After ten years in the United States, thePlatform is finally breaking out internationally. Julian Clover reports.
The last few years have seen many companies emerge in the area of multiscreen video. Such services are now clearly taking hold and the topic can be sure to be one that emerges during IBC.
One such firm, thePlatform, has stayed largely in its domestic market of the United States, but now sees the time as being right to enter Europe, where it is in the process of establishing a UK office.
Founded 11 years ago by CEO Iain Blaine, it was acquired in 2006 by cable MSO Comcast, though the operation remains independent. Blaine describes the challenge of taking video onto new platforms, beginning simply as pushing content to websites, and over the years expanding in terms of devices and the business models that are being pushed onto those devices.
As if to demonstrate the multi-faceted nature of Comcast the meeting takes place at another Comcast prize, the London offices of NBC. Blaine says thePlatform has needed to earn its stripes, suggesting Comcast isn’t necessarily prepared to take its technology without question. But a significant role has been built in the US and now with support from Alcatel-Lucent and reseller deals, such as with Sweden’s Real Life Venture AB, Blaine hopes to capture the enthusiasm already being demonstrated on products such as Sky Go.
thePlatform has brought on board Simon McGrath, most recently with SeaChange, and before it the UK VOD platform FilmFlex. He says there has been a tectonic shift between internet technologies, open standard and cost base moving towards the TV in terms of quality, and the TV wanting to get some of that quality. “Years ago when I was involved in the setting up of FilmFlex, the big magic number was 500 movies, and we made a big thing about it. We felt that after 500 the cliff we would go off in terms of diminishing return of people being able to find stuff and how many views they would get against the cost of transcoding and everything else”.
thePlatform’s role is in helping aggregate and ingest contest, not to different sites to their own, but multiple devices through a suite of tools for managing the workflow of publishing, on demand, linear feeds.
“There’s an inflection point in the market right now where people have stitched together all those things themselves and built a custom green box because they thought their workflow was unique, but that’s starting to break down,” says Blaine. “While we’ve been around for 10 years our technology is probably the newest in the industry because we took two and a half years and applied most of our engineering resources to rebuild, reimagine everything.”
Blaine says the iPad has been a major force of change, single-handedly making the market look at HTML-5. Waiting in the wings Android, as the Google technology begins to make its mark. “You have to be prepared for all of it – you have to reach the devices that consumer is buying – and there’s no standard formats to reach all of these. The watchword of the day is flexibility”.
