June 1, 2021
From rivals to colleagues: Together, we’re the future of TV as a Service
"Of course, that makes sense," was the immediate reaction from one of our biggest customers last Thursday when I shared with them the news that 24i had acquired Nordija. In fact, it's been the overwhelming response from the customers of both companies and from industry and market analysts interested in our TV as a Service (TVaaS) strategy.
Obviously we're delighted that they agree we've done the right thing, but we're not surprised, we thought it made perfect sense too! Negotiating an acquisition over Zoom is not something any of us has ever done before, so it was really great to finally get over to Denmark for the big announcement and to meet almost the whole Nordija team face to face. Of course, after years as trade show neighbours, friendly business rivals - and sometimes project partners - we’re not strangers. So we already knew there'd be a great cultural fit between the 32 members of staff in Denmark and the rest of the 24i family.
Getting down to TVaaS business
But now the welcome gifts have been exchanged and the champagne has been drunk, we're getting down to the hard work - delivering on our promise to be “the future of streaming” - and in particular the future of TV as a service (TVaaS).
From a business and technical perspective, 24i and Nordija have both been on this path for quite some time. We each recognized the enormous potential for growth in TVaaS. Pay TV operators are increasingly looking to share in the many benefits of a fully managed streaming service that many of our OTT customers have enjoyed for some time. It’s something both companies have been working on separately, but bringing the software, skills and experience of the Danish team into 24i will help us to supercharge that work and deliver a combined solution on an accelerated timescale.
The fundamentals of TV as a Service
A couple of months ago I outlined some of the key considerations for Pay TV operators considering switching to a managed streaming service in my “Buyer’s Guide” blog post. It looks at the importance of ensuring your TV as a Service includes 24/7 incident monitoring, performance monitoring, and capacity monitoring with alerting and proactive maintenance - not just for the application layer or the operational (backend) layer but also all the components and integrations between. We’re already doing much of this for customers like Dutch telco Youfone, but the Nordija acquisition will enable us to step up our product development and replicate this service to more and more Pay TV customers in the future.
Taking our TVaaS offering global
We also have global ambitions. While 24i has a global reputation for OTT excellence and Nordija is strong in the European Pay TV market, we both have planned for a global market expansion. So watch this space for more on that!
And if you’d like more information on how TV as a Service can reduce the stress of running a Pay TV operation, check out our latest whitepaper, Pay TV Doesn’t Have To Be Painful.
