With the recent announcement of its acquisition of Actus Digital, LiveU is ready to expand its portfolio with a comprehensive range of intelligent monitoring and compliance tools that will help its customers realize faster and more efficient workflows, according to company executives.
In a recent interview with TV Tech, executives from Actus and LiveU talked about how the acquisition came about and what it means for LiveU’s customers and market focus.
Actus President Sima Levy noted that both Actus and LiveU customers in broadcast, as well as government and enterprise are looking for solutions that solve multiple issues.
“Customers want an end to end solution, but they also would like to have fewer vendors,” she said. “LiveU targets the exact same customers as we do, so now LiveU is able to offer more products to the exact same customers.
“Why is that good for the customers?” Levy added. “Number one, LiveU’s reputation means that it is committed to make Actus Digital the biggest and the strongest compliance and media monitoring solution in the market, supporting Actus with all of its resources in terms of products, innovation roadmap, and its global presence.”
Emphasis on QoE
Actus Digital, renowned for its intelligent monitoring and compliance platforms, used by premier broadcasters, governments and media agencies worldwide, brings powerful content analysis, Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring solutions, and advanced AI enabled tools that will complement the LiveU EcoSystem, delivering operational efficiency and advanced content analysis. The LiveU EcoSystem is a set of innovative IP-video solutions, that add efficiency and shorten workflows across the entire video production chain, including multi-cam 5G contribution encoders and cloud-based ingest, production and IP-video distribution solutions, making the two solution portfolios highly synergistic.
Steve Wind-Mozley, chief marketing officer for LiveU, noted that the two companies’ evolution ran in parallel as they both pioneered their respective technologies when they started out about two decades ago.
“LiveU invented video over bonded IP and Actus began to assemble a single-screen compliance logging and this concept of intelligent monitoring,” he said, adding that LiveU’s interest in Actus Digital came down to the customer experience.
“How can you find the value in content and deliver it to a user in a convenient way? That resonated quite loudly with us and our board, which is why we were excited to reach out and acquire the Actus business and technology.”
Levy added that the two companies were well familiar with each other before the acquisition was announced at the end of April.
“We have been talking to LiveU in the last two or three years because we did understand the integration and the power of both solutions and the customers having one monitoring platform for their LiveU streams, their broadcast streams, their OTT or any other stream in one single screen,” she said, adding that there was significant overlap in the two companies’ customer base.
“[LiveU] is in the markets that we target. It's exactly the same industry. It's amazing. We have many, many common customers,” she said.
The broadcast industry’s move to IP has had a major impact on how the companies approached today’s market, according to Wind-Mozley.
“One of the things that attracted us to Actus, is that, like LiveU, Actus is video agnostic,’ so we don't mind what type of protocol our customers are using—IP, SDI, SRT, LRT, NDI, 2110, or another, it doesn't really matter,” he said. “Actus has the ability to monitor any type of feed, so they're even more agnostic than LiveU is. So the ecosystem that we're building together is designed to be as open as possible, because we want our customers to have the choice to use the right tool at the right time.”
Design Customers
Although LiveU is in the process of integrating Actus’ platform into its product portfolio, Levy noted that they are already getting increased interest from their customers for a common multiviewer for their different type of feeds as well as implement Actus other capabilities on the LiveU content, such as AI options.
“There are several levels of integration—one is something we already do, and that started even before the acquisition where LiveU customers were coming to Actus asking, ‘we would like to monitor LiveU content within a platform like yours,’ she said. “That started a year and a half back, before we even discussed the M&A with LiveU. So that came from a market need.”
“And here we don't need to do any integration—it's there and we are already doing that; Actus can ingest any type of video and audio, any protocol, any resolution, any format, into our platform,” she added.
As for further integration, Levy says the companies have already begun discussions with select customers to explore ways of integrating solutions that could lead to the development of new configurations of a combined system.
“We are talking to a few customers—and we have many shared customers who are coming to us and saying, ‘we would like to offer you some ideas for further integration,” Levy said. “I call them ‘design partners.’ We have already picked up three shared customers, both of ours and LiveU, and this is happening just now. All this M&A is so fresh, but it's already happening. We didn't plan to do that until early next year, but the industry is dictating the tempo here.”
Wind-Mozley noted the importance of having one solution in an easy to understand platform that can accelerate workflows for more efficient live production, adding that the Actus brand and team is still intact after the acquisition is completed.
“Actus remains the same,” he said, adding that “we already get more and more customers of LiveU that understand the integration and that we bring more value to the production, bringing monitoring in one screen.”
IBC Plans
Actus, which will be exhibiting in the LiveU booth at the IBC Show in September, will preview some upgrades to its Actus X platform. Actus X features next-generation Quality Assurance (QA) compliance logging, giving customers better access and control over alerts and threshold settings via its browser-based GUI; advanced multiviewer capabilities and AI-powered media insight.
Levy says the platform is designed to help customers expand the monetization potential of their content.
“We are not only providing mandatory compliance, we are turning the compliance and mandatory recording system into a kind of a business enabler,” she said. “We have a nice solution for clipping and content repurposing to social media that has nothing to do with compliance, but will help customers increase viewer engagement.”
“The punch of the Actus X goes much, much beyond compliance and monitoring,” she added,
Wind-Mozley says IBC will provide a stage to showcase LiveU’s role in increasing the integration of IP in live production.
”We will be unveiling what we're terming to be a ‘quantum leap’ in live production; and I don’t use that term lightly,” he said. “It's not even a revolution, this is something entirely new.
“Last time at NAB, we were excited to talk about and demonstrate LiveU IQ, our ability to use AI, eSIMs and dynamic switching to be able to do some pretty astonishing things in very contested, congested or very feeble remote network environments,” he added. “At IBC, we will be delivering the next chapter of that story, which will make live production much more accessible for many, many customers, and we're properly excited about that. We'll also be showcasing some very powerful add-on solutions that I kind of like to think really enhance the accessibility and the interoperability of what we call the LiveU ecosystem.”
LiveU and Actus will be Stand 7.C19 at the RAI Amsterdam during the 2025 IBC Show, Sept. 12-15.
