Re-building the House of Mouse on Cloud and IP: Lessons from Disney’s Majority Acquisition of BAMTech

This is an exciting time to be in Media. You don’t always hear vendors cheering consolidation. Often because 1+1 = 1 less customer. But not in this case: our strategic customer Disney is purchasing a majority (75%) stake in our strategic customer BAMTech, gaining control of the direct-to-consumer OTT streaming platform.

This is a major industry inflection point – and we are very excited.

BAMTech gives Disney the cloud/data center architecture it needs to control distribution beyond traditional MVPDs. This is important, particularly as networks such as ESPN have been impacted by cord-cutting/OTT (over 12 million subs lost since 2011). But this architecture is meaningful beyond controlling distribution.

And Disney knows a thing or two about controlling one’s destiny.

The world of media is changing. More content needs to be created. Fast. In ever greater resolutions. The traditional network and infrastructure is not able to support these new requirements. It just can’t scale or move rapidly enough, while costs and complexity are too high.

But extend a cloud/IP data center architecture to the back of the production house and… voila – you have the foundations to accelerate and scale content production. Anywhere. Everywhere.

This is the next generation architecture we see media companies adopting around the world (NBCU, CANAL+, BBC). It allows them to accelerate global production and collaboration. Create more content in more formats faster. And engage audiences more deeply.

Industry transitions are hard. We know. We’ve been part of many. We’ve been working with our media customers and their ecosystem partners to lay the foundation for their transition to cloud and IP. When companies take major investments in the direction of an industry transition, we can appreciate the confidence they have in their foundation and partnerships to be successful.

We’ll have more to say about this industry transition at IBC 2017. Come visit us @ booth 1.A71, Hall 1.