The increased capacity will allow the two companies to offer enhanced digital content capabilities to network operators, video distributors, OTT companies, content owners and content producers. In addition, it will allow its customers to redirect operations, create large libraries for global distribution and efficiently monetise their content offerings.
Speaking exclusively to Capacity, Gary Miles, general manager at Amdocs said: “the industry is converging and we’re responding to it. With the ever increasing cost of content development then it becomes a game of how do you distribute to the widest audience and monetise that effectively to offset that cost and then grow revenues.”
Commenting on the deal, Eli Gelman, president and CEO of Amdocs, said: “This acquisition uniquely positions Amdocs at the centre of increased convergence across the content community and video distributors including major OTT providers. Our joint offerings address the media and entertainment industry’s challenge in balancing the incredible growth of content and the many ways to consume content with making programming easier, faster to deliver and ultimately watch, while also delivering profits.”
The combination of Amdocs’ scalable solutions and Vubiquity’s content expertise enables customers to quickly improve entertainment offerings and maximise revenues while gaining customer insights from content consumption.
There’s no doubt that Vubiquity weren’t the only companies on the table when it came to Amdocs selecting its next acquisition in the media space. When questioned on what made the company choose Vubiquity, Miles said: “What we really like about them (Vubiquity) is they’re not just a technology player, they are an end-to-end service to work with both sides of the equation both the content house to get the libraries and to help them produce, and the technology side of things. That’s the key differentiator to us.”
“Vubiquity connects content owners like Time Warner and Disney, distributors like Comcast and Sky and OTT providers like Netflix and Amazon to deliver entertainment across platforms on a global scale,” added Gelman.
Vubiquity works with over 600 leading film studios, television networks, and independent producers and has a large international footprint in 121 countries, in 80 languages and manages a 150,000+ asset library, providing superior quality and high volumes of assets for predictable day and date delivery. And these capabilities are of increasing importance to Amdocs’ 350+ communication and media service provider partners.
“Vubiquity has successfully been connecting content owners and distributors across many diverse platforms and evolving business models at the core of its support to the media community. Our capabilities, coupled with Amdocs’ global scale and rich set of complementary solutions around monetisation, analytics and personalised customer experience will be truly unique, allowing us to deliver to a larger set of customers while solving key industry challenges. This includes helping video distributors deliver additional profitable offerings, as well as enabling content owners to focus on content creation and maximising licensing revenues,” said Darcy Antonellis, CEO of Vubiquity who will, upon completion of the deal, be joining Amdocs as head of the Amdocs Media Division.
Miles indicates that Amdocs will keep Vubiquity as a separate entity within the Amdocs family, commenting: “It is our intention to have a standalone (subject to closing conditions etc.) media and entertainment unit that keeps the DNA that is specific for that industry but also leverages the reach of Amdocs. It will be an independent division. We need their DNA and we need their mind-set as we move into this media space.”
Subject to the necessary closing conditions the deal is expected to be completed by the end of Q2 2018.
In closing Miles says that the deal is important not just for the two companies but the entire industry as well.
“The industries are too siloed today, we need to come together and benefit from each other’s capabilities. I think it will create an overall knock on effect but the end gain is that it will be better for consumers.”
As for the future, Miles say watch this space because Amdocs are doing “several acquisitions a year, we just don’t always publish them.” Adding that he foresees the company doing a cadence of this deal because the industry is so dynamic but he makes it clear that “for us the focus is on the digital experience.”
