Broadband TV News speaks to Jonas Engwall, who has been working in the media-tech space for more than 20 years.
In 2019, he became CEO of the European streaming-tech venture Bedrock, the newly formed JV between M6 Group and RTL Group. The 400 team members’ company is on the path to become the biggest streaming platform in Europe for national premium content, thanks to its 12 years’ experience in the streaming world and its 45+ million users.
Can you tell us more about the company and its origins?
Bedrock is a leading streaming-tech company formed as a Joint Venture by Groupe M6 and RTL Group (part of Bertelsmann). Our teams design, build, and power streaming services specially tailored for leading national media companies. Bedrock’s uniqueness lies in our ability to provide end-to-end platforms, with best-in-class user experience across AVOD & SVOD on all devices, helping our partners to deliver on-demand video, linear channels and live sports.
We are massively investing in people and tech with 400 team members across Europe working on seven different streaming platforms, and addressing multiple challenges in terms of scaling, performance and peak traffic. On our way to become the biggest streaming platform in Europe for national premium content, we already entertain over 45 million users, delivering cutting-edge user experience across all devices. Since 2008, Bedrock also strongly relies on its experience in digital innovation and streaming technologies to help our partners achieve their business goals on any connected device.
What’s so unique about Bedrock in the streaming world?
Bedrock stands out in the tech landscape, as we are the only large-scale strategic media player that offers an all-inclusive partnership model around its streaming platform. This model allows us to deliver state-of-the-art performance to our partners, on par with global streaming giants, for a cost similar to running a leading national video streaming service on their own.
What are your main streaming projects?
First off, I must say we are receiving a tremendous amount of interest from media companies across Europe since we announced the JV in March 2020. Since the beginning of the pandemic, digital is becoming even more important and a lot of national platforms realise scale is needed to meet growing demand from viewers and to cope with the increasing competition from global streamers.
This comes as an addition to the new projects we already have with lots of European partners in their streaming expansions. Salto, the SVOD service backed by M6, TF1, and France Télévisions is using our streaming technology and the launch was a real success in France. We also have Videoland, the Dutch leading SVOD service with its 1million+ subscribers, joining our platform this year.
Our partners have boosted their line-up of channels and have seen impressive user growth; and we’ve greatly expanded our capabilities for subscription-based platforms, so called SVOD services.
What do you aim to achieve with Bedrock?
I consider Bedrock as a ‘pooling of resources’. In today’s media-tech world, even national leading players are forced to compete with global players in terms of technology, features, user experience and personalisation. Maintaining a streaming platform reasonably on par with the global players costs at least €50 million annually, in tech and product investment alone. Needless to say, few companies can afford this level of continuous spending. So, mutualising investments across multiple partners makes total sense.
I think that we understand the media ecosystem and its needs really well, and have a ‘skin in the game’ approach as our shareholders/partners are putting all their digital future in our hands. We have more and more third parties understanding the need for scale, as we are the only strategic player that invites national media groups to collaborate around an end-to-end international streaming solution. At Bedrock, we ‘only’ do streaming since 2008. We aim to do one thing and do it really well, in contrast to a lot of tech companies trying to diversify and sometimes losing focus.
In the end, the goal for Bedrock resides in the building of state-of-the-art platforms, as well as enabling their partners in their digital expansion so their content can be distributed in a way that is on par (or better) with Netflix and others.
Any recent events worthwhile mentioning?
The most recent one has to be the UEFA Euro final 2020, which was streamed exclusively on M6’ streaming service: 6play. It was, obviously, a massive event in Europe and the game put our platform to the test, as well as beating audience forecasts for 6play. It was a real success for us and our partner, as we seamlessly delivered the final to a huge amount of people in France.
Since our platform is constantly evolving it’s difficult to single out topics. We are constantly expanding the availability on more devices (Smart TVs, game consoles, set top boxes etc), we recently launched the next generation of our Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) allowing segmentation and ad personalisation … It never stops!
What does the future look like for Bedrock?
I’d say the future looks pretty amazing! We can see a lot of changes recently in our media industry, with the consolidation of major companies in Europe, especially in France and in the Netherlands, where we already have a strong footprint. We are lucky to take part in these developments, with the streaming war shaping the future of the industry and media companies needing our expertise to be the streaming champions of tomorrow.
On top of that, and without losing sight of our current partners, we look forward to further expanding both geographically and outside of Europe to create more scale. Which is actually great news for our partners as this will ensure that we can keep up with global players and deliver their fantastic content in the same professional way as the leading global streaming giants.
For more information about Bedrock, or to contact the company, please visit its website www.bedrockstreaming.com or contact@bedrockstreaming.com
Bedrock is also very active on LinkedIn so feel free to contact it directly there.
