Introducing a new arm to help OTT customers address ‘huge pain point’ of media asset management, streaming technology solutions provider Quickplay has undertaken a strategic expansion into media services and media asset management with the acquisition of 440 Digital.
The company uses cloud-based technology based on industry standard tools to automate and package content with QC and conformity validation. It delivers solutions to platforms encompassing TVOD, AVOD, SVOD, MVPD or broadcast.
Using 440 Digital’s automated processes, the new Quickplay Media Services arm will provide a wide variety of services, including onboarding of content providers and distributor endpoints; management of ingress and egress drop-off locations; identification, tracking, and quality control of media assets; pre-processing and enrichment; audio and video transcoding; metadata aggregation and normalisation; subtitles and closed caption conversion; avails, planners and content rights management; and preparation for and delivery of media packages.
As part of the acquisition, 440 Digital founder Robert Longwell (pictured) - who built and managed the media services team that helped transition the Walt Disney Company Disney to digital - will become Quickplay’s head of media services. Longwell will be leading the integration of 440 Digital’s best-in-class automation technologies into Quickplay’s cloud-native OTT platform. The acquisition is designed to extend Quickplay’s end-to-end video pipeline, video CMS, and user experience capabilities to the onboarding and management of content – including media workflow automation and digital mastering – that occur prior to distribution.
“Media services and media asset management are huge pain points for every streaming provider,” said Juan Martin, CTO and co-counder of Quickplay. “Distributors must deal with a maze of content sources and distributors, often with different formats, different naming conventions, and different levels of quality control. With 440 Digital and Robert Longwell, we’re simplifying the ability of every customer to receive content that is normalised, delivered on time and versioned for the customer’s specific needs.”
“A highly skilled media services organisation makes an incredible difference in streaming operations,” added Longwell. “Many providers simply lack the necessary resources, knowledge and experience to ‘get it right.’ The fundamental thinking behind 440 Digital and the acquisition by Quickplay is to offer those distributors proven capabilities that can streamline all of the processes around media asset management and content distribution.”