TVBEurope; Changing of the guard: how Arqiva is adapting for a modern media landscape

Story from TVBEurope:

Dominic Wedgwood joined Arqiva as chief technology officer in May 2023, having been a customer for over 20 years. He describes the company as “an absolute stalwart” of the broadcast landscape, which is now working on transforming itself to meet the challenges facing content owners and broadcasters.

Wedgwood says that the company “is leaving no stone unturned” as it works to adapt to the changing needs of the industry, adding “there is quite a buzz around the place at the moment because everybody knows that they’re part of something special in that long, rich history of Arqiva”.

Among those changes are new services, products and capabilities that the industry might not have associated with Arqiva previously. “We’ve got a huge opportunity as a managed service provider to help with all of the complexity that content owners and broadcasters have today, which means we can almost leapfrog some of the barriers to change and the huge transformation projects that broadcasters might have,” adds Wedgwood. “We want to be a real support factor at a time when borrowing is harder and everybody is looking for profitability and making sure they’re streamlining their businesses.”

One of the key areas that Arqiva is focusing on is its customers’ customer, ie the viewer, as, says Wedgwood, they are rarely the focus of the media supply chain. “It’s that kind of thinking that is really taking us to different technologies and products that we think will be valuable for our customers, and going straight to the heart of the troubles that they are facing right now.

“Their businesses have technical debt that is reasonably recent because of the absolutely breathtaking pace of innovation and that pressure to keep up with on-screen features and stimulating experiences.”

Technical debt is a phrase that’s being increasingly used in the industry at the moment and Wedgwood believes the speed of change is an area where Arqiva can thrive. “The services that we’re offering today are now in software, in the cloud, we’re looking at really groundbreaking streaming technologies,” he adds.

Looking at things differently:

One example of this is Arqiva’s partnership with System73 to offer optimisation, QoE analytics and CDN switching as part of its streaming portfolio. The service has the potential to reduce reliance on physical CDNs for up to 80 per cent of traffic, lowering data centre energy consumption by the same percentage.

“We’re not looking at trying to capitalise on specific infrastructural solutions that have been the paradigm for how you broadcast or stream. We’re truly working back from that customer experience and saying, let’s have a look at things differently,” says Wedgwood.

“At the moment, we’re really looking at de-duplicating and simplifying our customers’ business for them,” he continues. “That includes our headends and our multiplexing. To be able to do an OTT adaptive bitrate stream and your broadcast encoding and muxing from the same platform is hugely interesting when businesses are running a traditional broadcast and a streaming business, and to find those points of unity and consolidation is really what we want to be able to try and do.”

With all this talk of change, Wedgwood is keen to stress that Arqiva is very aware of what it’s known for, and is still focusing on the movement of content and transport of signals. However, there are opportunities for the company to diversify. “It’s about making sure that we can move content no matter the technology. We’re making sure that we have the most flexibility and scalability for the transport of content.”

The company is investing in Arqade, its cloud content interchange, to ensure it continues to deliver what customers want, be that processing, content transformation, content clean-up, inserting markers to be able to create advertising, or making sure it’s secure enough for wherever content is being distributed. “Arqade and that cloud interchange is really our focus for enhancing people’s content, as well as moving it from A to B to C,” says Wedgwood. --The transport and transformation business:

Of course, one of the biggest areas of development in the last few years has been the migration towards IP. While some UK broadcasters have started to make the move, it’s possible to argue that it’s still being held at arm’s length by others. Wedgwood says this is often down to where a broadcaster is in its investment cycle, as well as the depth of their pockets. “The fact that there are examples out there now where businesses are capitalising on the benefits of 2110 gives a lot of people more confidence. That said, it’s staggering how many are still standing by and watching.

“That helps Arqiva, because it is creating that abstraction layer for us to be able to take on that complexity and be able to take those scaled problems, because they are in every organisation, and make sure that we can unify them and simplify them. We’re in the transport and transformation and distribution of content business, monitoring and giving insight.”

In terms of what its customers are asking for to help them meet the current challenges within the industry, Wedgwood says most are concentrating on content quality and customer satisfaction regarding how that content reaches them. Audiences are past the point where they will allow streaming to be lower quality than broadcast – they expect the same standard whether they’re watching a traditional broadcast channel or a streaming service. “In that regard, Arqiva is well placed, because in a true hybrid nature, we can meet customers where they are in their pain points, and say, we could talk to you about the most modern, most innovative services or product.

“But actually what I think they appreciate is a trustworthy partner who says that there is an in-between. There are stepping stones that you can take depending on your affordability, depending on the timings, and depending on any other drivers that you have. We haven’t mentioned sustainability and environmental impacts. If that is significant with certain companies, then that can play into the change of infrastructure, the change of types of solutions.”

Partnerships will continue to be part of Arqiva’s landscape in the coming months, says Wedgwood, and that is something the company is focusing on internally as it builds its interoperability capabilities. “That means that we meet the customer where they are with their complexity, with the idiosyncrasies of their business.

“Arqiva is thinking about things differently, and the partnership with System73 enables us to offer streaming, quality of experience, CDN switching,” he continues. “I don’t think people will have thought Arqiva will step past the more established delivery mechanisms and into something that some might find provocative. We moved to get that partnership done before IBC as an indication of how Arqiva is thinking about things in a completely different way.”

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