Synamedia acquires Quortex

France-based Quortex has developed dedicated architecture for just-in-time live processing that scales the cloud dynamically and in a cost-effective .
France-based Quortex has developed dedicated architecture for just-in-time live processing that scales up and down in the cloud dynamically and in a cost-effective way. Synamedia thinks the transparent pay-as-you-stream model will help the migration path to the cloud for customers of all sizes, especially the cost-conscious. Synamedia has made its third corporate acquisition as an independent company as it beefs up different parts of its product offering. Since spinning out of Cisco in 2018, ContentArmor (security) and Utelly (content discovery) have been added to Synamedia’s growing product portfolio, centred increasingly around a more flexible software-as-a-service approach. Quortex, a cloud video delivery platform optimised for just-in-time processing of live video streaming, has similarly been brought in to augment Synamedia’s SaaS capabilities as it targets the cloud-based OTT market.
Synamedia will use the newly acquired technology to enhance its cloud video network capabilities, specifically complementing its Vivid Workflow as-a-Service (WaaS). Synamedia has been working on its Vivid platform for a couple of years now, centred around infrastructure migration with a view that its traditional customer base - broadcasters, content owners, service providers – will do a progressive migration to the cloud. And the company has built a lot of technology to enable that, including hybrid support for mixed multi-cloud deployments with a focus on quality and reliability. Meanwhile, Quortex has built a cloud-native platform for delivering live linear in OTT in a rather unique way. Quortex enables on-demand processing of live channels, offering good performance at a reasonable cost, which attracted Synamedia after evaluating the technology for several months.
Delivering the live experience reliably at scale has always been one of the hardest challenges that media operators, broadcasters and content owners have faced – and this is a task made even more challenging in the streaming world. Using a patented, industry-first, pay-as-you-stream model, Quortex’s just-in-time technology provides exactly the resources required at any given time. If no-one is watching a channel, it simply frees up those resources. The process uses bandwidth only when it is required and should appeal to cost-sensitive customers. For long tail content, for example, Quortex’s technology is estimated to reduce cloud costs up to 67%. At the same time, live content in the evenings peak is also where the largest audiences are still found. “In the ‘traditional’ cloud approach, everyone would be processing everything all the time, so I think this is a real architectural revolution in some way. They have really turned that logic upside down.
Because the reality is that when you look at large service providers, or even 24x7 OTT services, that traffic is very spiky. Their architecture enables you to have a completely stateless processing of live linear, which enables you to use those completely dynamic instances in the cloud. That changes the cost and scaling equation a lot,” Synamedia’s Julien Signes told CSI. “We are very excited because we think that the Quortex platform will unlock the big elephant in the room with cloud, because everyone wants to do the cloud but everyone is afraid of the costs when it comes to video and we will resolve a big issue with that when going live linear,” said Signes, who leads Synamedia's Video Network business. Vivid, on the other hand, is a premium 4K/8K HDR platform with low latency support used to process premium content, but it is a heavier more expensive process.
While the exact integration and positioning is a little unclear, Synamedia will, for the time being at least, keep both brands because it believes they serve a very specific purpose with complimentary approaches. Signes lik...