Vimond's Megan Wagoner Talks Acceleration of Cloud Broadcasting
Tim Siglin: Welcome back to Streaming Media East 2022, here at the Westin Copley in Boston. I've got today with me, Megan Wagoner, from Vimond. First of all, tell the audience here in the U.S. who may not know about Vimond what exactly the company is.
Megan Wagoner: Absolutely. We are an OTT streaming technology vendor, and we deal primarily in the video CMS space. Based in Norway,
Tim Siglin: So, you were on a panel that talked about broadcasting in the cloud. Tell us what broadcasting in the cloud means to Vimond.
Megan Wagoner: It's an interesting concept, in terms of working on a streaming vendor versus a more traditional kind of broadcast playout vendor. Wat we started the conversation with is kind of the definition and educating a little bit to make sure we were level-set on what that was. But the idea of broadcast being one-to-many versus more of the streaming, unicast type of solution. So in terms of what we talked about today, it was a lot of history of what broadcasters have done to get into the cloud. And then just things that you need to identify in terms of what to ask vendors what viewers you're going to have and how a lot of the business models are different.
Tim Siglin: And obviously what devices they're gonna consume on, that kind of thing. Now, what has the pandemic done for Vimond in terms of the acceleration of that cloud broadcasting?
Megan Wagoner: Well, I think as you can imagine, it's accelerated a lot of folks' idea for that. I often say that 2021 was the idea of acceptance of broadcast in the cloud, and 2022 is a lot of adoption. We also find that, at least for many startups where there were barriers of entry, that's really lowered a lot for people so that they are able to find tech solutions that can enable them to have a pretty niche streaming solution, a niche channel--something that maybe they didn't think that they could accomplish before. And so, again, it's educating people on what they need to make this happen and then finding the right fit. You know, it's gotta be a good business model. You've gotta have the right target audience. And all of that is on top of the technology.
Tim Siglin: Nice. Now Vimond obviously started in the Nordics and then did work sort of pan-Europe, and now it's in the U.S. Is there a general sense of where the next potential market is beyond beyond these areas? Is it Asia, or is there already a presence in Asia for Vimond?
Megan Wagoner: We actually have a really large presence in the Australia region, what we call our APAC region, which encompasses Asia and Pacific. And so we work with Telstra there. We work with many of the Foxtel brands, Streamotion, Binge Flash, Fox Sports. So we have a really good presence there. The focus on the Americas is really amped up since the pandemic. We've been able to grow a team a little bit out more, and we again have kind of focused on more of the startups. We have really large tier-one customers like Disney and Comcast and folks like that. But now we're able to reach folks that are really just trying to get their voice out there.
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