MARKHAM, Ontario—Enghouse Systems Limited has announced it has successfully completed its acquisition of substantially all of the assets of SeaChange International, Inc.  related to its IPTV products and services business, for a purchase price of approximately $23 million (after the deduction of SeaChange's cash and cash equivalents at the closing date).

Enghouse noted that SeaChange's annual revenues are currently expected to be approximately $18 million.  

SeaChange will be integrated within Enghouse's Asset Management Group which includes its IPTV business.

"This acquisition increases the scale of our IPTV business, augments our product offering and furthers our expansion into the European market", said Steve Sadler, chairman and CEO of Enghouse. "We are very pleased to welcome SeaChange's employees, customers and partners to Enghouse."

SeaChange had announced an agreement to be purchased by Enghouse in April. In August of last year, the financially troubled company had announced its voluntary decision to deregister its common stock with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and delist its Common Stock from The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC. 

SeaChange is a provider of streaming video services, cable TV broadcast platforms and advanced advertising insertion technology.  Its StreamVid premium streaming product enables customers to cost-effectively launch and grow a direct-to-consumer service to manage, curate and monetize their content as well as form a direct relationship with their subscribers, while SeaChange's Advanced Advertising Platform helps to generate new Video Advertising revenues.

NEW YORK—Dish Media has announced that it is working with SeaChange and Beachfront to launch what they are calling a “first-of-its-kind solution” to enable advertisers to access premium linear TV inventory through a real-time, programmatic buying model. 

The solution, National Linear Programmatic (NLP), will work across Dish TV's 7+ million households nationwide. 

NLP is enabled by Beachfront, the sell-side ad server built for convergent TV, and SeaChange International, Inc., a major provider of video delivery and ad insertion platforms.

"Pioneering this new capability is another step in our effort to build more open and interoperable solutions for our advertisers," said Kevin Arrix, senior vice president, Dish Media. "The television marketplace is evolving, and providing our valuable linear TV inventory via programmatic technology is another positive step in this direction."

NLP will enhance Dish Media's existing sales channels while presenting the demand-side with a more flexible, interoperable ad-buying solution, allowing marketers to buy in a more practical, scalable and efficient way, the companies said. 

Viant is the first Demand-side Platform (DSP) to utilize this new technology, Dish said. 

"This exciting new offering is a great option for digital-first buyers who want to expand their reach and take advantage of Dish's linear footprint," said Jonathan Ahuna, senior vice president of operations, Viant. "It delivers a one-two combination of being able to buy ads seconds before the ads' airing, then, through the power of Viant's Adelphic DSP, quickly report out on the buy, vastly reducing the traditional delay of linear reporting."

Key features of the product include: 

• Ability to expose linear inventory to be executed in real-time
• Fully automated buy process for linear demand partners
• Ability for demand-side to plan linear alongside their digital/over-the-top buys for a more holistic view and more control of their linear exposure
• Provides a greater range of buyers access to linear TV

"Enabling new and incremental advertising capabilities for Dish TV with our Advanced Advertising Platform is a true milestone in our quest to optimize ad yield for operators globally. Adopting the principles of addressability and automation from the digital landscape to enable real-time auctions for linear TV through industry-standard digital advertising marketplaces is a gamechanger and a growth milestone for the industry," said Chris Klimmer, president, SeaChange. "Together with Beachfront, we will continue our mission to optimize ad yield for operators by attracting additional advertisers, enabling real-time bidding and automating ad sales."

"Having Dish TV deploy an automated solution is truly going to accelerate the growth of programmatic capabilities in the industry, particularly for TV media buyers, programmers and distributors," said Chris Maccaro, chief executive officer, Beachfront. "Advertisers are constantly looking for the fastest, most efficient use of time and money. Having access to Dish TV's national linear TV inventory with the tools required to get a campaign live in a day will provide a lot of new flexibility."

BOSTON—SeaChange International has appointed Peter Aquino as its new president and CEO, the company said.

With more than 30 years of experience in technology, media and telecommunications, Aquino takes on the new roles as SeaChange transitions to tech-forward use cases for cable and streaming customers, it said.

