Exclusives

The media and entertainment (M&E) division of V2 Solutions has been spun off into a new M&E company named Spherex, led by CEO and founder Teresa Phillips, and the new company is “creating a new category: the first digital market network for the M&E industry,” according to Jim Delli Santi, its VP of marketing.
  
“We named it Spherex because our metadata and merchandising platform provides an unparalleled 360 degree view of titles across digital stores around the globe,” he told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) Dec. 19.

“Our mission is to connect global storytellers with digital stores and their local audiences worldwide,” he said, adding the company’s artificial intelligence- (AI-) assisted market network “acts like a smart merchandising assistant, monitoring and notifying you of metadata issues for titles across global” over-the-top (OTT) and multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) platforms.

In the process, Spherex will help customers “understand and react to changing market conditions and discover new market opportunities,” he said, explaining: “The large industry problem we are solving touches every aspect of today’s inefficient digital supply chain — but then extends this value from problem solving to creating an entirely new way to market and merchandise digital titles globally.”

The company has seen from the “significant technology investments” it’s made that “the existing supply chain — how we’ve always done things — won’t scale and is starting to buckle under current and projected OTT growth,” according to Phillips. 

Explaining how V2 evolved into Spherex, she said: “A couple of years ago, we began thinking about the digital supply chain as circular workflows rather than linear processes. And the result is Spherex — our solution to the core M&E pain points. Spherex’s matching IDs and controlled metadata across Product, Avails and Stores solves for today’s store compliance issues such as availability, pricing, metadata and artwork.”

The company’s solution also tracks price changes and promotions across storefronts, she pointed out. 

“But this is just the beginning,” she said, adding the Spherex platform “now allows retailers, who know their customers best,” and content providers, “who know their products best, to communicate back and forth through common data translations and structures.”

That allows each to “do what they do best, while providing an infrastructure to increase updates transactional velocity end-to-end,” she said, explaining: “This new, always-on connectivity lets both benefit from marketing activities such as smart distribution or dynamic pricing and solves for what we all ultimately want: Letting customers find the right content at the right time as a sea of new content washes over the globe. We’ve built workflow and utility underneath our platform and analytics on top to enable smart distribution decisions and continuous translation and flow of metadata and content.”