VoIP veteran Charlie Vogt sees $40 billion market for video optimization and delivery, partners with HPE
Video optimization has received a bad wrap lately, but carriers and other service providers know it is the reality of IP-based video delivery.
“Nobody’s getting uncompressed video,” explained Charlie Vogt, who left his CEO job at Genband two and a half years ago to transform Harris Broadcasting into a cloud-based video solutions provider. “The only way you can get uncompressed video, believe it or not, is using your old traditional rabbit ears in your house and you can get true high definition 1080p in your home. Everyone else is getting a fairly significant compressed video.”
The quality of compressed video depends in part on the software used to encode, transcode and encapsulate the content. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is betting on Imagine Communications, the new incarnation of Harris Broadcasting. Vogt changed the name in 2014 as he began his mission to transform the company.
“We started down a very aggressive innovation path two years ago to really take all of this traditional technology that was for the most part very purpose-built, very hardware-centric, very proprietary-centric and move it into an environment where you could virtualize some part or all of the network functions in the cloud,” said Vogt, adding that in addition to the HPE partnership, Imagine has a strategic partnership with Microsoft and is deploying within Microsoft’s cloud-based Azure service.
HPE is set to resell Imagine’s product portfolio, which has been aligned with HPE’s software, hardware and services. The partners plan to target media companies and service providers with their non-exclusive partnership, meaning HPE can sell other solutions and Imagine can partner with other hardware vendors. Vogt said Imagine is also working with Cisco Systems and Accenture.
In addition to video optimization, Imagine’s solution handles traditional video editing and graphics. Vogt sees significant new opportunities as these functions move out of the network and into the cloud. He also foresees new opportunities for consumers to manage video on multiple devices as delivery moves to the cloud.
“We’re becoming a very key player in eliminating the hardware boxes in your family room and moving all the traditional DVR functionality into a cloud-based infrastructure,” Vogt said. “This will be a viable business for the carriers … if you think about a truck roll to someone’s house to fix or replace a [set-top] box, it’s expensive.”
Among U.S. telecom operators carriers, Verizon Communications and AT&T are the only major providers of in-home video delivery services. AT&T is already working with Ericsson for video delivery, using the Mediaroom solution Ericsson purchased from Microsoft.
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