Media software services and project delivery company Ovyo has merged with Portuguese technology services firm, The Loop Co. to provide “a stronger service portfolio” for media and technology clients.
The deal will give Ovyo the ability to spin up new project teams and give clients rapid access to niche industry skills, said the company. It also enables the company to offer its services in Portugal, as well as the UK and India.
TVBEurope spoke to Pav Kudlac, CEO of Ovyo, to find out what the merger means for the video industry.
Can you start by giving us some background on both companies?
Ovyo delivers custom software projects to companies throughout the video industry. It was founded in 2019 by video industry veterans to try to deliver software services to the industry in a better way. Headquartered in the UK with the main delivery centre in India and a presence in South Africa, the team of over 100 software engineers and project managers delivers custom software projects across the video/OTT industry. Ovyo does a lot of work building and customising OTT apps for smart TVs, mobiles, web and consoles as well as cloud-native software, video pipe configuration and live operations services.
The Loop Co. is a B2B services company founded in 2015 and based in Coimbra, Portugal. It has a significant focus on sustainability innovation and the circular economy but also works across Salesforce, TV and media, cloud engineering, web and mobile and data science, with a strong background in supporting companies in launching products.
What exactly are nearshore service capabilities?
This means delivering projects and software from Europe, in our case Portugal, rather than from off-shore (further afield such as India) or on-shore (e.g. at a customer’s offices). There are trade-offs when choosing where to deliver services from, for example, offshore is typically cheaper however a base in Europe offers more travel flexibility and can make it easier to deliver across a bigger range of timezones to better match customer working hours, especially west-coast US. Naturally, it’s possible to combine nearshore, off-shore and on-shore all together.
Who are your clients?
Ovyo partners with clients including large Tier 1 European operators and broadcasters, smaller operators, streamers and broadcasters, and many vendors serving the industry. The majority of our customers are actually industry vendors, who particularly appreciate the flexibility we offer regarding the rapid responsiveness to requests for support and the focus on engineers with strong industry expertise.
Why the decision to merge?
Many people have observed a slowdown in investment decision-making in the industry, which has led to increased demand for creativity in service delivery. One of the trends we’ve seen is demand from customers for nearshore as well as offshore service delivery. It was important for us to deliver this in a credible fashion and to be able to offer scale for our customers, both of which this merger immediately enables. Ovyo’s customers will also have more access to expertise in domains where Ovyo has historically had less presence, such as data science and OSS/BSS, so we are able to help in more ways.
What will it mean for your clients?
Our customers have ever more flexibility in how they can rely on partners to deliver their projects and product roadmaps. As such, we can be more creative in the solutions we can propose for how to help people. This will mean customers can get even more granular in defining their core business to focus on internally and the adjacent areas where they want the ability to scale up and down flexibly, carrying fewer overheads and increasing their efficiency. This also helps our vendor customers boost their top line – with a flexible partner, they know they can say yes to more work and have full confidence it will be delivered to the right level of quality.
What plans do you have to grow the business in Europe?
Since the merger announcement, we are already working with two customers on spinning up teams based in Europe and we anticipate more requests, so we envisage building multiple teams with deep video expertise in Portugal to serve customers across the region as well as North America.
What areas of technology (such as AI) will the new entity focus on?
We see significant demand for work customising OTT apps, back-end platforms and video pipes as well as Dev Ops, project delivery and consulting. Within the OTT/video industry, we are focused on helping customers flexibly scale software, project delivery and operations teams, wherever the focus is for them, whether that’s a short-term need or a longer-term “managed team” involvement.
If we were to talk again in 12 months, where would you expect the new company to be?
Given the demand we see in the market, we’d expect the company to have grown the number of customers relying on us to deliver software projects, with a split (even within customers and projects) of those leveraging teams in India and Portugal. We see more demand for multi-year partnership agreements where a core service level is then rapidly expanded and contracted in line with a customer’s demand for the skills, so we envisage that type of engagement forming a larger proportion of our projects.
