Advertising and cybersecurity are Abe Peled’s two technology passions right now, as expounded by the fabled Synamedia Chairman during our live Faultline fireside chat this week. Of course, Peled being Peled, these two topics were just the tip of the oxymoronic fireside iceberg.
Discussion fluctuated from a stubbornness about the death of traditional pay TV being a fallacy, to an unexpected detour into realms of edge networking. When you have contributed as much to the pay TV market as Peled has, his almost omniscient view offers something for everyone, that is reflected both in the contemporary Synamedia product portfolio as well as his investment ventures on the side. The most surprising takeaway from Faultline’s viewpoint, however, came as Peled agreed heartily about being underwhelmed by the Synamedia Go unveiling two months ago.
“I told our CTO Nick that it sounds like a high school science project,” Peled jested, referring of course to Go.Experiment – one of two initial SaaS offerings within the suite alongside Go.Aggregate. This is really about allowing non-technical teams to experiment with products via intuitive dashboards, with some actually clever segmentation features developed behind the obtuse branding.
After regaining composure, we encouraged Peled to paint a picture of how a complete Synamedia Go portfolio might look by the end of this year. Product labels aside, Peled believes Synamedia has work to do in clarifying the Synamedia Go suite, particularly with what complements the technology and in emphasizing its openness.
He described the focus of Synamedia Go as targeting two kinds of aggregators. The first type he calls content aggregators, which could take the form of a broadcaster that operates several channels and wants to rally resources together with fellow broadcasters to create a joint ad-supported streaming service, for example. These content aggregators might need to replace some of the pieces developed in-house as they find that scale requires a professional quality system, something like Synamedia Go. The idea then is that Synamedia can start selling added value services like Clarissa for analytics and Iris for addressable advertising, once the Go foot is through the door.
“I always used to say that building an editor everyone can do, maintaining it not everyone can do,” added Peled.
The second category of target aggregator is what Peled describes as aggregators that really aggregate services for a consumer – i.e. typical telco or pay TV operator types that are aggregating third-party OTT services. “They make 70% margin on broadband and 20% margin on video distribution because of the cost of content. Here, they have the opportunity to rejig the whole thing, and we will have a suite for people who want to do that. That’s what we expect to have by the end of the year,” he continued.
While Go.Aggregate sounds like a great toolkit for presenting content from multiple sources in a curated view, with support for metadata aggregation, recommendations, and unified search, our qualms are that this hardly screams ambition in targeting the new guard of D2C streaming customers, rather keeping the existing crop of clients happy, chiefly operators looking to reduce churn.
That said, Peled – who is renowned for his honesty – said he rarely passes over an opportunity to flag things he believes are wrong. “I can be quite straight on that,” he warned – a reminder that you don’t get to his position purely on platitudes.
Another refreshing note of honesty came from Peled’s admission that the pandemic has hurt Synamedia’s ability to release some of its latest innovations out into the marketplace. Showcasing and explaining new ways of monetizing advertising to prospective customers via all manner of video conference platforms is a much harder task for any sales team compared to face-to-face demos – one that requires “strategic sales of the highest level,” according to Peled.
The same is true of disrupting streaming piracy. Showing Synamedia’s latest piracy developments in action has been a learning curve that the company has supposedly mastered by now, although Peled admitted he is notoriously impatient about not moving fast enough.
Peled also described a new approach, which he sees as complementary with Synamedia Go, stemming from a major rebalancing in computing power between the end point, the edge, and the cloud. He reminded attendees that one-way distribution requires a lot of power in the set top itself, while two-way distribution requires nothing in the device and it can all be in the cloud. However, running everything in the cloud can turn out expensive, which is why some of this computing power has to be in the edge, helping to keep latency to a minimum.
“You don’t want to hear about the goal two minutes after it was scored – so we must have a fundamental rethinking of that rebalancing, that can revolutionize the end point device to make it almost non-existent, with everything being done between the edge and the cloud,” he explained. “I think we are moving quickly but maybe not quickly enough.”
We got the impression that Peled feels most impressed by Synamedia’s security credentials, like slipping on an old pair of slippers. “When I look at our traditional competitors, I think in streaming piracy we have simply taken an approach that is completely different – not just telling you about it or blocking an IP address, which is useless because there are 50 other IPs set up. So I feel pretty good about where we are,” he said.
While Faultline’s goal was to keep the conversation looking forward, rather than dwelling on Peled’s past (which is easy to do with a résumé like his), we threw up a past quote from when Synamedia was founded in 2018, with Peled saying at the time, “it’s not about the product set, it’s about the execution”. This is easy to say to outsiders who have little insight into the day-to-day execution of products behind closed customer doors, but is a simple and effective mindset that Peled has instilled in the Synamedia team.
“A great product that doesn’t work is not helpful. I have always thought that success is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Strategy is the easy part; execution is the part that separates the successful ones from the non-successful ones. When we came in, we had a lot of unhappy customers, and I’m happy to say that we’re almost prepared to move away now. We have stabilized all that, our system works. Ultimately, we are judged by consumers who are very impatient,” Peled continued.