If you’ve watched an Alliance Films trailer on your computer, tablet or smartphone recently, followed live debates in the parliament of Trinidad, or listened to prayers broadcast live from Saudi Arabia during Ramadan, you have NetroMedia to thank.
The Victoria-based company specializes in delivering audio and video for clients around the world through its streaming platform.
“We’re the piece between the content creator and the audience,” said NetroMedia CEO Che Pinkerton. “We’re like a large antenna for the Internet.”
NetroMedia recently worked with IT City in Saudi Arabia to provide live broadcasts of prayers this month for Ramadan.
The IT City contract is all part of NetroMedia’s expansion into the Middle East. The company plans to open an office in Riyadh in about a month from now.
“That’s exciting for us,” Pinkerton said. “We had planned this for a year, and obviously the Arab spring is a concern for us in terms of safety, so we’ve delayed it a bit. But we believe the time is right for that region.”
He added that Africa is another market with great growth potential.
“Places like Africa and the Middle East are just getting their wind,” Pinkerton said.
“The growth there, the business adoption, the leap-frogging of technology is nothing less than spectacular.”
Now 10 years old, NetroMedia was founded by Matthew Carson – the company’s director of technology. It now employs 40 people worldwide, 13 of whom are based in Victoria and three in Vancouver.
The company started out providing local webcasting, mostly for conferences. Pinkerton came aboard in 2003 as CEO.
“After the tech meltdown, we looked at where our best position could be and went into streaming,” he said.
It turned out to be a good move.
“We’ve been profitable every year that we’ve been in business,” Pinkerton said. “Last year, through the recession, we were at least 40% [up in revenue].”
With broadband’s increased availability, streaming became the most common way of transferring audio and video files. Companies like Netflix have their own streaming distribution platforms. NetroMedia provides a streaming platform through its global content delivery network for small- to medium-sized clients.
“Conventional broadcasters, globally, are our bread and butter,” Pinkerton said.
“They have a terrestrial distribution sometimes or maybe they’re Internet only, and we do their [Internet and mobile] distribution for them.”
In addition to on-demand and pay-per-view services, NetroMedia does live streaming for concerts, conferences and even prayers and sermons for religious organizations.
The broadcasting of live prayers from Saudi Arabia during Ramadan is just the most recent example. In fact, Pinkerton said faith-based broadcasters were among the first clients to use streaming.
“One of our very first clients many, many years ago was a faith broadcaster,” he said.
“Really, faith broadcasters, no matter where they are in the globe, are really early adopters of technology.”
NetroMedia offers a wide variety of features, including ad-integration, geo-control (blocking specific countries, regions or cities) and a user agent detection that optimizes the content according to what kind of mobile device someone is using. The use of streaming for distributing audio and video files continues to grow, thanks to the increased use of smartphones and tablet computers.
“Obviously, it’s exploding, and we were in smartphones long before there were tablets. NetroMedia was an early adopter and one of the leaders of mobile streaming.”
Pinkerton added the next big opportunity for growth is likely to come from over-the-top television (OTT), which broadcasts TV via the Internet.
Mark Goldberg, a telecommunications consultant, said OTT provides greater opportunities for smaller content creators around the world to reach new audiences and for audiences to find a greater range of content than they currently get from dedicated content providers (Netflix, for example).
“I think the real opportunity is the personalization of entertainment,” Goldberg said.
“They’re permitting anybody who has video content anywhere in the world to distribute that content to viewers anywhere in the world. In an increasingly fragmented video marketplace, they’re enabling folks who are producing and archiving content to reach audiences wherever those audiences might be.” •
