NAB Perspectives: Origin Digital’s Lorincz Embraces the Cloud

Origin Digital CEO Darcy Lorincz has three major goals that he hopes to bring to the sports industry: extending the company’s reach, automation services with a virtual headend, and embracing the cloud. The cloud, he says, is crucial to the company’s future success.

“We’ve embraced the cloud this year,” he explains. “No matter where you put your facilities, you’re never going to be able to get encoding and transcoding close enough to the event unless you virtualize it. So we virtualize all of our platform into the cloud. By embracing the cloud and automation together, now we can lay down capacity for live or on-demand events anywhere, because of the cloud.”

Origin Digital is extending its reach both by opening facilities of its own in new places and by connecting into digital video networks worldwide.

“The reach of our infrastructure has always been somewhat of a challenge for us,” Lorincz says. “You’ve got to be where the sport is, so, this past year, we spent a lot on making sure that we’re connected to the digital video networks. And we’ll soon have a physical footprint in Sydney, which will take us closer to where the action is.”

The new Sydney office will serve as Origin Digital’s Asia-Pacific Rim presence for the time being, and, with a clear view of the skies, that location will be able to tap into satellite feeds as well. On the fiber side, Lorincz says it’s mission accomplished when it comes to connectivity: “Now you don’t have to worry about acquisition in most regions where our customers are.

“We see sports internationally more than domestically as a business,” he continues. “It’s good for us to now be able to acquire those signals wherever those kinds of events happen. Our focus is what’s internationally interesting.”

The major goal, Lorincz explains, is to equate the experience of watching content on the Internet and mobile devices to that of linear television.

“There’s still jitter and finger-pointing between the CDNs,” he says. “I hope that goes away and it’s just like television. Putting a signal on TV should be the same as the Internet and mobile, and that consumer should get the same experience. In the next year, I think you’ll see dramatically different experiences on the second and third screens.”