On this episode of Eye on Business Video, I visited with Mike Newman, Chief Executive Officer of MediaPlatform, to discuss how vendors specializing in enterprise streaming solutions can compete in an increasingly competitive market for technology vendors enabling one-to-many online video behind the corporate firewall.
As large vendors of unified communications solutions such as Microsoft, Zoom, Cisco and Google, begin to incorporate features into their platforms that enable webcasting on corporate networks, enterprise streaming specialists – such as Newman’s MediaPlatform – must adjust their go-to-market strategies to maintain differentiation.
For MediaPlatform, that has meant a sustained focus on developing enterprise streaming solutions that address the needs of a small set of corporate video producers who typically are responsible for creating and managing high-quality, high stakes corporate webcasts.
In this interview, Newman discusses some of the needs of corporate video producers in today’s market and the product features that MediaPlatform has developed to address the priorities of this market segment. Key themes highlighted in this discussion include the following:
- How demand for professional video services and broadcast services is evolving among enterprise customers.
- Why MediaPlatform is positioned to partner with large technology vendors, such as Microsoft, rather than competing with them
- What MediaPlatform has done in its product development efforts to focus on the unique needs of corporate video producers
- Why more organizations than ever before are poised to develop comprehensive strategies for implementing streaming video solutions to enhance employee communications
Be sure to subscribe to the Wainhouse Webcast so you never miss an episode.
Watch the episode here:
Disclaimer: The Wainhouse Research Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
Transcript:
Steve Vonder Haar: Hi, and welcome to this edition of Eye on Business Video. I’m your host, Steve Vonder Harr. Joining me this time, the dean of Enterprise Streaming, one Michael Newman. Welcome, Mike.
Mike Newman: Hi, Steve. How are you?
Steve Vonder Haar: Very good. Now you’re CEO of MediaPlatform now, but you’ve been involved in the business for 15 plus years in a variety of roles, and there’s nobody better that I can think of to really give us a tutorial on what enterprise video platforms are right now. So when people are thinking about what enterprise video platforms do and ask you what you do for a living, what do you tell them?
Mike Newman: Sure. Happy to answer that, Steve. If you think about it, every day hundreds of millions of people are creating live video content. Typically, they’re using that for one-to-one communications. It could be small group meetings, it could be possibly small one to many presentations. But the vast majority of that content is being used very temporarily, and it disappears as soon as people hang up. Contrastingly, the enterprise video platform space focuses on a much more discreet subset of users. Predominantly these users are going to be high-end producers within large enterprises, and they’re being charged with creating very engaging, high production value live webcasts for their companies. And so these are the type of events where the way in which it’s presented will project a lot about the company. It’s attention to detail. It’s innovativeness. It will really embrace its employees, try to engage them, and send a message about the quality of its products or services.
As you might imagine, that content is very high value. And so – in addition to be being able to create it – organizations will also want to be able to protect it. They’ll want to be able to distribute it successfully, track things like quality of service, and then measure KPIs at the end of that. So the enterprise video platform is really purpose-built for those types of users, those types of use cases. And unlike a situation where a roadmap might be aligned with hundreds of millions of communicators, this is really designed for a small subset of high-end presenters who are, in the aggregate, also communicating out the hundreds of millions of people.
Steve Vonder Haar: In the post COVID era, we have lots of people who are familiar with video, but not everybody’s familiar with the concept of doing video on a one-to-many basis really, really well. And that’s what enterprise video platforms do, don’t they? They help with the creation, the distribution, and the management of the content that’s created every day by business organizations.
Mike Newman: That’s absolutely correct. And you have a lot of solutions today steering towards ease of use, automation, using AI as a surrogate for decision making. And that’s really enabling even the least technical communicators to use those types of products successfully. Our roadmaps steer towards really being able to assert that creative control. It’s being able to fine tune the way things are distributed and making that content very unique to the identity of the organization that is reflected by the way everything’s being presented. So, it’s a lot of fun. I certainly have enjoyed, over the last 20 years, working with the largest companies in the world, as they’re putting a lot of creativity and time into content that really reflects well on the organization, is embraced, as I said, by the employees, and tends to stick around for a long time.
Steve Vonder Haar: It’s really about putting your best video foot forward when you’re making a webcast that’s reaching out to a lot of people at the same time. Now, a lot of companies are out there providing enterprise streaming solutions. What makes MediaPlatform unique in the marketplace, in your opinion?
