Launched in 2016 by Marina Kalkanis and Marcus Box, M2A Media has found a place in the media technology industry by providing cloud automation and orchestration for major live events.
The company now delivers over 70,000 live events per year to over 200 territories, streaming over one billion hours of content, working with the likes of DAZN, ITV, Channel 4 and the ATP.
In September 2024, Ciaran Doran joined M2A Media as its new CEO with a vision to move the company forward via a SaaS model and drive it towards what he describes as “the leading edge” of broadcast technology.
“The cloud allows a whole range of users to employ M2A Media’s technology to deliver broadcast quality television over the internet to any number of viewers, and that’s where the world is going,” he tells TVBEurope.
“We know that the money moves where the eyeballs move and when the eyeballs move to look at content online, whether it’s on your phone, tablet or smart screen, then I’m interested in being with the company that is at the cutting edge of delivering that kind of technology.”
As CEO, Doran wants to help M2A focus on targeting the correct specialist markets, creating processes and disciplines across numerous teams to ensure the company is looking for “the right kinds” of customers. “That’s hugely important in our industry,” he states, “because in the television broadcast industry, there’s a lot of tier-one broadcasters who, want to build it themselves.
“When a company builds a platform itself, I’ve always thought, what do you do when “Fred” who built it leaves, or retires or is ill? With one of our newest customers, Fred left and they realised that they had built a reasonable system in AWS — their customers weren’t overly happy with it, but it worked. So when Fred left, they asked, are we going to go through this pain again ourselves, or should we bring the professionals in? And that’s what they’ve done. So my job at M2A is to make sure that we find the right customers who we can not only help but who want our kind of professional expertise allowing them to crack on with much more interesting projects.”
In a recent issue of TVBEurope, we asked if the broadcast industry is evolving into an IT industry, and Doran says that fundamental question has been around since the 1990s. “From my memory, the IABM said a few years ago the broadcast industry’s total revenue is less than what the IT industry spends on R&D. But the broadcast industry is important in our lives for education, entertainment, information, which I believe is the motto of the BBC, and the change that’s happening right now is being accelerated by the innovators and the inspirers who are creating new ways of getting content to our eyes. That is being resisted by some of the more traditional organisations who think they’re special and need a bespoke system.”
Doran adds that he believes these ongoing changes within the industry will have a dramatic effect over the next 5-10 years, ultimately determining which broadcasters and streaming services will survive.
Evaluating the value proposition
“At the DPP Leadership Summit in December, ITV’s CTO Simon Farnsworth explained why it’s important for the modern television broadcaster, or the modern company who wants to deliver content, to move to things like cloud technologies, to have flexibility but not be tied in the way that they were tied in the past when you went with one manufacturer’s protocols,” he explains. “At M2A, I believe our part in that is to listen to what our customers are asking for and make it happen.”
That belief has resulted in M2A launching a new SaaS model alongside its existing fixed license. “That means we can offer the customer a very flexible model. It also puts huge pressure on an organisation like us or any SaaS company to constantly make sure that we’re offering value. We constantly review our value proposition to the end customer, because the benefit of an hourly rate is that they can join at any time but they can also leave at any time. We want them to stay, of course. So to encourage them to stay we have to constantly review our value proposition.”
The move to the cloud remains a challenge for some within the broadcast industry, although it has developed from if they’ll make the move to when. This is especially true for linear broadcasters who have had to embrace streaming in order to reach audiences who are moving away from so-called ‘traditional TV’. “Now they’ve got two different streams, linear and OTT, and they need to work out how to bring this together as one broadcaster,” Doran explains. “It brings us back to the kinds of things that M2A Media is great at, helping customers move content around the world to multiple platforms”
AI and media delivery
Like everyone, M2A Media is busy looking at artificial intelligence and how it can help with processes. Doran reveals the company is currently working with two customers, one broadcast and one not, on projects considering the use of AI to alleviate bottlenecks within content delivery.
“These examples are not replacing humans, they are assisting humans to be able to do their job so that their talent as humans can be used across more channels,” he stresses. “That’s something that I think is really key because the broadcasters we’re talking to are not looking to reduce humans. They’re looking to make the talent of those humans become much more valuable to them. I’ve watched this happen in different parts of the industry over the last 10 to 15 years, where sometimes the technical people think that AI is going to replace them. No, it’s going to assist them and the broadcaster to stay alive and earn more revenue.”
Doran cites AI in media delivery as an area where M2A can “lead a charge”, particularly because the company currently specialises in moving live content (live sports or reality shows) to live broadcasters, VoD platforms and viewers around the world, or streamed directly into an archive. “That is M2A Media’s ethos. We orchestrate thousands of pieces of content direct to the consumer, live to VoD and contribution/distribution in the cloud, simplifying the Amazon AWS cloud at the moment and perhaps multi-cloud soon too,” he adds.
“When you’re delivering pop-up events, it’s not a simple case of just opening the instance and letting it broadcast. You’ve got to know the sport. You’ve got to understand how to orchestrate the AWS servers in order to deliver that event. Speed, security and simplicity of orchestration is key.”
While Doran is keen to continue working with tier-one broadcasters and streamers, his plans also include working with a much wider range of broadcasters as well as sport federations and rights owners who are currently not reaching all of their global fan bases. “There are rowers around the world who rowed at Henley Regatta, but they now live in California. There are cyclists around the world who dreamed of living in France to watch the Tour de France but don’t. So there are sports organisations, rights owners and content owners who are now eyeing the possibility of that global niche audience, more easily getting their content to that audience and monetising it. That’s what I’m getting excited about, being able to offer them a SaaS service which makes that service easy for them.”
In terms of what sets M2A Media apart from its competitors, Doran believes it’s down to the simplicity and ease of use of company’s technology. “Our tool sets, our console, which sits in the cloud, allows operators to be able to manage the movement of content without needing a deep engineering level experience to set it all up inside AWS,” he states.
“And the beauty of it is a much easier setup for orchestrating live events, so you simply sit back and let it happen. That’s what I’m looking forward to M2A doing, changing that part of the content owners’ world.”