“With our strong balance sheet, enhanced product portfolio and continued momentum, this is the right time to attract a high-caliber leader like Pete to take SeaChange to the next level of growth and profitability,” said Robert Pons, chairman of the board. “The board and I have known Pete for many years and are confident that his experience and relationships with cable MSOs, telcos, vendors, and partners will benefit our team, customers and ultimately drive value for our shareholders.”

Aquino is serving as chairman and CEO of Spartacus Acquisition Corp. and will continue in those roles until the business is combined with NextNav, a next-gen GPS developer, in a deal that’s expected to close in Q4 2021. He is also expected to join the board of NextNav. 

Prior to joining Spartacus A.C., Aquino served as chairman and CEO of Internap Corp., chairman and CEO of Primus Telecommunications Group, and president and CEO of RCN Corp. At RCN Corp., he led the company’s transformation into an all-digital HDTV cable multiple system operator (MSO) and created an advanced metro-fiber network. Aquino began his career at Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) in 1983.

“I am very excited to join SeaChange at such a pivotal time in its growth and potential for new innovation given its decades of performance and software development,” said Aquino. “We have an opportunity to leverage SeaChange’s strong skillset and technology platform to continue to lean forward on strengthening our existing video and advertising capabilities, and accelerate our momentum as a leading provider of streaming services in a global TAM that is exploding.”

More information is available on the company’s website.  

BOSTON—SeaChange today announced it is deepening its collaboration with Amazon Web Services to add data analytics to its cloud-based video delivery platform.

SeaChange and AWS have collaborated since 2016. SeaChange will now leverage AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) services to gain a deeper understanding of end-user engagement and improve customer business outcomes, it said.

With Amazon SageMaker, SeaChange customers can deploy ML use cases, such as predictive maintenance, computer vision and predicting the behavior of customers, it said.

“At SeaChange, we strive to provide our customers with the best technology available. By integrating Amazon Personalize into the SeaChange solution, we will equip our customers with the tools that increase end-user engagement by delivering personalized and relevant content recommendations catered to users’ consumption habits, content preferences and demographics,” said SeaChange senior vice president of global sales and marketing Chris Klimmer.

“Using Amazon SageMaker will also enable us to utilize AI and automated ML to further optimize the business performance of our customers’ services. Our platform will automatically merge data from various sources and deliver predictive insights to user behavior, which in return allows our customers to prevent churn and increase user retention.” 

Amazon Personalize enables SeaChange customers to deliver personalization experiences, channel lineup utilization, VOD catalog engagement and effective promotion, said Ankur Mehrotra, director of vertical AI services, at AWS, who added AWS is “pleased to work with SeaChange” to enable brands to benefit from ML-based personalization.

More information is available on the company’s website. 

SeaChange also is streaming a video on its StreamVid platform.

BOSTON—SeaChange International, Inc. has launched StreamVid, a turnkey platform for OTT services that is designed to help operators and content owners directly connect with subscribers by offering new streaming services. 

StreamVid is an end-to-end, fully managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that supports the full range of business and technical functions from content ingestion and management to curation and monetization, SeaChange explained. It provides operators and content owners full control over content distribution, user complete lifecycle data, the ability to do cross-selling and the rich data to understand their user base. 

The StreamVid solution also leverages SeaChange’s advanced advertising platform to provide targeted and personalized ad insertion capabilities for content owners – allowing them to tap into the rapidly growing streaming ad market. 

As part of the launch of the new StreamVid brand, SeaChange also has put up a new website for the end-to-end SaaS platform. 

“StreamVid is a complete enabling technology for streaming businesses,” Chris Klimmer, senior vice president of Global Sales and Marketing at SeaChange International. “It allows content owners to build and own a direct, independent relationship with their consumers and to drive brand recognition, loyalty and value. As a complete platform without third-party software components, StreamVid removes market entry barriers since it is being offered under a true, consumption-based, pay-as-you-grow SaaS business model. As we understand the increasing importance of advertising business models within the streaming landscape, we put a particular focus on the integration with SeaChange’s ad tech components. We are now able to help our customers increase their advertising revenues with creatives that are relevant for each individual viewer.”

