Apogee Insight has announced the acquisition of PMA Research, a longstanding provider of market intelligence in the professional video projector and display market sectors.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In making the announcement, the two companies reported that the acquisition ensures continuity of PMA’s trusted research services while expanding resources, analytics capabilities, and coverage into new and rapidly growing areas.

“PMA Research has earned its reputation over decades as the definitive source of display market intelligence,” said Lee Dodson, co-principal of Apogee Insight. “Our priority is to preserve that legacy and build on it — expanding the scope of research, strengthening the data foundation, and giving our clients deeper insight into a display market that continues to evolve.”

PMA Research traces its origins to Pacific Media Associates, founded by Dr. Bill Coggshall, whose pioneering work established the industry standard for tracking and analyzing the global projector market. The company was renamed PMA Research in 2013 when longtime industry leader Nick Rogers assumed leadership following Dr. Coggshall’s retirement. With Rogers now retiring, Apogee Insight has acquired the PMA Research organization, including its extensive historical datasets, experienced research team, and its well-known portfolio of industry reports and services.

PMA Research will continue to operate with the same commitment to accuracy, independence, and integrity that has made it a trusted source for manufacturers, distributors, and channel partners worldwide. The existing PMA team will remain in place, including regional staff in Japan and Taiwan, ensuring uninterrupted service for clients.

Apogee Insight founders Lee Dodson and Sean Wargo will direct the organization going forward, expanding the research portfolio while investing in modern analytics technologies and additional proprietary data sources to support the evolving display market. Lee will serve as COO and Sean will serve as CAO - chief analytics officer, of PMA Research.

The acquisition will allow the organization to extend its coverage beyond displays and into adjacent and emerging categories. The combination of PMA Research’s syndicated data portfolio and Apogee Insight’s applied research and survey capabilities will offer the ability for companies to take the PMA Research resources farther than ever before while adding deep proprietary industry data to Apogee Insight, the two companies said.

“The display industry today spans far more technologies than when PMA first began tracking projectors,” said Sean Wargo, co-principal of Apogee Insight. “By combining PMA’s unmatched historical data with Apogee Insight’s analytics capabilities and expanded data sources, we can deliver a clearer, more complete view of more of the market while maintaining the integrity clients have always relied on.”

Nick Rogers, who has led PMA Research since 2013, will retire following the transition. “It has been a privilege to lead PMA Research and to work alongside such a talented and dedicated team,” said Rogers, “I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built together over the years and the trust the industry has placed in our work. As I step into retirement, I’m confident that PMA’s future is in great hands with Lee Dodson and Sean Wargo. Their experience, vision, and commitment to the integrity of the research make them the right leaders to guide the organization into its next chapter.”

Clients will continue to receive the same PMA Research reports, data services, and analyst support they rely on today, with additional offerings to be introduced as the combined organization expands its capabilities.

NEW YORK—A+E Global Media and Nielsen have announced a new, multiyear deal for measurement, media intelligence and analytics.

The deal includes measurement and media intelligence for A+E Global Media linear and digital brands, including A&E, Lifetime, The History Channel, LMN, and other assets.

As part of the agreement, Nielsen will provide A+E Global Media with linear and digital ratings, and information to help develop advertising, programming, and licensing strategies.

As part of the renewal, A+E Global Media will license new Nielsen services, including Nielsen National Respondent Level Data (NRLD), Nielsen Audience Builder (NAB) and the Data-Driven Linear API (DDL API). This builds on existing services for A+E Global Media, including Nielsen’s Streaming Content Ratings, Streaming Platform Ratings and Ad Intel.

It works in gaming, it works in retail. Heck, it even works when it comes to M&Ms.

Study after study proves that a major key to success in 2018 is customization.

Yet for one European news media service, an inflexible legacy distribution system was blocking the way to such customization.

That was the reality that Euronews was facing. A pan-European news organization with multiculturalism at the heart of its DNA, Euronews was founded nearly 25 years ago by 10 European public broadcasters looking to cover world news from a European perspective in multiple languages 24/7. But this network — seen as groundbreaking when it launched in 1993 — was being held back by an inability to adapt programming to the specific needs of individual countries.

So this pioneering broadcaster began searching for an answer to two key questions.

•How does a multilingual broadcaster better serve a segmented audience in the wildly diverse digital environment of 2018?

•How does one better reach an audience while juggling complex multilingual content production on one hand and managing intricate multiplatform distribution on the other?

