At IBC earlier this month, Ateme showcased its newly launched cloud-centric SaaS – Ateme+. The company says the solution represents a more agile business model which will allow broadcasters and service providers to “to pay for the functionality and capacity they need, when they need it.”
“Basically the problem the SaaS is seeking to address is that some customers want more flexibility,” said Silvia Candido, Marketing Director at Ateme. She elaborated: “Instead of paying everything up front and owning the technology, with a SaaS service providers and broadcasters can pay as they go. They can pay a monthly subscription if they want, and there are a range of different business models they can choose from.”
She believes that since this transforms the usual CapEx investment into something more resembling operational expenditure, it makes it easier to launch services and to be onboarded. She said: “We call it frictionless onboarding, and you get a quicker time-to-value.”
Candido elaborated on the importance of the flexibility afforded by this model. She said: “In TV, when you’re delivering content there are peaks – times when you’re going to have live events and you’re going to use a lot of processing – and there are times when you are going to require less capacity. Instead of building over-capacity to manage those peaks, with a SaaS model you use what you need at the moment, and when you don’t need it you don’t have to pay for it.”
According to Candido, this means Ateme’s customers can give more of their focus to their core business, while the video processing solutions provider ensures that the SaaS technology is continuously upgraded, and provides 24/7 support to address any issues with the service.
Candido remarked that, despite there being more and more players offering OTT services, many services are struggling to effectively monetise their content. In this context, she argued that it’s important to not only reduce your costs and the time-to-value (“the time it takes to actually make money out of it”) but also to find new ways of monetising content, to be profitable.
While the SaaS addresses the cost side of the equation, Ateme has other offerings to address the monetisation side. The company’s digital ad insertion technology enables companies to offer targeted advertising over any platform – including standard OTT, FAST channels and HbbTV.
Candido commented: “The advantage of having it run over any platform is that sometimes you’ll have a broadcaster who might have to buy different technologies for different platforms from different vendors, so it becomes very complex to manage and less efficient. This is partly because you need different expertise for different platforms. With our technology you have a single solution that runs on all platforms, so it is a lot easier to manage, as well as more efficient and cost-effective.”