Mike Newman: Yeah, I think they’re really two aspects to that answer. The first of which is relative to the video meeting solutions that I was just talking about, and that is being purpose-built really from the ground up for that producer community. One of the advantages, if there are any, of getting older is I hope to think I’m getting a little bit wiser about the decisions we make with our products and our services. And one of those things is we invest pretty heavily in our professional services organization and our broadcast services organization. And so whereas we may be thought of as strictly a technology company, we recognize that the demand on the studio teams within large enterprises, it oscillates a lot.
And whether they’re trying to hit a hybrid audience, whether they’re trying to evaluate new technologies, whether they’re trying to do a multi-location shoot, there’s a lot of opportunity to work with them closely and provide a white glove service that really is designed to ensure their success, to make this partnership very, very successful, and not to make it strictly transactional. I’d say also as an extension of that, working very closely with our partners, I’d say our roadmap is incredibly well aligned with their requirements. We certainly don’t think we are smarter than the users of our products. We don’t think we can design something better in a vacuum.
Steve Vonder Haar: You are smarter than your users. You’ve forgotten more about enterprise streaming than some of the people out there know.
Mike Newman: I have forgotten a lot. That’s for sure, Steve, but it’s really enjoyable to collaborate and to hear unanimity or consensus about certain innovations. It really makes our product management much easier. And so we’re doing regular customer councils, we’re spending time on site with customers, we’re in their studios, and that’s the best way of learning. So we have a commitment to that demographic. It’s very, very focused. And unlike those product managers who are responsible for trying to make a hundred million people happy, we like what we do. We think it’s a little bit easier to stay focused, and we think we’re doing a pretty good job at it.
Steve Vonder Haar: Now all of a sudden, streaming is becoming really popular among these big tech giants. You got Microsoft, Zoom, other tech giants that are trying to get into the streaming game, offering webcasting solutions that maybe build off traditional UC platforms. How can the chugging train of MediaPlatform compete in such an environment amongst the battle of the titans?
Mike Newman: It’s a great question. It’s something I’m thinking about all the time, but I think it’s built upon the wrong premise, which is that those companies are trying to innovate in our direction: They want to get into the EVP space, they want to have really high touch, high support burden relationships with their customers. And in addition to the hundreds and hundreds of millions of licenses that they’re able to get on things like Teams and Zoom, they want our licenses. I would say that as you look at their roadmaps, and I can’t speak for them specifically, but what I sense is that A) they’re competing amongst each other, and those are pretty sizable competitors. And B), they’re really steering towards, again, automation, ease of use, the things that are lowering the bar on enabling users to create content and to create communications. Again, contrastingly, I don’t think that automation brings them any closer to our space.
Undeniably, it is innovation. Undeniably, things like AI are innovative and will help a very large universe of communicators out there. At the same time, our users will largely feel that some of those innovations will handcuff them, will take away some of their creative control, will make decisions on their behalf. And so whereas it may seem logical to say one video solution must compete against another, it’s a little bit like saying a sedan is going to compete against a rugged off-road vehicle. I don’t think you’re going to sell as many off-road vehicles, but they’re purpose built. And if you have a landscaping business, you don’t want to be strapping your riding more to your sedan.
Steve Vonder Haar: Yeah, there’s a big difference between creating video tools that everybody uses versus video tools that are used by those are really, really focused on putting out the most high quality version of video that they possibly can, the people who might lose their jobs if the CEO doesn’t look good on his webcast, for instance. So with that in mind, what is the ideal customer for MediaPlatform? I guess it’s not the great unwashed video masses, is it?
Mike Newman: Yeah. And I was just going to quickly add one thing. The sort of meeting space that maybe is assumed to be migrating towards the EVP space is – I think – what you’ll find reveals itself over the next 12 months. Rather than being competitive silos, they’re actually very synergistic. And I think what will reveal itself is that these two solutions and these two budgets should not be viewed as competitive or as binary. Just as we experience with our partnerships with companies like Microsoft, we can provide that high touch that a lot of their customers want. We can offload a lot of the support burden that maybe they don’t want to be burdened with. And so as we look at the Microsoft ECDN or integrating with Teams or using both of those solutions as sources and delivery mechanisms for large live webcast, there’s a lot of room for pushing the envelope by looking at things cooperatively or collaboratively.
As far as our ideal user, they are the fortunate – or unfortunate – souls who are charged with creating the most compelling, engaging, thought-provoking content for these name brand recognizable institutions, these logo recognizable companies. And so whether they’re a consumer or business-to- business, they are dealing with the C-level executives. They are dealing with very important messaging. They’re dealing with incredible investments that are designed to empower employees for long periods of time. We want to enable that. We want to be jazzed by what we see is the content they’re creating. And so just recently, we were working behind the scenes with a customer of ours who created a set that resembled The Tonight Show. You start with that. That sends a message. And as you bring that into the technology, all you’re thinking about is “Don’t compromise that.”