The platform can be deployed quickly to deliver all content—including Connected TV, OTT, SVOD, TVOD and AVOD—to all devices in 4K quality, SeaChange announced. 

The company also noted that StreamVid supports a broad range of operating systems, platforms and devices including Apple iOS, Apple TV, Android TV, Android, Samsung Smart TV, Roku, RDK, Fire TV, LG, PlayStation, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Chromecast and more. 

The cloud-based system can be provisioned to support any size implementation – from start-ups to large-scale migrations. Emerging businesses benefit from the consumption business model since it removes the cost and technical barriers preventing them from launching a streaming service and allowing them to expand as their business grows. The platform supports all monetization models including subscription, transactional or advertising – the latter based on SeaChange’s proprietary ad insertion technology. 

More information about StreamVid is available at the new website here. 

WALTHAM, Mass.—As people are stuck inside because of the coronavirus (COVID-19), SeaChange International is reporting that streaming activity—linear, video-on-demand and OTT—has gone up by 30% across the globe in March as people stay home to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Greater increases in those numbers may be on the way.

In addition to simply the overall increase in streaming numbers during this time, the change in what SeaChange says were “relatively predictable viewing habits” is putting a higher demand on network infrastructure. “The rate at which these systems need to scale in order to meet the growing demand could not have been anticipated by operators,” Walid Hamri, chief product officer at SeaChange, wrote.

Even as streaming numbers go up, advertising revenue for these services is taking a hit. Travel and retail are scaling down advertising efforts because people are staying at home. In Europe, Facebook found that even while time spent on the app was up, ad business has weakened in countries that are taking active measures against COVID-19.

Both traditional and OTT service providers are likely to optimize their operating expenses because of lower video average revenue per user and less overall advertising revenue, SeaChange reports.

SeaChange cites a Nielsen report that predicts a 60% increase in the amount of media watched moving forward as an indication the situation will not be immediately remedied.

“During these trying times and to prepare for future uncertainty, TV operators and direct-to-consumer service providers require a complete system that offers flexibility, scalability and budget control,” wrote Hamri. In the report, Hamri describes the benefits of SeaChange’s own Framework system in these regards.

For more information, visit www.seachange.com.  

ACTON, Mass.—SeaChange International, a video delivery platform company, has made the move to acquire the European-based company Xstream, which focuses on OTT video and TV cloud platforms. The deal is said to be for $4.6 million in cash and 541,738 shares of SeaChange common stock, which totals $5.5 million, per the official press release.

Based out of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Warsaw, Poland, Xstream reportedly has more than 5 million active subscribers and customers that include Canal Digital, Star Online, ALT Digital Media Entertainment, Mayo Clinic, Alitbox and Our Star Club.

[Read: SeaChange Unveils cFlow Video Management, Personalization Portfolio]

“Xstream’s MediaMaker video platform will enhance the SeaChange end-to-end video framework and enable us to gain near-term revenue synergies,” said Ed Terino, SeaChange’s CEO, in the press release. “In addition to leveraging Xstream’s experienced engineering resources, we expect to realize cost synergies in sales, marketing and administrative functions, including the consolidation of multiple locations into our Warsaw offices this fiscal year.

“The acquisition of Xstream will accelerate SeaChange’s penetration in OTT and new market segments with a SaaS revenue model and fully cloud-based end-to-end video platform that operates in a host managed service environment,” Terino concluded.

ACTON, MASS.—Video solutions provider SeaChange International and Russian-based video operator TotalVideo have entered into an agreement to develop a multi-operator, multi-tenant hybrid OTT/DVB/IPTV platform that will enable video and cable providers in Russia to offer multi-screen services to their subscribers.

TotalVideo has agreed to develop their new service using SeaChange’s PanoramiC platform, and plans to offer this new video platform to service providers across Russia and Eastern Europe. The service platform will provide advanced viewing capabilities for live, linear, and on-demand content across a variety of devices, both fixed and mobile.

“With SeaChange, TotalVideo has the scalable foundation to serve our customers as comprehensively and effectively as possible,” said Mikhail Silin, General Director, TotalVideo. “The combination of software solutions and professional services provided by SeaChange will allow us to deliver a platform that video providers and operators can easily adopt, allowing them to offer their viewers an enhanced user experience. With our new platform, they will benefit with increased viewership and customer loyalty.”

