Accenture To Acquire Origin Digital: Looking To Solve The Workflow Problem

Yesterday, Accenture announced that it will acquire NJ based and privately held Origin Digital in a deal that is expected to close within the next 30 days. While terms of buyout were not disclosed, I'm sure we'll read about the price at some point in one of Accenture's future public filings.

For the past few years, Origin Digital has been working primarily with broadcast clients to streamline the content workflow problem of signal acquisition, ingestion, transcoding, management, syndication and delivery of live and on-demand video assets through their web-based management tools. Their system is pretty robust and many of the major CDNs work with or use them for some of these services that the CDNs don't do themselves. With Accenture taking Origin Digital's products in-house it will be interesting to see if these services are still going to be available to the CDNs and whether or not they will continue to be able to re-sell them.

While I never thought of Accenture as one who would be in the digital media services business, acquiring Origin Digital gives them a real offering in the market with the types of customers Accenture does business with. Origin Digital's products work as advertised, they are a small nimble company with some smart technology folks and more importantly, Accenture looks like they plan to focus on the bigger pain point with video owners, that being the workflow. We should know more about Accenture's offering in the market when they officially launch the digital media portion of their website this summer.

We keep hearing and reading a lot about the content delivery market, but it's all the other pieces around delivering video that's the real complex part. Since no standards exist when it comes to video over IP, content owners need to figure out how to get their content in the right format for all the syndication services and devices, while at the same time figuring out how to scale their business and keep costs down with that growth. The workflow for Internet based video is going to be the biggest problem the industry as a whole is going to face 24 months from now. Sure, we'll always need delivery, but as the business for online video content on the web really begins to take off, and there is money to be made, content owners are going to be struggling to figure out how to put their content in all of the necessary formats, for all the different devices, for all the different players and with different levels of protection. Not to mention if you need to do this around the clock for live content as well. Many are already struggling with this today and it's only going to get more complex as we move forward.

Comments

[Rahul Kapoor]

Hello Dan,

Could'nt agree with you more. I personally know of some valley video startups who struggle with this. For example, one of them had to put other client orders on hold for several days as they ingested and encoded content for a beta customer. Lots of time, customizations and h/w being used right now.

[Stephen]

I think your observation on where the pain points are for content owners is spot on. The challenge isn't in simply delivering the content, it's all the services that needs to go around that - for example scale ingest, rights management (of the intellectual property kind)and scheduling multiple products into multiple channels. We're finding tht the move to digital is proving to be massively disruptive and layers on complexity that never existed before, requiring constant change and evolution in line with new devices, services and evolving consumer demand. For this and a host of other reasons we're excited about the acquisition of Origin the digital media services market in general.

We already address the same kinds of issues for rights owners in Music (see below) and through this acquisition we are extending our services to those with rights for more extensive video. One clarification I wanted to offer – Accenture provides those services today. The only thing we’re launching this summer is a website and the marketing efforts to support ADMS.

This is a link through to our press release on Universal -
http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4652