Few had heard of Firstlight Media before the company salvaged the remaining Quickplay assets from the iron grip of AT&T two months ago. Maybe fewer had heard of a technology company founded on the premise of prizing a business from one of the world’s most powerful operators for a reunion with its original co-founder.
That is precisely what Firstlight Media set out to do in January 2019, going on to complete the acquisition of Quickplay from AT&T in March 2020 with financial backing from private equity firm Highview Capital. Now with Firstlight coming up for air, offering a modular end-to-end OTT platform, our first bone to pick was why Firstlight sees a future in Quickplay when AT&T clearly does not.
“AT&T has been consolidating to a multi-tenant back-end called OpenVideo which the Quickplay team helped build,” said Firstlight CEO André Christensen, speaking to Faultline this week. Describing how the market has changed dramatically since AT&T bought DirecTV all those years ago, Christensen pointed to how Quickplay technology was instrumental in AT&T’s transition from legacy pay TV to OTT video over almost 4 years. However, supporting a thoroughbred video streaming behemoth is not where Quickplay’s – and therefore Firstlight’s – expertise lies.
“We saw no carrier-grade OTT technology provider out there,” continued Christensen, noting that during his time at AT&T, competitors were pitching to him every week. “We have a better OTT story than Synamedia and MediaKind, with better UI and engagement capabilities, while companies like BAMTech have been acquired,” he added.
Stories and experience don’t win you prizes at the end of the day, but Firstlight does have a trump card up its sleeve, in the form of the world’s largest multi-tenant OTT headend. The headend is part of Quickplay’s full blown Media Operations Center based out of San Diego, which is the driving force behind Quickplay’s reputation for driving transformations from legacy to multi-tenant OTT.
Most people think of this as a saturated market, but Firstlight has identified gaps in technology compared to so-called legacy providers like Synamedia and MediaKind, in-house providers like BAMTech (now Disney Streaming Services), OVPs like Brightcove, and of course niche providers, of which there are numerous. Firstlight claims that no rival or in-house system can offer an independent E2E modular platform purpose built for OTT transformations, with carrier-grade scalability and AI-assisted engagement in a cloud-native environment, as shown by the Firstlight graphic below.
Instinctively, we scooted over to Synamedia for a second opinion. The company’s Senior Manager of Product Marketing, Adam Davies, told us, “We have experience, not legacy. We continue to innovate using machine learning and AI – for example in our security portfolio. And our roadmaps for security, data, advertising and monetization are always ahead of the curve. Delivering video content is where we start – we lead the industry and also understand the business challenges of our customers because we’ve worked with them for so long. This is well evidenced in our ‘new bundle’ features, allowing customers to mix and match their existing services with new features and product offers.”
It seems highly hypocritical then of Firstlight to describe itself as experienced, not legacy, but then to describe Synamedia’s experience as legacy. Both vendors have a long history, with roots in some of the world’s largest pay TV deployments through Quickplay and NDS – but Synamedia has a serious head start on Firstlight as an independent entity and naturally disputes claims like falling short in AI. Of course, Synamedia’s focus does not drift towards the front-end UX like Firstlight plans to, so any attempted comparisons here are redundant.
Quickplay was pivotal in developing DirecTV Now and Watch TV, which weren’t exactly success stories in themselves thanks to AT&T mismanagement, but the back-end intellectual property taught AT&T valuable lessons and ultimately laid the foundations for becoming the streaming powerhouse it plans to be once HBO Max launches.
That said, following our early March 2020 coverage of the Quickplay sale, a disgruntled AT&T got in touch with Faultline to disregard Quickplay’s involvement. “Quickplay does not play a role in DirecTV and very little role in U-verse. Quickplay technology plays virtually no role in DirecTV Everywhere,” said the robotic representative. As we said, it was for DirecTV and Watch TV that Quickplay achieved notoriety, but we appreciate AT&T’s attempt at pouring clear water over something that didn’t require it.
But that’s enough dwelling on the past. Going forwards, the 150-employee Firstlight is pitching itself as the youngest and most experienced vendor on the market, boasting of 15 years spent targeting tier 1 accounts. The Firstlight roadmap appears to be one of traveling the world patching up botched attempts by lumbering operators at offering OTT video alongside cable or satellite pay TV – of which there are many.
“We improve areas and rearchitect platforms rather than targeting greenfield deployments, based on data that platforms have accumulated,” weighed in Firstlight CTO Juan Martin.
Firstlight’s array of services are broad – covering encoding, packaging, ad tech, personalization, analytics, CMS, billing, UI, player and more. Martin whittled these down to two core areas, encoding – where the company is applying AI to make major compression improvements – and CMS – which Martin described as the “window into the platform.” Asked whether encoding and CMS are Firstlight’s two biggest bread winners, Martin simply said this was reflective of the market.
Your bog standard CMS might not be the sexiest of services but broken down into a datastore and storefront, it provides a portal for operators to begin buying into additional services like analytics and engagement capabilities. “We are developing storefront curation tools and are trying to give a visualization for apps in the future – with recommendations based on themes and dynamics. This will form the heart of data science and help drive value,” said Martin.
“Skill and experience is hard to sell. We don’t have the the fanciest algorithms but we have the experience. Differentiation is about understanding complex architectures and if a customer has an existing recommendation system, then we are happy to plug in,” added Martin.
Firstlight, supported in the acquisition by Highview Capital, plans to put Quickplay to use in targeting an extensive spread of entertainment companies from cablecos and sports leagues, to studios and niche OTT players, by offering a product suite for optimizing the collection, management, distribution, consumption and engagement of video content. Unfortunately, no customer case studies or nuggets of information regarding field trials were provided.