Reflecting On 2022. A Letter From Red Bee Media’s CEO

By Steve Nylund,
Chief Executive Officer, Red Bee Media

As the year is coming to an end, I want to share some of our most significant achievements in 2022 and reflect upon the upcoming year.

We enjoyed being back at industry events and fairs to present our business; we participated in many industry panel discussions, talking about topics including managed services, OTT, FAST, Access services and sustainability, to name just a few. Most importantly, we appreciated the opportunity to reengage with our customers and partners face-to-face after such a long time. 

Our Red Bee Pulse offering supported the launches of a wide range of global streaming services, including Newyonder, Sustainable Film Streamer,Together TV, UK’s first social purpose streaming service, and Nordisk Film‘s new streaming service, Nordisk Film+. We also proudly added a FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV) offering to our services portfolio.

We were selected by Utopia Music, the music fintech, to help bring greater efficiency to royalties collection for the use of music on TV and radio. In addition, BT Sport went live with our fully automated subtitling service, ARC (Automatic Real-time Captioning),to significantly increase the amount of subtitled sports content it provides viewers, making its programming even more accessible.
 

Throughout the year, we also had the privilege to support some of the world’s most important sporting events, delivering the highest quality viewing experiences. Events included the FIFA World Cup, UEFA Women’s European Football Championships, Women’s Rugby Union World Cup, the full set of Rugby League (Men’s, Women’s and Wheelchair) World Cups, the Winter Olympics in Beijing and many more. We also stepped up at times of national importance, such as the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

We also completed two major migrations in our business:  one onto our software-defined, hybrid cloud, Managed Playout Platform; and the full migration of all customers onto our primary Content Discovery platform, CDMMP. These migrations are major milestones for Red Bee as they mean we can now shut down legacy arrangements and push ahead with our business development plans.

This was achieved at a time when global events were causing significant economic uncertainty and testing the skills, ingenuity and resilience of our teams. At these times, teamwork, close collaboration with partners, and helping customers strengthen their own resilience are more important than ever.

Thank you for your partnership in creating new opportunities during the five years I lead the company as CEO. Red Bee has already embarked on the next phase of its evolution, and I look forward to observing it accelerate forward with a new leader next year.

As you approach the New Year and prepare for 2023, please take a look at our Vision Paper, discussing the benefits of Media Services partnerships, including operating at scale, gaining flexibility, cost predictability and risk reduction. Do not gamble on an uncertain future, reduce risks and create the cost certainty needed to fuel your company’s innovation and growth by working with Red Bee.

Now we look forward to another year with new potential and opportunities for evolving our industry and delivering more amazing media experiences to audiences around the globe.

The entire Red Bee team wishes you a joyous festive season and a Happy New Year!