ORS Group and Insys Video Technologies have announced the launch of a new joint brand identity.
Big Blue Marble, derived from the famous photograph of the Earth taken in the final days of the Apollo mission, wants to shape the future of media and entertainment through globally scalable, intuitive, and cloud-native video service solutions.
“We want to keep our strong local presence, but scale our services internationally,” explains Michael Wagenhofer, CEO of ORS Group. “Streaming is all about scaling, so you can’t win locally without being without having a global perspective. And we want to be a great partner for startups to make sure that new a brand new innovation ecosystem.”
Only last week ORS celebrated its 20th anniversary as a standalone company, buoyed by Austria’s belated entry into commercial television. “We saw great new launches like Servus TV from Red Bull and ATV and Pulse 4 from ProSiebenSat.1 and so on,” recalls Wagenhofer. “We still felt that the B2B market might not grow anymore in Austria, so we decided to diversify our business and entered the B2C market with our brand simpliTV.”
Beginning as a broadcast network operator, ORS became a major reseller of Astra capacity, before adding streaming capacity as a third element.
“We first partnered with Insys Video Technologies in 2016 when we launched the streaming offering as a pure complement to the terrestrial offering, but we soon understood that our collaboration has great leverage, great potential,” Wagenhofer continued.
The potential resulted in the 2023 merger of ORS and Insys with ORS holding 75% in the Poznań company.
Krzysztof Bartkowski, CEO of Insys Video Technologies, says the company was an early adopter of Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming. But despite working on a number of large projects, it wasn’t until the partnership with ORS, that the company was able to quantify the extra requirements demanded by broadcasters.
“We understood that there’s this niche and we should fill it providing broadcast grade streaming solutions. So, this really means what broadcast grade means. It means high scalability, high resilience, high quality, high content protection capabilities, best quality, support, maintenance, etc.”
There were already contracts in place with the German Football Association (DFV), Lisboa Benfica – the partnership with ORF adding Germany’s ARD, and Turkey’s TRT.
Wagenhofer adds: “We don’t think that it the future will be only internet, so there will still be broadcasting infrastructure in place, and that’s why we are investing in 5G Broadcast, because this is an IP Internet protocol based technology, and it perfectly fits into this new IP streaming world, and it gives broadcasters, to some extent, control over their distribution, which they would lose otherwise.
“So, if they left distribution purely to the internet, then they would be out of the out of control. And broadcasters must have control to make sure that customers can access to their signal, make sure that they are findable. And we provide solutions for this changed environment, giving back control to a certain extent to the broadcaster.”