The PanoramiC platform is a cloud-based video management and delivery platform, combining the components of the SeaChange cFlow™ video management and monetization portfolio with complementary streaming solution elements from leading vendors ATEME, ATES Networks, Broadpeak, and castLabs. The scalable platform solution allows providers to quickly and cost-effectively deploy personalized video services across multiple screens and devices, while offering a consistent user experience across their multiple devices.

“As consumers demand access to video on every device, video providers around the world must enhance their existing infrastructures to offer high-quality, premium video across any platform, with optimized and personalized user experiences,” said Ed Terino, Chief Executive Officer, SeaChange. “We are proud to have been chosen by TotalVideo to help them develop a best-in-breed multi-screen platform for video operators and their consumers in Russia.”

WASHINGTON—Collectively, the growing wave of streaming and OTT versions of linear programs has generated a tidal wave of usage, posing challenges to producers and distributors who are hustling to find ways to create a “consistent experience” for audiences who see programs on a variety of devices and via multiple delivery systems.

According to a Parks Associates analysis last month, 52 percent of U.S. broadband households subscribe to both pay TV and one or more OTT video services. The study also found that about two-thirds of U.S. broadband households subscribe to an OTT service, and 38 percent have more than one OTT subscription.

A separate study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that in North America, 65 percent of viewers watch streaming video once or several times per day—slightly less than the streaming usage in Europe, Asia/Pacific and far less than in South America and the Middle East. And yet another report from PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that OTT video revenue will reach nearly $31 billion by 2022, up from about $22 billion this year.

MULTIPLE CHALLENGES

Despite such rosy data, however, the video streaming outlook faces multiple challenges. For example, Dan Rayburn, a principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, frets that the current streaming infrastructure cannot keep pace with the growth in streaming demand. In a recent online blog Rayburn contended that, “if online video consumption continues to take market share from traditional distribution channels and ultimately replaces traditional broadcast distribution, then streaming video infrastructure will need to increase its capacity by over 3x in the coming years.”

Moreover, Rayburn predicts that if 4K UHD replaces the current high-definition signals for streamed content, then “the required bandwidth will increase by a factor of another 4x.

”Adding 8K, used for “true virtual reality” would trigger the need for “another 3x increase in capacity,” Rayburn said in a blog last month. He concluded that such growth scenarios would require a 20-fold increase in the streaming video infrastructure during the coming decade.

“Building 20x the data centers and filling them with 20x the servers in addition to constructing the power plants to power this infrastructure is clearlly not an economically viable or sustainable strategy,” Rayburn added. But his modest conclusion was only that “we need to start talking now about how to meet the “capacity gap” challenge.

WANTED: NEW WORKFLOW TOOLS

That realty—the necessary coexistence of linear and streaming content—has triggered aggressive efforts to empower the media supply chain with new tools to handle workflows for the emerging market.

“Workflows, as repeatable processes, are evolving constantly in reaction to new content manufacturing and distribution scenarios,”said Richard N. Yelen, head of North American Business Development for Accenture Digital Video Products and Services. He cited “the migration from traditional licensed content distribution to ‘app syndication,’ as content owners take greater ownership over the viewing experience.”

“We are increasingly looking at ways of using data [aggregated from consumption platforms, AI-generated from media analysis and other sources] in a highly secured way to drive automation into the supply chain,” Yelen added.

He acknowledged the “distinct differences” between broadcast and cable operator products and services “with obvious intersections” but emphasized that both of those traditional platforms are “quite different” for video on demand and live streaming.

“The difference is between file-based workflow vs. active real-time streaming,” Yelen said. “Live streaming requires more careful/intense real-time management of service continuity and user experience since popular large live events, such as sporting matches, can cause unpredictable viewership spikes.

“These spikes often have load implications across the viewing platform ecosystem, including both core platform services [e.g. user authentication], as well as network and caching [e.g. CDN performance],” Yelen added.

Jon Alexander, senior director of product management for Akamai, noted the special considerations for live vs. on-demand.

