Declaring that the media world is moving away from big, bespoke technology solutions to cloud and software-as-a-service platforms, Synamedia on yesterday unveiled Synamedia Go, a modular suite of data-driven SaaS services that provide a frictionless way for pay TV operators and OTT/D2C streaming providers to rapidly augment and create value from their technology platforms.
Based on a flexible, “add and go” architecture, each service is designed to achieve a significant return on investment with minimal effort.
Paul Segre
The company continues to serve a base of video providers in traditional technology architectures, said company CEO Paul Segre, during a wide-ranging press conference that also offered an update on the company’s rapidly expanding video networking business. Synamedia’s traditional customers, as well as newer direct-to-consumer providers, “are on the same journey we are on,” Segre said. “They see the world moving to IP and are looking for ways to monetize content.”
The first new services out of the blocks are Go.Aggregate and Go.Experiment. Targeted at commercial, product and editorial teams, these new platform-agnostic offerings provide immediately actionable results supported by rapid experimentation, implementation and improvement to drive up engagement, loyalty and revenues.
Go.Aggregate removes the navigation headache faced by viewers as they switch between broadcast, catch-up and OTT content sources in a provider’s ecosystem. It empowers providers to extract more value from their platform by unifying content from different services and presenting it to viewers in a simplified, curated and searchable way. With support for metadata aggregation, recommendations and federated search across multiple services and on any display, Go.Aggregate helps providers keep viewers on their platform, boosting satisfaction and reducing costly churn.
Nick Thexton
Go.Aggregate represents “an integration of all content metadata sources that come together to make up the final user experience,” said Nick Thexton, CTO. “It helps us move more quickly toward a world of super aggregation.”
Go.Experiment offers business teams new tools to improve and accelerate their decisionmaking on pressing issues such as content spend, UI improvements and live event promotions. Intuitive dashboards make it easy to segment viewers into sub-groups, and subsequently test elements of the subscriber experience, marketing campaigns or operational practices. For example, product owners can test UI designs on sample audiences in live environments and then apply selected changes more broadly, based on real-time insights.
“Go.Experiment builds on top of the company’s CTAP (cloud TV application platform) infrastructure, putting in a layer of business thinking and a tool kit allowing non-technical people to understand how the platform works,” Thexton said. Its incremental, simplified and accelerated integration model radically cuts the time to market for customers as they launch new features and services and reduces operational overheads compared to traditional siloed systems.
“Synamedia Go makes it simple for video providers to turbocharge their existing platforms to work harder for them, all with minimal disruption, Thexton said. “Our suite of add-on modular services helps them test, refine and introduce features, apps and services that solve real business pain points and that really resonate with viewers. The inspiration behind Synamedia Go is our desire to help customers continually reinvent themselves, meet their KPIs, and stay ahead of the competition in the rapidly evolving video landscape.”
Providing a baseline for continuous innovation, Synamedia Go is centered on a microservices architecture and offers fully customized or out-of-the-box multi-tenant SaaS offerings hosted by Synamedia and running on AWS, removing the need for any engineering dependencies. The suite is both distribution technology and client software agnostic and is fully integrated with AndroidTV, RDK, AppleTV, iOS, WebOS and Tizen applications.
Part of Synamedia’s broader set of cloud offerings, Synamedia Go complements the recently launched Synamedia Iris addressable advertising and Clarissa business insight services, as well as CSFEye for credential sharing and fraud prevention, and Synamedia EverGuard for piracy detection and protection.
Synamedia’s new solutions come at a time of rapid growth for the company’s video networking business, which experienced a 57% expansion in bookings during 2020, as the company added 30 new customers.
Quality of video experience is at the heart of its video network strategy and in 2020 Synamedia expanded its market-leading offerings with a solution that delivers lower latency than satellite technologies with no buffering.
With consumer demand putting pressure on video infrastructure during the pandemic, Synamedia’s Video Network business saw revenues increase across all industry sectors, geographies and technologies, including primary distribution, unified virtualized headend, ad insertion, video compression and edge delivery. The business recorded the largest single contract in its history: supporting a US content provider as it minimizes bandwidth utilization in the C-band spectrum. Synamedia projects increasing revenues from service providers needing to optimize delivery as the FCC reallocates spectrum for the rollout of 5G.
Synamedia’s Next-Generation Insertion (NGI) for regional ad insertion on broadcast streams is also seeing a surge of growth in the US. NGI seamlessly inserts online ad assets into the broadcast stream to support regional ad delivery to the consumer’s set-top-box.
Synamedia says it is enhancing VIVID Compression to improve video experience in an increasingly multi-codec world, including support for the VVC codec and 8K. Over the last 12 months VIVID Compression, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver advanced compression implementation, has improved encoding efficiency up to 15% for the massive installed base of devices using MPEG2 and AVC. Synamedia is now using neural networks to automate test processes and run more quality tests in a shorter time.
The VIVID brand has been extended to Synamedia Video Network’s flagship offering, VIVID Workflows in the cloud — a microservices-based offering providing end-to-end workflows including ingest, encode/transcode, package and distribution to consumers. VIVID Workflows can be deployed on private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
16 May 2024
23 May 2024
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