Synamedia: ‘Huge cultural transformation’
March 16, 2022
By Colin Mann
Video software provider Synamedia has fundamentally changed its customer and product development approach, according to senior company executives.
Briefing industry journalists at its West London HQ, Paul Segre, CEO, said the pay-TV sector now needed to be quick and agile in responding to user demands and competition.
Whereas the company and its predecessor entities (NDS and Cisco’s Service Provider Video Software Solutions business) had predominantly worked with, and developed products and services for larger companies, it was now adapting these to address a much broader market. “We need to get the word out that we’re expanding the market,” said Segre.
He noted that with the emergence of AVoD streaming services to accompany content owners’ D2C services, some players were needing to become involved in advertising technology. Equally, content pirates were innovating much more efficiently, requiring players such as Synamedia to respond accordingly. “We’ve undergone a huge cultural transformation,” declared Segre. “The pace of change has been dramatic.”
Nick Thexton, CTO, said that one of the biggest transitions that had happened was the difference between doing everything custom, to a more productised world. “That approach has been driven our switch to a multitenant SaaS implementation,” he explained, adding that if you plan such an offering, you can’t really highly customise everything for everybody, and you can’t go customer by customer. “It means we have to take a much more premeditated approach. It also means we have to think very clearly about the pain points of the operators that we’re addressing and why it would work for them.”
“it meant that our whole mindset around product creation and discipline of product management, which stretches from video network, all the way through to security, has been such a big learning exercise for us. It’s been a very rapid one because we were able to implement many of those features and changes in thinking in our multitenant SaaS approach,” he advised.
“The transformation from a company that wanted to work very much customer by customer, big project by big project, that era is over, big time,” he declared. “We are moving very rapidly to a totally different way of looking at our products and the way our products are consumed.”
Segre and Thexton revealed that Synamedia was looking to launch 10 products during 2022.