NAB 2025: Narayanan Rajan Talks Reintroducing Media Excel, Hero Platform Differentiation, and AI-Powered Encoding
In this interview with Streaming Media contributing editor Jan Ozer, Narayanan “Raj” Rajan, CEO of Media Excel, reflects on his first year at the helm of one of the most established names in the encoding industry. Rajan discusses how Media Excel is reasserting its relevance with the Hero platform—an encoder/transcoder/packager suite—and why live streaming, low latency, and AI-optimised encoding remain at the heart of the company’s strategy.
Media Excel delivers its technology as an appliance, software, or containerised cloud deployment, offering pricing flexibility across CapEx and OpEx models. Rajan explains how the company differentiates itself with vertical video support and real-world bitrate savings—particularly for H.264-based workflows. He also shares where the Hero platform is gaining traction, who it's best suited for, and why Media Excel remains focused on selling products, not services.
Below is a lightly edited version of the conversation.
Jan Ozer: I'm with Raj Rajan, CEO of Media Excel, and we’re going to talk about who Media Excel is and what they do. Thanks for joining me, Raj.
Raj Rajan: Great to be here, Jan.
State of the company
Jan Ozer: We talked last year, and I wrote an article summarising what I saw at NAB. You've been here 12 months now. What did you come into, what have you seen, what have you done, and where are you taking it?
Raj Rajan: I came into probably the oldest startup in the industry. We've been around for 25 years, and before I got here, we'd continued doing engineering innovation, but a lot of folks had kind of forgotten we were around. The mission has really been to make people aware that Media Excel delivers a great quality product. We've never stopped innovating, and I think that shows in the value propositions we bring to the market.
Core product and new decoder offering
Jan Ozer: Break it down for me—what does your company sell?
Raj Rajan: The core of what we sell is the Hero platform, which is our encoder/transcoder/packager platform. We’re also starting to separate our decoder logic from the transcoder to create a standalone HLS-based decoder that supports CMAF and chunked transfer encoding. As we see this migration from satellite distribution to IP distribution, we think there's a need in the market to do that cost-effectively over a CDN. That product is coming out later this year.
Deployment Models and Pricing Flexibility
Jan Ozer: When you say you sell a transcoder/encoder, how do I buy that? Software, hardware, cloud?
Raj Rajan: We sell it as an appliance. We sell it as software you can deploy as a VM on your own bare metal. And we also offer Docker containers in the cloud for you to do your own orchestration.
Jan Ozer: Is that CapEx or OpEx?
Raj Rajan: We want to meet the customer where they are. Some lean into the OpEx model, others are very CapEx focused. From our perspective, whether you choose one or the other, the price over a period of years—depending on how you depreciate your CapEx—should be roughly the same. We don’t penalise customers based on how they want to consume the product. We just want to sell them what they need, the way they want it.
Standing out in a crowded market
Jan Ozer: It's a very crowded and tough market. How do you differentiate your product?
Raj Rajan: You're absolutely right—it’s a commodity space, and we have to recognise that. The media ecosystem is incredibly crowded, with a lot of vendors doing similar things. The suppliers who embrace that reality and maintain a cost structure that supports it are the ones who will succeed.
That said, you still have to innovate. We’ve incorporated AI-enabled encoding—what we call Diva—into our platform (DIVA is Dynamic Intelligent Video Adaptive). It allows customers to save 20 to 30% of bandwidth downstream if they’re doing distribution at scale. That translates to cost savings or improved picture quality at a given bitrate.
We’ve also built the company on doing live streaming really well. That’s a hard thing to do. We achieve low latency—broadcast-level latency—while maintaining high encoding efficiency and enabling features like compact GOPs. On top of that, we’ve built rich features into the platform, like support for encoding vertical video natively, which is increasingly important for mobile content.
Evaluating Efficiency Claims
Jan Ozer: I'm going to push back—this is kind of where I live. You’re doing H.264 and H.265. Those are your two primary codecs?
Raj Rajan: Yes, that’s correct.
Jan Ozer: When you talk about 20–30% downstream savings, what are you comparing it to? And is there a document I can download to check that, or is that just marketing speak?
Raj Rajan: No, absolutely. We can share a list of tests we’ve done across different content types that validate that. We're talking about objective metrics—VMAF scores, for example. For HEVC, applying AI encoding yields less benefit—about 15% savings—because it's already more efficient. For AVC, you might get 30% or more, because there's more room for optimisation.
Codec usage breakdown
Jan Ozer: What are your customers using now? How much HEVC, how much AVC?
Raj Rajan: Still, the predominant thing we sell is AVC. I'd say about 10% of what we sell is HEVC. We do have customers who have leaned into HEVC, but despite its ubiquitous adoption on consumer devices, most of what we're seeing on the encoder side is still AVC.
Customer Segments and Use Cases
Jan Ozer: Are there particular market segments where you’re seeing more traction?
Raj Rajan: For us, it's medium-sized operators, managed service content distributors, and niche content owners. That’s where we're doing a lot of business today.
That said, we also have very high-profile content owners and brand-name customers in the sports domain. From our perspective, the traditional segment lines—operators, content owners, broadcasters—have completely blurred. Anyone who values the propositions we provide and wants one of the best price points in the market is someone we’re talking to.
Lift pitch
Jan Ozer: Give me the elevator pitch. 15 to 20 seconds.
Raj Rajan: If you want an encoder or transcoder that delivers premium picture quality, doesn’t compromise on platform evolution, and is priced 20–30% below what most of the market charges for comparable products, come talk to us.
Related Articles
At NAB 2025, the term AI reigned supreme over other still-popular tech buzzwords like SaaS, cloud, and end-to-end that dominated previous' years shows. But before jumping or falling into the AI world, perhaps learning from the past is a good idea. As with SaaS and cloud, buying or launching a family of products with AI does not make a strategy.
15 Apr 2025
Streaming Media returns to the US west coast October 6-8 for Streaming Media 2025 in Santa Monica, California. In this interview Conference Chair Andy Beach, former CTO of Microsoft, offers an advance look at the conference's mix of tech, monetisation, and content strategy, and explains why this is the show the streaming industry needs now.
15 Apr 2025
In this NAB 2025 interview with Streaming Media contributing editor Jan Ozer, Lily Bond, Chief Growth Officer at 3Play Media, discusses how the company has evolved from one of the earliest captioning providers into a full-service accessibility and localisation partner. With 15 years in the business, 3Play now offers captioning, subtitling, audio description, and hybrid AI/human dubbing services for customers looking to comply with accessibility laws and expand into global markets.
15 Apr 2025