“For live and linear delivery, we emphasize live origin capabilities—ingesting video into our network from as close to the origination point [ideally production or playout] as quickly as possible,” Alexander said, noting that for on-demand content, Akamai seeks to move content “into our storage environment or from a customer’s on-premise or cloud storage platform. He emphasized the architecture that seeks to enable “capabilities such as multisource multicast and prepositioning of content.”

The technologies Akamai leverages for OTT video delivery differ from those used for traditional broadcast and cable transmission, according to Alexander.

“The workflows themselves are different, as is encoding and security,” he said. “For OTT, we’re delivering content files in chunks, and we’re using the open, unmanaged internet as the transport layer. While there are changes on the horizon, the majority of OTT delivery today is unicast—one stream to one device—as opposed to one-to-many broadcast delivery.”

But although the underlying technologies are very different, Akamai is working to enable the same experience, he said.

“The bar for consumer expectations has been set by broadcast, so we’re aiming to reach and ultimately exceed those expectations by tuning every layer of the delivery stack from the client and network transport protocols all the way through the application,” he added. “This helps enable efficient video delivery across the internet from the origin to the end-viewer device, whatever or wherever it may be.”

Aspera, an IBM operating unit, has developed a range of streaming video solutions, based on its Fast Adaptive Secure Protocol (FASP), a large data transport protocol that eliminates TCP’s loss and error handling and the resulting erratic transfer rate swings.

“FASPStream enables centralized, real-time production of high bit-rate programming, eliminating the need to colocate costly production staff at remote venues,” Todd Kelly, director of product marketing, explained. “It also supports in-line transcoding, packaging and delivery to accelerate live video delivery and facilitates open file workflows for real-time editing and production. By lowering the production costs for all kinds of events, especially ‘tier 2’ and ‘tier 3’ events, broadcasters can create and deliver new content [that targets] new audiences.”

Kelly also emphasized the value of collaboration, citing his company’s work with Telestream to build a joint solution that integrates FASPStream technology into Telestream’s Vantage and Lightspeed Live software.

“This API-level integration provides a truly innovative approach to delivering live, broadcast-quality video streams from the venue to the remote production facility, enabling workflows never before possible,” Kelly said.

SeaChange International is also focusing on the multiplatform ecosystem with its new “cFlow solutions” portfolio, which debuted in June. According to SeaChange Marketing Vice President Kurt Michel, the solution was developed to serve broadcast, cable and OTT customers who “want a single workflow management system that handles all of the associated workflows.” In addition, SeaChange’s PanoramiC platform, a pre-integrated end-to-end cloud-based video delivery platform, can be used by content producers, broadcasters, cable and mobile operators and aggregators (such as vMVPDs) for multiplatform delivery.

“We have customers who perform over 1,000 quality checks on incoming content, before they even start processing it,” Michel explained. “With adaptive bitrate streaming, their workflows can literally produce dozens of variations of a given title,” including content rights, geo restrictions and other factors.

He characterized SeaChange’s “medium-agnostic” approach as a “cohesive, viewer-centric system” with modular elements that are “medium-specific where technical requirement dictate.”

Michel cited ad insertion technologies that can be adapted to the mechanisms used on different networks.

“Our session management capabilities allow a viewer to stop watching a title on their traditional TV, and pick up where they left off on their smartphone,” he explained.

VIDEO LATENCY & SPORTS SPEEDS

IBM Aspera’s Kelly underscored the importance of low-latency for streamed content.

“Capturing and producing content for live events such as sports, news, training or education programs poses unique challenges, and true real-time, remote production has long been one of the ‘holy grails’ for broadcasters that produce live events,” he said.

The issue of latency in high-speed streaming of sports has become more prominent due to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing sports betting in the U.S., Kelly added.

Akamai’s Alexander agrees that latency is one of the most significant differences between traditional broadcast/cable delivery and OTT systems.

“We’ve done a lot of development to reduce end-to-end latency to 10 seconds on our generally available delivery and live origin products... equivalent to the latency you see on traditional television,” Alexander told TV Technology. “This is especially important for the live sports experience, where you want viewers—no matter how they’re watching—to see a big play at roughly the same time rather than hear cheers or groans or see something on social media before they actually see it live.”

