Connections

Founded in 2005 by two university friends, New York-based Oxagile grew from a promising tech startup to a mature software vendor serving more than a billion users. While the company now operates across a dozen business verticals and domain , its core expertise remains the same: online video and everything around it.

“JumpTV was our breakthrough project in online video,” said Oxagile CTO Sergey Marchuk. “It was a large-scale content management and substitution system for a Canadian internet TV service provider, one of the first online television networks in the world. The skills we acquired there became the bedrock of our video expertise.”

The company is now staffed with more than 400 professionals, including product and project managers, domain experts, software and QA engineers, and solution architects, most of whom are working on VOD and live-streaming projects for international clients.

“Lately we’ve been expanding beyond our traditional markets of Western Europe and the U.S. Thanks to global industry events like IBC and the NAB Show we were also able to connect with Asian and Middle Eastern broadcasters. These are fast-developing markets full of untapped potential,” Marchuk said.

What Oxagile is up against

Content consumption is growing faster than ever, which is good news for the M&E industry. However, new opportunities come with new challenges that businesses have to address.

Marchuk explains: “When viewer numbers are exploding, performance becomes an issue. The compatibility of devices and platforms becomes an issue. Workflows become too complex and unwieldy, which slows down production and distribution and eventually leads to errors. Those errors become vulnerabilities and then content protection becomes an issue as well.

“We help clients resolve all kinds of bottlenecks but the end goal is almost always the same: to ensure the highest quality of experience possible. Because this is what keeps users coming back.”

Years upon years of experience in building custom solutions for content production, management and delivery have left Oxagile with a profound understanding of the domain and several sophisticated frameworks that can be used to accelerate development and cut related expenses.

The right technology

“Our Content DNA framework uses human-like machine learning algorithms to carry out granular video analysis and metadata enrichment,” Marchuk said. “The face recognition SDK that we developed helps achieve maximum performance with any kind of input, including shaky footage, videos filmed in bad weather, or footage of partially obscured faces. And our Kurento-based WebRTC framework allows building scalable media platforms that support thousands of concurrent users in a single conference.”

Oxagile’s commitment to quality is reflected in the proprietary test automation framework that is used on long-term, high-stakes projects to streamline and scale quality assurance.

“The scalability of Oxagile’s QA service dovetails with the scalability of the systems we build and deploy,” Marchuk said. “According to our calculations, our solutions are already serving more than one billion end-users worldwide. Content consumers make up a large portion of this user base, and they’re also the fastest growing category. This is why we encourage our M&E clients to consider scalability as early as possible, and suggest architecture designs that make future scaling painless.”

Oxagile also enables clients to expand their reach via frontend OTT applications for a wide range of platforms, including iOS, Android, web, smart TVs, STBs, gaming consoles, and streaming sticks. Underpinned by flexible layout management and seamless backend integration, these apps help engage audiences, connect them to content, and boost profits.

Strategies for the future

With its massive growth and intense competition, the M&E industry drives studios and broadcasters to seek innovative methods for producing and delivering content. In turn, these companies push engineers to think outside the box when offering them software solutions.

“The R&D team gets involved more and more often,” Marchuk said. “At Oxagile, we see our job as helping clients get ahead of the pack. Cookie-cutter won’t get them there. To succeed, you have to push the boundaries of what’s possible. This is what we’re all about: equipping our M&E clients with innovative tools designed to be both effective and future-proof.”