Blog

Positions Amdocs as a Tier 1 entertainment provider

Vindicia’s parent company, Amdocs, is to acquire Vubiquity, a major provider of premium content services and technologies based in Burbank, California. This is a highly strategic acquisition that catapults Amdocs deep into the media and entertainment business – a commitment that was first expressed through Amdocs’ purchase of Vindicia in September 2016.

Vubiquity connects content publishers and owners with video distributors such as pay TV operators, telecommunications providers, and OTT publishers. Vubiquity works with over 600 content partners including 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner Brothers, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Disney Television Group, MTV, HBO, and Showtime.

Vubiquity also provides specialized solutions for linear broadcast, digital streaming, advertising, subscriber authentication, metadata and analytics, content discovery, digital rights management, file management and delivery, encoding for time-shifted viewing, and more.

A great incentive for Amdocs to purchase Vubiquity must surely have been its impressive roster of communications service provider (CSP) clients, which includes many of the world’s largest. Most of them are already Amdocs customers, such as AT&T, Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, Cox, DIRECTV, Dish Network, and Verizon.

So the logic behind Amdocs’ acquisition is clear and compelling. Vubiquity has deep connections into the entertainment industry, and will continue to develop them. The press release announcing the acquisition very much focuses on scale, content, monetization, customer experience, analytics and technology, which the companies can jointly offer across all types of distributors. However, Amdocs can now directly target communications service providers that see their future in moving decisively into the media and entertainment sector with a very rich entertainment offering. Leveraging Vubiquity, Vindicia’s subscription billing and monetization expertise, and Amdocs BSS/OSS, data analytics and other assets, Amdocs can provide everything CSPs need to acquire, sell, distribute, service, and monetize every type of media. In other words, Amdocs can now deliver many of the crucial pieces of the puzzle CSPs need to launch and profit from entertainment.

As Eli Gelman, CEO of Amdocs said, “Our joint offerings address the media and entertainment industry’s challenge in balancing the incredible growth of content and the many ways to consume content with making programming easier, faster to deliver, and ultimately watch, while also delivering profits."

Moreover, media and entertainment companies like Disney, HBO, and Time Warner are reaching out directly to end users with a direct-to-consumer (D2C) business model. These are now also potential customers for Amdocs. “This trend requires new systems to support an improved customer experience that we believe Amdocs is well-positioned to provide,” Gelman said.

What does this mean for Vindicia?

Clearly the Vubiquity acquisition builds upon and emphasizes the importance of the Vindicia platform as the founding cornerstone of Amdocs’ entertainment strategy. As Amdocs builds out its entertainment offering, and as Amdocs spreads its wings beyond communications into the entertainment space, Vindicia will be a central and indispensable piece of the ever-expanding Amdocs Entertainment portfolio that Amdocs can offer to a widening range of studios, content owners and distributors.

Exciting times ahead for Vindicia.