Quickplay has announced that it will expand into media services and asset management through the acquisition of 440 Digital.
As part of the acquisition, Robert Longwell, the founder of 440 Digital will become Quickplay’s Head of Media Services. Longwell, who has experience in building and managing media services teams, will oversee the integration of 440 Digital’s automation technologies into Quickplay’s cloud-based OTT platform.
This acquisition will allow Quickplay to extend its end-to-end video pipeline, video content management system, and user experience capabilities to the onboarding and management of content, including media workflow automation and digital mastering, prior to distribution. The announcement was made before Quickplay’s participation in the Parks Associates Future of Video conference.
“As we’re slashing time-to-market, cost, and effort for the creation of new platforms, we’re finding that the biggest hurdles are in the preparation of assets for distribution,” said Paul Pastor, CBO and Co-Founder of Quickplay. “By adding 440 Digital’s cloud capabilities, we’re creating a unified environment from content prep to the user experience that will dramatically accelerate our customers’ digital transformations,” he added
“Media services and media asset management are huge pain points for every streaming provider,” said Juan Martin, CTO and Co-Founder of Quickplay, “Distributors must deal with a maze of content sources and distributors, often with different formats, different naming conventions, and different levels of quality control. With 440 Digital and Robert Longwell, we’re simplifying the ability of every customer to receive content that is normalized, delivered on time and versioned for the customer’s specific needs.” he added.
Leveraging 440 DIgital’s automated processes, Quickplay Media Services will provide a wide variety of services, including onboarding of content providers and distributor endpoints; management of ingress and egress drop-off locations; identification, tracking, and quality control of media assets; pre-processing and enrichment; audio and video transcoding; metadata aggregation and normalization; subtitles and closed caption conversion; avails, planners and content rights management; and preparation for and delivery of media packages.
“A highly skilled media services organization makes an incredible difference in streaming operations,” said Longwell. “Many providers simply lack the necessary resources, knowledge and experience to ‘get it right.’ The fundamental thinking behind 440 Digital and the acquisition by Quickplay is to offer those distributors proven capabilities that can streamline all of the processes around media asset management and content distribution,” he added.
