On Demand Group Launches New London HQ with Content Processing and Video Production Facility
On Demand Group (ODG), Europe's leading pay television and on demand content aggregator, today announced the move into its new HQ, including a purpose built asset processing and video production facility, in Tower Bridge Road, London, SE1 3LW. The new facility will provide cost effective, quality encoding, content processing services, and promo production targeted at U.K. and international companies looking to launch or enhance their on-demand video services.
The new facilities, including key equipment from Grab Networks, Dolby, Softel and Tektronix, will enable ODG to ingest from tape or file-based assets supplied by content partners, and supply content into a wide range of SD and HD consumer formats including; MPEG 2, MPEG 4, MXF, FLV, WMV and QT, at very competitive prices. Further, it is the first and only TL9000 certified content processing facility available to Europe’s growing telco IPTV operators.
The building extends over six floors, with five floors of open plan office space and a basement installed with state of the art digital video processing and editing facilities, including Avid Media Composer workstations, Avid Media Composer Nitris DX finishing suites, and a White Mark designed Pro-Tools 8 Audio Suite. The new video production facility will allow ODG to further expand its award-winning creative production capabilities for multi-lingual onscreen video barker production, promotions, commercials, interstitials and graphics.
The move allows ODG to be in control of its own asset processing and creative production capability for the first time, and will allow ODG to be competitive in the fast moving digital TV, broadband and mobile markets. It will also underpin the company’s key objective of offering a cross platform, three-screen on demand product offering, including set-top box, PC and mobile services, to both existing and new clients.
ODG has expanded rapidly in the last two years, content managing VOD and pay-per-view (PPV) services on behalf of clients reaching over 6.5 million households with set top boxes in Europe. As well as being the content management partner for the Virgin VOD service in the U.K., ODG also manages PPV movie services for the two biggest German cable companies, Kabel Deutschland and Unity Media, and VOD and subscription video on demand (SVOD) services for Telekom Austria and OTE, the Greek national telco. ODG has also signed an agreement to launch a new VOD and SVOD service with TTNet, the Turkish ISP owned by Turk Telecom.
Tony Kelly, ODG CEO, commented “The move puts ODG in control of its own destiny and powerfully positions the company to move forward positively in the increasingly competitive world of on demand media. It is a critical move in order for us to continue with our expansion plans that we build our own cost efficient asset processing, content distribution and promo production capability to satisfy customer needs. It means that we can offer our services to all industry players, not just those we have a current contract with.”
Mobix Interactive, the leading mobile content service provider that ODG acquired in December of last year, will also move into the new offices enabling the entire company to be completely self-contained under one roof. Mobix is also expanding fast, currently managing video services to over 160 million handsets in the UK and internationally, including clients such as O2, 3, and Vodacom.
Andrew Bolton, ODG COO, who spearheaded the build-out commented “This new facility underpins our expansion plans for new business and increased efficiency, such as our digital workflow programme being rolled out over our various platforms, enabled by our world leading VZ content management software system. We will now be able to offer clients a leading edge service for asset processing, content management and production that will support the exciting new developments that we are seeing across platforms in PPV, VOD, SVOD, advertising supported VOD, and real time VOD advertising insertion
If you are interested in efficient content processing and video production, or require further details, contact Andrew Bolton on 020 7378 2500.
