Synamedia Go SaaS suite unveiled
March 17, 2021
By Colin Mann
Video technology provider Synamedia has unveiled Synamedia Go, a modular suite of data-driven SaaS services which it says provide a frictionless way for pay-TV operators and OTT/D2C streaming providers rapidly to augment and create value from their technology platforms. Based on a flexible, ‘add and go’ architecture, each service is designed to achieve a significant return on investment with minimal effort.
The first services released are Go.Aggregate and Go.Experiment. Targeted at commercial, product and editorial teams, these new platform-agnostic offerings are designed to provide immediately actionable results supported by rapid experimentation, implementation and improvement to drive up engagement, loyalty and revenues.
According to Synamedia, Go.Aggregate removes the navigation headache faced by viewers as they switch between broadcast, catch-up and OTT content sources in a provider’s ecosystem. It empowers providers to extract more value from their platform by unifying content from different services and presenting it to viewers in a simplified, curated and searchable way. With support for metadata aggregation, recommendations and federated search across multiple services and on any display, Go.Aggregate helps providers keep viewers on their platform, boosting satisfaction and reducing costly churn.
Go.Experiment offers business teams new tools to improve and accelerate their decision-making on pressing issues such as content spend, UI improvements, and live event promotions. According to Synamedia, intuitive dashboards make it easy to segment viewers into sub-groups, and subsequently test elements of the subscriber experience, marketing campaigns or operational practices. For example, product owners can test UI designs on sample audiences in live environments and then apply selected changes more broadly, based on real-time insights.
Underpinning Synamedia Go is Synamedia’s Cloud TV Application Platform (CTAP). CTAP uses open APIs to integrate and connect Synamedia Go services to existing backend systems and third-party solutions and devices seamlessly. Its incremental, simplified and accelerated integration model radically cuts the time to market for customers as they launch new features and services and reduces operational overheads compared to traditional siloed systems.
According to Nick Thexton, Synamedia CTO, Synamedia Go makes it simple for video providers to turbocharge their existing platforms to work harder for them, all with minimal disruption. “Our suite of add-on modular services helps them test, refine and introduce features, apps and services that solve real business pain points and that really resonate with viewers. The inspiration behind Synamedia Go is our desire to help customers continually reinvent themselves, meet their KPIs, and stay ahead of the competition in the rapidly evolving video landscape.”
Providing a baseline for continuous innovation, Synamedia Go is centred on a microservices architecture and offers fully-customised or out-of-the-box multi-tenant SaaS offerings hosted by Synamedia and running on AWS, removing the need for any engineering dependencies. The suite is both distribution technology and client software agnostic and is fully integrated with AndroidTV, RDK, AppleTV, iOS, WebOS and Tizen applications.
Part of Synamedia’s broader set of cloud offerings, Synamedia Go complements the recently-launched Synamedia Iris addressable advertising and Clarissa business insight services, as well as CSFEye for credential sharing and fraud prevention, and Synamedia EverGuard for piracy detection and protection.
Separately, Synamedia revealed that bookings for its Video Network business increased 57 per cent year on year in 2020, it increased profitability significantly, and added 30 new customers. With consumer demand putting pressure on video infrastructure during the pandemic, Synamedia’s Video Network business saw revenues increase across all industry sectors, geographies and technologies, including primary distribution, unified virtualised headend, ad insertion, video compression and edge delivery.
The business recorded the largest single contract in its history: supporting a US content provider as it minimises bandwidth utilisation in the C-band spectrum. Synamedia projects increasing revenues from service providers needing to optimise delivery as the FCC reallocates spectrum for the rollout of 5G.
“Our leadership position and strong growth are the direct result of our intense focus on virtualised software, cloud and quality of video experience over the last two years. By allowing new customers and our installed base to migrate to the cloud at their own pace, we are well positioned to sustain this momentum,” said Julien Signès, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Video Network at Synamedia.