In other words, how do you reach an Italian teenager surfing on her mobile phone while simultaneously connecting with a 70-year-old multilingual professor looking for over-the-air breaking news in Ukrainian?

Connecting with Audience via Customization

“We have been operating a ‘one size fits all’ policy since launch because that was the limit of the software we were using,” said Duncan Hooper, digital editor in chief for Euronews. “We found that we could no longer take our brand or product further so we [made a change] to help us break out of those limits and to create a specific identity for each channel with content customized for each audience.”

For Euronews, now the continent’s biggest news channel, that change came in the form of a new broadcast infrastructure with customization at its center.

The result: weeks after the launch, Euronews was already producing more than double the amount of television content that it did under its legacy infrastructure. Additionally, by synchronizing the production of content between its television and digital platforms, Euronews is now producing 20% more content for their digital channels and managed to grow traffic to their website by 66% since the beginning of 2018.

For Euronews, the answer came in the form of a new production and distribution platform that allowed it to transition from a single multi-language channel to 12 separate cross-platform channels that can now be individually tailored to local audiences.

After its installation in fall 2017, Euronews is now generating adapted content with enhanced graphics across TV, social media and the web. The broadcaster is able to set up a separate identity for each of its language channels and deliver pictures and graphics in different languages for audiences in 165 countries.

Journalists and other editorial and creative personnel have more individual control over their content. Under the new system, journalists can now access any video, graphic or script created by another reporter and directly customize that content on the platform. Collaboration between departments is proving to be seamless.

“Journalists can collaborate better, share content seamlessly, and transform an original story with minimal effort to adapt it for each language and audience,” said Francois Schmitt, Euronews COO.

And dependency on technicians is reduced. Using this new system, Euronews can now store all assets in a single, unified environment, which allows for a smooth, automated flow of content from ingest to output.

Now, the 500 users that work at Euronews offices in Athens, Brussels, Budapest and Lyon are connected and collaborating on a single platform. The solution — called Dalet Unified News Operations — handles production, orchestration and delivery of stories in a way that was not possible for Euronews a year ago.

Euronews is now able to adapt its output to the needs of the consumers it serves, “empowering the uniqueness of our multiculturalism,” said Michael Peters, CEO of Euronews. The new production platform is transforming Euronews into a robust, agile and innovative organization, he said.

“[We are becoming] the first glocal news brand by reinventing our approach to broadcast journalism from production to distribution,” he said.

Detractors said Euronews’ multiplex approach to news coverage lacked the ability to adapt programming to the specific needs of individual countries. That’s no longer the case. Now, Euronews is producing double the amount of television content that it did under its outdated infrastructure. By synchronizing the production of content between its TV and digital platforms, Euronews is producing 20 percent more digital platform content than before the adoption of the Unified News Operations solution.

“The most positive thing about the Dalet system for all the journalists has been their empowerment,” Hooper said. “They are no longer reliant on other people to make things happen since they can create content and publish online, on social and on TV. They then have the power to adapt the content to tell the story that they want to tell rather than having to tell the same on each platform regardless of language.”

“[This technology] has enabled us to give more individuality to our storytelling.”

Euronews’ strategic transformation project has been nominated for an Innovation Award at IBC 2018. Lauded as one of the most coveted awards in the media industry, the competition celebrates technical and creative excellence, acknowledging collaboration between organizations like Euronews and Dalet to achieve clever and innovative solutions for real business challenges.

Arnaud Elnecave is vice president of marketing for Dalet. 

Additional Resources

Euronews Customer Story— The world's first "Glocal" Media: a strategic transformation with Dalet

Dalet Unified News Operations Solution — Discover Dalet’s story-centric, integrated news production and delivery solution for TV, radio, web and social

LONDON—From the folks at Statista: Some people like to stay on top of the news cycle throughout the day by checking Twitter, Facebook and their favorite news websites. Others prefer to be served a selection of the day’s important happenings by the evening news on TV. Whether you prefer one or the other may come down to your age and what you have become accustomed to in the past.

According to data published in the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Reportlast week, there is a generational divide when it comes to news consumption. While the large majority of those who grew up with the internet see it as their most important news source, those who relied on the TV news for a daily news fix for decades still tend to prefer the television over online news sources.

Very few people still rely on print publications as their primary news source, indicating that the role of newspapers has shifted from conveyor to commentator of news.