one a Portuguese distributor chose. Schedules do not change centrally either. They change late, in local time, around national holidays, live sport and last-minute programming decisions taken in a broadcaster's own playout gallery. Regional channels, domestic formats and national competitions are followed by the people who watch that market every day. And a synopsis written for a Portuguese audience reads differently from one translated into Portuguese, because it is written with the same instincts as the programming it describes.
That kind of accuracy comes from people who live in the market, speak the language as their first one, and have working relationships with the national broadcasters. It is why we keep acquiring national metadata businesses rather than covering new markets from a distance, and why the team always stays.
It is also why support works the same way. When a customer in Lisbon has a question about a schedule change or an API response, the answer comes from a colleague in their own language and their own timezone, editorially and technically.
What this means for an international operator
An operator running services in several countries needs two things at once.
The first is uniformity: one integration, one schema, one commercial relationship, one support path, so that adding a market is a configuration and not another project. The second is depth in each of those markets, because local editorial quality is the part subscribers actually see when they open a guide.
Partnering with Media Press Group is designed to deliver both together:
Standard in every market one integration
- One schema and one set of formats, whatever the country
- Delivery through MP API, the same endpoints everywhere
- Permanent identity per title through Open ID so the same programme reconciles across markets and partners
- One commercial relationship, one onboarding, one set of service levels
- Shared automation, quality control and content identification
Genuinely local in each market people, not translation
- Editorial written in-market, by native speakers, for that audience
- Schedule monitoring in local time, including late changes
- Regional channels, domestic formats and national sport
- Editorial and technical support in the local language and timezone
- Direct relationships with national broadcasters
Standardisation is what makes a platform straightforward to adopt across a footprint. Local depth is what makes it worth adopting in each country. The Group is built to provide both from a single partnership.
Another step in a long-running strategy
Portugal is not the first national metadata business the Group has acquired, and the approach is the same every time: keep it as a national business, keep the team that built it, and connect it to shared European technology, formats and workflows.
The result today is metadata coverage across 110 countries, with our own teams on the ground in eighteen of them, working follow-the-sun.
What happens next in Portugal
The first priority is that customers notice nothing. Service continues uninterrupted, from the same team, under the InfoPortugal trademark used under licence by EPG Metadata Services – TVADVISOR, Unipessoal, Lda.
From there, the Portuguese operation is progressively connected to the Group's European infrastructure, which is where the upside sits for existing customers: advanced TV and streaming metadata, editorial and visual content, content identification, automation and API-based delivery, all reachable through the same platform the rest of the Group already runs on.
Ownership of the InfoPortugal trademark remains with Impresa. The transaction relates exclusively to the acquired EPG and content discovery business.
The full press release is available as a PDF and as plain markdown.
If you run services in more than one country, book a demo and we will show you what the same title looks like in four markets at once.