Steve Vonder Haar: Right.
Mike Newman: Enhance it, amplify it, manicure it. And we want to provide the products, and the consulting and the guidance and the support to help our customers do that.
Steve Vonder Haar: So what specific tools can MediaPlatform bring to the table that help enable that high-end glossy, slick production type of experience?
Mike Newman: So there are really two things that we’ve recently released that I think are notable. The first of which was a complete ground up rebuild of our large live web casting product. It was formerly called Webcaster. That product was not designed cloud native from the ground up. Broadcaster is highly extensible, highly scalable. It’s amazing to see just our support metrics now that almost none of our support is derived from, I guess I could call them room for enhancements or bugs. It just performs in incredibly. And so without that sort of technical debt, we’re able to focus on features and functionality. And so, enabling people to really customize the audience experience, do things like sentiment voting to add engagement, do things like storyboard. So rather than being locked into a static template, now you can really manipulate the audience experience to highlight video, highlight graphics, highlight polling, and extract analytics and data that is really, really rich and meaningful.
Mike Newman: We have released a product called Autocaster. And on its face, I can understand why it may be mistaken for something like Simulive. But, in actuality, what it enables people to do is modularize the creation of a large live webcast so that they are able to do components of that – or all of the webcast – in advance. You can create the video content, you can create the polls, you can do all of these things, and then schedule when it’s actually broadcast, the benefit of which is not only that you’re able to use the resources when they’re available, including those C-level executives, you’re also able to remove some of the moving parts like encoders that might be points of failure. So you kind of have to see it to really experience the benefits. But for anyone who is either resource constrained – or wants to be able to do things that will be broadcast off hours – it’s had just a great reception.
Steve Vonder Haar: Yeah, I think from what you’ve been telling me about Autocaster from the past, when you’re doing Simulive, it’s really just a repurposing of the video that you produce. As opposed to Autocaster, which really creates the entire interactive experience and allows you to deliver it on a time shifted recorded basis to other markets. So if you have a single webcast in the US, you can replay it in Europe the next day, in the Asia-Pacific market the next day, without necessarily devoting a lot of video production resources or individual time to making that happen. Is that right?
Mike Newman: I’m glad we’re recording this, Steve, because that was much more articulate than how I would’ve said it. So yes, absolutely. It has enormous, enormous benefits. Simulive is just this flattened repurposing, as you were saying. Autocaster, like all of our products, is designed to empower and really elevate to the next level. The way that you create and distribute content, replay it over time, and use your resources in the most effective manner possible. So that two in the morning, you’re trying to hit a geography that maybe your people aren’t in. You can replay the video and maybe have one of those people monitoring the Q&A or monitoring support, but you don’t have to occupy the studio, you don’t have to have that C-level executive driving in at the wee hours in the morning, and everybody’s happy and the things goes off without a hitch.
Steve Vonder Haar: Video production teams have enough to do on a day-to-day basis without having to babysit webcast repurposed around the clock and around the globe. So this has got to be a godsend for really those short-resourced, bare bones video production teams that we usually find in the enterprise. They need all the help they can get.
Mike Newman: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it goes to us listening. It’s kind of cheating from a product management perspective, but we’re listening to what the challenges are and we’re collaborating with our customers to figure out innovative ways of resolving those challenges. And it’s a little cliche to say do more with less, and it’s very complicated to really resolve how to do that. But over the last year, we set out to tackle that challenge, and we think we’ve done it in an elegant way that’s really powerful and really does enable companies to make the most of their resources – both their locations and the people they use and not always have to have the highest paid, most competent people available for every single thing that’s being done.
Steve Vonder Haar: Now, you talked about challenges. I don’t think we’ve had any single bigger challenge in the COVID era we just got past. How did MediaPlatform adjust during those times and in that environment? Have your team come out as a changed team as a result of what we went through.
Mike Newman: I would say that, during that period, there were a lot of distractions. And some of those distractions could have been very lucrative. We chose to remain eminently focused on our core customer base. We didn’t chase some of the opportunities and things like virtual trade shows that emerged. Rather we used that 18-to-24 months to continue to enhance the product, to really invest in Broadcaster, which again was focused on the same user base. And I think what we’ve seen is that our products are incredibly well designed to support these teams as they deal with the hybrid workforce. So the sophistication that we’re able to provide in areas like delivery, when you have a mobile workforce that three days a week is in the office, one day a week is at home, one day a week is in the car, how do you orchestrate the way in which that content is delivered?
