Beefing up its security credentials while consolidating the video streaming sector, software provider JW Player is acquiring video orchestration vendor Vualto for an undisclosed fee.
This a striking example of Faultline being right at the nucleus of activity within the video software sphere, having interviewed executives from both JW Player and Vualto on separate occasions during the past nine months. The spooky part is that both parties agreed wholeheartedly with our observations about the commoditization of certain software components within their respective product portfolios – prompting each to reveal exclusive glimpses into roadmaps devised to surmount this very commodity conundrum.
With just 12 weeks between the two conversations, we are almost inclined to say we sowed the seed for JW Player’s proposed takeover of Vualto, having coincided with the early days of the two vendors first partnering in what became a natural culture match between the teams. The acquisition aims to create a single platform for high-quality live and on-demand video delivery across mobile, web and OTT platforms – one differentiated from the competition with emphasis on security as well as data intelligence and monetization features.
When speaking with Vualto in late September 2020, we made no bones about alarm bells being triggered by the vendor shaving its products page from six down to three – as part of its ongoing consolidation of certain playout and workflow technologies targeted at the OTT video market. Vualto was then in the process of bringing its services under one broader management umbrella through a central API and graphical UI – with a cloud-heavy approach to video orchestration and delivery.
Less than three months later, in our final poignant interview of 2020, JW Player’s CEO and co-founder Dave Otten even referenced Vualto directly as a company he had been keeping a close eye on throughout the pandemic. The writing was on the wall from this moment.
At the time, Faultline readers were given a firsthand look at the new-look Vualto that JW Player is inheriting, one built around a slimmed-down core Vualto Control Hub (VCH) – which it describes as a complete management platform, covering everything from ingest to playback. Vualto believes it takes more of a modular approach compared to OVPs like Kaltura and Brightcove, offering clients a SaaS license deployable on a cloud-agnostic basis.
In other words, VCH does a lot of the underlying dark arts – from live and VoD workflow management and preparation, to stream monitoring and metadata, to the CMS and video editing. The vendor-agnostic VCH basically allows broadcasters and content owners to manage video streaming workflows in one place.
Vualto’s recent streamlining slots in nicely to what we learned about JW Player not long after. Despite the name, some 90% of JW Player’s business today comes from its multi-product portfolio of back-end delivery technologies – covering recommendation software, analytics, APIs, CMS, ad tech and other monetization opportunities for the OTT video space. This prompted us to describe JW Player’s strategy as a “trojan horse” – from where its concealed back-end soldiers can finish the job once the video player horse has penetrated the fort walls. This horse is about to get a whole lot stronger too, with a boost from Vualto soldiers wielding specialized skillsets.
Making sure those back-end soldiers are all glued together in JW Player’s Stream suite is key to this strategy for creating true vendor lock-in – primarily handling cloud-based transcoding and APIs for live and VoD content. JW Player launched its Live Channels feature a year ago, after experiencing a 400% spike in live streaming during the month of April 2020 alone. Live Channels works by spinning up live streams directly from the encoder in under 30 seconds with replays available in under one minute.
New York-based JW Player now describes itself as an infrastructure-as-a-service video platform able to deliver at scale, which was only achievable through raising enough venture capital back in 2013 to create a large open source community that eventually resulted in building the JW Player video intelligence strategy and analytics backbone supporting the whole JW Player network. This is where JW Player believes it has achieved scale where fallen OVPs like Ooyala and Massive Interactive have not.
With Vualto, JW Player is acquiring a specialist in DRM, offering the fully managed VuDRM platform to Hollywood studios. This takes a device-agnostic approach to flexible token generation, enabling customers to issue individual user permissions for one piece of content without need for re-encryption. This brings JW Player into competition with the likes of easyDRM and CastLabs.
A big differentiator – and something of an unsung hero for Vualto – is its systems integration work. Broadcasters in the US and Europe are still driving high demand for systems integration projects across varying technology stacks, although these legacy infrastructure projects are shifting to the cloud where some 80% to 90% of Vualto’s business now resides. Belgian broadcaster VRT is one of Vualto’s notable pure cloud-based customers.
Another string in Vualto’s bow is specializing in event-based live streaming – spinning up origin, cache, encoding, CDN etc. some 10 minutes before an event starts, controlling the lot then tearing it down straight afterwards. That is a compelling option for anyone putting on a live streamed event concerned with quickly escalating costs that can often come with cloud-based infrastructure. Things like file transcoding are already done as part of quick live to VoD workflows during the live process, so customers can reuse this immediately.
Only crossing onto our radar for the first time in February 2020, which proved to be a critical pre-lockdown period, Vualto has gone through even more of a rollercoaster year than most.
Vualto will expand JW Player’s customer base with customers in the European market, including UK broadcaster ITV, French national public broadcaster France TV, and the European Parliament. These broadcasters join over 12,000 media companies already using the JW Player platform, including Fox, BBC, CNBC, and EuroSport.