“While 10-second latency is acceptable for most applications, we continue to push for lower latency,” Alexander added. “We have demonstrated two- to three-second end-to-end latency using chunked-transfer encoding, which is being successfully tested with several customers at the moment.”

SeaChange’s Michel also addressed the latency challenges for sports events and other live programming, which he characterized as part of a bigger reality: “workflow complexity is increasing.”

“Real-time content protection [adds]... an additional layer of complexity,” he said. “Viewer tolerance for problems with live sporting events is usually very low, since they are emotionally attached and the content is highly perishable. The live experience is everything.”

He emphasized that providers are not satisfied with an either/or for live video-on-demand.”

“They require both live and VOD,” he said.

PROMISING OUTLOOK

As vendors look toward the next steps in managing conventional and future video delivery, one theme comes through: the need for a consistent experience.

“A consistent experience across viewing devices and platforms” is the objective of SeaChange’s portfolio of content management systems, advertising management and back office systems, explained Kurt Michel, vice president of marketing for the Acton, Mass.-based company.

“Consistency of the viewing experience,” is Akamai’s goal, said Jon Alexander, senior director of product management for Akamai.

“Uniform, unaltered, in-order byte stream that equally supports constant bit rate and adaptive bit rate formats,” according to Todd Kelly director of product marketing for IBM Aspera, in more technical terms.

“Reliable functioning of many large platforms,” is how Accenture’s Yelen summed it up.

“OTT will continue to grow and to dislodge traditional viewing experiences, with mobile traffic growing even further in prominence,” Yelen said. “The rollout of 5G services will be an additional accelerator because it will provide much higher quality and less compressed images when streamed to a device or television. Better connectivity in highly populated urban areas as a result of 5G may also boost consumers’ desire and ability to stream videos.”

Alexander expects to see more mainstream adoption of the HEVC and CMAF [Common Media Application Format] standards for streaming this year.

“We’re still early in the OTT adoption cycle, so consistently meeting performance expectations at 10x or 100x current traffic levels is a major point of emphasis for Akamai,” Alexander said.

Kelly, citing IBM Aspera’s work with Fox Sports on World Cup coverage, pointed out that, waiting for transfers to be complete before editing is “not an option.” He explained that while monitoring the soccer action in Russia, the Fox Sports production team in Los Angeles was “able to create clips while files are still growing,” constantly keeping in mind that delays “would not meet the audience expectation for live viewing.”

Collectively, all that upbeat exuberance seems to justify the forecast of Colin Dixon, chief analyst and founder of nScreenMedia, a Silicon Valley consultancy.

“By 2022, video streaming will scale to TV audience size,” Dixon said in June. “Linear TV broadcasters will be taking advantage of technology to provide fully addressable linear experiences.”

Consistently.

ACTON, Mass. — SeaChange has announced its new cFlow solutions portfolio. The company describes it as a comprehensive set of video management and personalization tools for video providers.

“Broadcasters have built their primetime lineups for decades to create a ‘flow’ from one show to another, and between content and ads, to keep audiences watching and returning,” said Shankar Nagarajan, SeaChange VP of product management.

The cFlow portfolio is aimed at enabling OTT video providers to create personalized content flows to improve viewer engagement and unlock the potential of anytime, anywhere multiscreen services, he said.

The new portfolio repositions SeaChange to help its customers navigate the march towards personalization of television and capitalize on this change, Nagarajan added.

The SeaChange cFlow portfolio includes four solution families that can be used together or standalone, including:

• cContent content management: Simplifies the design and management of complex content workflows, provides metadata enrichment needed to match the right content to viewers and scales as subscriber numbers grow;
• cBridge offer, session and transaction management: A set of back-office management capabilities, including offer creation, pricing, packaging, promotion and multiscreen session management;
• cAds ad management: Tools to develop and manage monetization through targeted, personalized advertising across multiple channels and devices; and
• cView viewer experience: Client software that provides a consistent, personalized look, feel and experience across mobile devices, smart TVs, connected TVs and set-top boxes.

SeaChange this year is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and the expertise in management of video and creating engaging viewer experiences acquired over that history is enabling the company to infuse “that experience into every element of cFlow,” said Nagarajan.

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