How do you oscillate the levels of engagement you want? How do you deal with the in-person audience, as opposed to someone who’s capturing their content online? These are problems we’ve been thinking about for the last 24 months. And I think in addition to being very well aligned with where the industry and the market are today, I also think we have a lot of goodwill from our existing customers. Because while we could have been distracted, what we did was sit side by side with them and say, “You’ve just gotten kicked out of your physical studio. How are you going to keep the wheels on the bus?” And we helped them develop their remote studios. We were a surrogate when they needed remote encoding, or helped with closed captioning, or an extra set of eyes through a camera. And it was a really great relationship-building opportunity, and it put us in a position where we can truly use the word partnership to describe the relationship that we have with our customers.
And I see it as truly symbiotic. Autocaster doesn’t exist without the input that we’ve learned from our customers. Broadcaster has been dramatically enhanced by that input. And at the same time, we really genuinely care about their success, and we sit side-by-side with them. And again, rather than making short-term money-chasing decisions, we kind of stayed the course. And I think it’s paid off. And as I look at our renewal rates, our customer satisfaction rates, the growth rates we’re experiencing at the end of 2022, going into 2023, it reflects that I think we made the right long-term decisions.
Steve Vonder Haar: So it sounds like it was time well spent. Now, let’s look at the year ahead. You’ve just come out of that kind of 18 months to 24 months of kind of hunkering down and making the product better and strengthen your relationship with your customers and partners. What’s going to happen in 2023? Look into your crystal ball for me.
Mike Newman: I happen to have read one of your trend reports, Steve, and-
Steve Vonder Haar: Don’t trust it.
Mike Newman: I will say you are seeing the same things that I am seeing. When a company is observing a space and trying to figure out their strategy, they’re just not going to make major decisions. And that was most of 2021, and all lot of 2022. And what we see now are these large enterprises committing to a strategy. And that bodes really, really well for us because we’re positioned in a consultative capacity. We’re trusted. We’re recognized by the analyst community. We’re a pretty good partner in that regard. And so now that companies are getting ready to act, we’ve been very, very busy. It’s been really exciting because it doesn’t look like the community of users prior to COVID, where it was kind of like, let’s experiment a little, and let’s see if we can sell this internally. Now, it’s really aggressive adoption. They understand the value. They understand the problems that are being solved. They understand what the workforce will look like going forward and how important online communications is. So it’s really about helping them shape what success looks like, as opposed to convincing them they need to do something.
Steve Vonder Haar: Yeah. We’re not selling them on the idea that end users are going to magically want video. End users do want video. It’s a matter of how organizations are going to go out and support these video capabilities, and what kind of platforms they’re going to implement to make all that happen. Isn’t that right?
Mike Newman: Absolutely. Absolutely. Our company is not going to convince a 400,000-or-500,000- person company to do something if they’re not ready to do it. And now they’re ready.
Steve Vonder Haar: You can just wave your magic wand and do that.
Mike Newman: Yeah, I’ve tried. I don’t know what my win loss ratio is, but now it’s just fun. I love seeing people push the envelope. I love the industry. As you alluded to, I’ve been in the industry a long time. There’ve been a couple opportunities to change out of the industry, and I just got back into it as quickly as I could. We’re just coming out of a customer council where I got to hear some great stories about how people are planning on doing things that are even sort of more ambitious than what they were doing in the past, and I love it. And I think the company ethos is very much the same. We all take pride in what our customers are doing.
Steve Vonder Haar: Now, not to date you at all there, Mike, but I do remember a time when you told me about you and your sales team huddling around the fax machine at the end of every quarter in order to see those purchase orders roll in just under the deadline.
Mike Newman: That is right. We were counting our revenues on an abacus.
Steve Vonder Haar: Well, I’m glad we’ve advanced from those stone age days, and great to see MediaPlatform thriving and succeeding as we head into 2023. Mike Newman, thanks so much for your time. Great to have you on the show today.
Mike Newman: Absolutely, Steve. I always enjoy speaking with you and always enjoy following your guidance and your trend reports and your analyst reports. So thanks for covering the space.
Steve Vonder Haar: Absolutely. And we thank our audience for joining us for this edition of Eye on Business Video. Be sure to subscribe to catch more episodes down the line, and we’ll be looking at trends within the enterprise streaming space on an ongoing basis on our next edition of the Eye on Business Video series. For Wainhouse Research, I’m Steve Vonder Harr. Thanks for your time.
Author Information
Steve Vonder Haar is a Senior Analyst with Wainhouse – a Futurum Group company. His area of expertise and focus is enterprise streaming and virtual events.
