Perhaps the reason Israeli hybrid-IPTV platform Comigo has only managed to gain a handful of customers in four long years is that it doesn’t honor its meetings – isn’t it such a shame that everything is moving to the cloud.
Faultline first wrote about Comigo in 2012, when we highlighted that CEO Dov Moran is the man, along with many of his original team, who created M-Systems, the company which patented the USB Flash drive and by being acquired, contributed many of the SanDisk flash memory controller patents, which made it so strong globally with major licensees such as Samsung and Toshiba. SanDisk was of course bought by Western Digital last year for $19 billion – one of two companies which dominates the hard disk drive business.
We last met with Comigo at TV Connect in 2015, when we were impressed by its set top in action, with its ability to overlay a shopping app on top of a film to push related merchandise to the viewer. However, it was disappointing when less than five minutes into our scheduled meeting at MWC this year, we were dismissed for apparently more important issues. Comigo didn’t announce anything at the show, in fact it hasn’t published a press release since September 2015, but what we managed to note down in this brief period, was that the only exciting update is Comigo’s server is “much stronger now,” according to Comigo’s CRO Gilad Chitayat.
Comigo is going to have to do better than that if it wants to gain the customers it needs. in 2014 we reported that Comigo had won its second customer, a whole 21 months after the first, in US streaming platform NeuMovie, but we assume NeuMovie is now deceased as its website has been shut down. In which case this puts Comigo back to just 3 customers in Russian service KartinaTV, ChitramTV in Germany, and Primetime in Thailand.
Comigo also told us that its only rival is Comcast’s Xfinity offering, which is frankly deluded to compare itself to the OTT service of a US operator that pulls in an annual revenue exceeding $55 billion.
Comigo said it is not currently pushing to move outside of Europe and into the US market due to it being too crowded, which is true, but we’re not surprised that the company is keeping its distance as its only US customer seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.