THAMES DITTON, England—Imagine Communications has announced that it has recently helped one of Europe’s largest media companies, Antenna Group, rapidly expand 22 pay-TV channels and two streaming services to more than 24 million subscribers in 12 territories migrate Imagine’s Landmark Rights and Scheduling software as a managed service.
Operating as Software as a Service (SaaS) within the dedicated Imagine cloud, the new system has enabled Antenna to streamline workflows and operations and maximize return on investment by moving to an OpEx model.
After acquiring Sony’s networks and services, Antenna had to move within a tight deadline, the companies said.
In Hungary, where Antenna Entertainment is headquartered, an earlier version of the Landmark system was in operation and a decision was made to integrate operations onto a single, modernized platform.
“Managing rights and scheduling across multiple linear and digital platforms in multiple territories is a complex business,” said Costas Colombus, CTO of Antenna Group. “We needed to take over a very large library of new content from the acquisition alongside our existing rights holdings and get our operations up and running immediately. Imagine gave us complete confidence in the rapid database migration as well as the commercial benefits of using Landmark as a SaaS.”
The commercial terms of the acquisition left a very short window for the transfer of operations, and specialists from Imagine and local distributor Amy DV in Athens quickly got to work to help Antenna meet its deadline. The entire implementation – including creating SaaS instances, migrating on-premises databases from both operations to the Imagine cloud and training the team – was completed in less than 12 weeks.
Mathias Eckert, Senior Vice President and General Manager EMEA and APAC at Imagine Communications added: “Media companies today want to focus on their core business, which is the creation, management and monetization of content. Operating the core technology as SaaS allows for a very rapid implementation – as demonstrated by the Antenna project – with all maintenance and support performed for the business from our cloud facilities. Antenna never has to worry about software updates or routine server maintenance and replacement. The result is a highly functional system that is tailored precisely to their needs, with a significantly reduced total cost of ownership.”
Landmark Rights & Scheduling enables rights management and scheduling for premium quality live, streaming and on-demand channels and content. Its comprehensive scheduling engine provides the tools to create single or multi-channel schedules – combining program content and commercials into a single, frame-accurate playlist. This allows media companies to get the most out of their programming resources with the optimal schedule to reach audiences and maximize profits,” Imagine said.
“We carefully analyzed Antenna’s business processes before determining that Landmark was the right product to evolve their workflow,” said David Chalkidis, manager at Amy DV. “Migrating to a next-generation software release that its operators were already familiar with allowed Antenna to streamline this significant transition and prepare for a converged linear and digital future.”
For more information, visit https://www.imaginecommunications.com (opens in new tab).
