The News: Sweden’s Quickchannel held on February 15, 2023, took the wraps off an overhauled version of its streaming platform solution that the company describes as an “end-to-end” offering suitable for creating, managing and distributing one-to-many video for both internal and external business communications. The company described highlights of its product overhaul in a video released on February 15, which is accessible here.
Analyst Take: Quickchannel’s introduction of a revamped streaming platform is notable for the two ways in which it cuts against the grain of conventional wisdom in today’s enterprise video technology marketplace.
First, the platform update is the product of a merger between Quickchannel and its Swedish streaming rival Screen9 that was completed in September 2022.
The idea behind the merger was that the legacy Quickchannel platform – a lightweight solution designed primarily for outbound marketing use cases – could be combined with a Screen9 solution that had featured more extensive streaming processing capabilities but suffered from a less-than-stellar user interface.
The February product update from Quickchannel can be considered unusual because of the speed of its implementation. Typically, mergers between vendor peers in the streaming market can result in a year or more of product development work in order to integrate features from multiple vendors into a single streaming platform solution. Quickchannel’s ability execute an integration of this sort in roughly a half-year is not common occurrence following a merger of this sort.
Quickchannel Webinar Creation Interface, Source: Quickchannel
The second way that the Quickchannel revamp differs from the industry norm is that the company is beefing up its platform in a way that enables it to address a broader range of marketing and internal communications use cases. The new version of the Quickchannel platform integrates webinar creation tools with classic video editing capabilities and marries the two with streaming engines that manage and measure the distribution of business video.
This move to assemble an “end-to-end” platform represents a reversal from current product development trends among long-established providers of enterprise streaming solutions. Increasingly, developers in this segment – particularly those serving the North American market – are pulling away from the concept of supplying “end-to-end” offerings in favor of approaches that enable them to specialize in specific silos of the streaming technology ecosystem.
With more than 300 customers in hand and a continued strong focus on serving the European market, Quickchannel still may be addressing a market that favors the simplicity of implementing an end-to-end approach over the complexity that can come in embracing best-of-breed solutions from different vendors across an enterprise streaming ecosystem.
Notably, the company focuses significant attention on adhering to privacy and security requirements imposed by the European Union, providing it significant differentiation for selling into that geographic region.
As Quickchannel zigs while other streaming vendors zag, it may be worth stepping back for a moment to consider whether differences between North America and other geographies may play a larger role in determining vendors’ success in foreign markets than many had previously thought.
Disclosure: Wainhouse Research, part of The Futurum Group family of companies, is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Wainhouse Research as a whole.
Other insights from Wainhouse Research:
Eye on Business Video with Neal Stanton, Vice President of Alliances at Vbrick
MediaPlatform Introduces MediaPlatform Autocaster Feature Enabling Automated Webcast Replay
Image Credit: Quickchannel
The original version of this article was first published on Wainhouse Research.
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.
