Connected Media | IP interviews Pieter-Jan Speelmans at NAB 2022

Claire: Hi, welcome to the CMIP studio here at NAB Show 2022. My name's Claire Plaisted and I'm joined by PJ Speelmans, the CTO and co-founder of THEO Technologies. Hi, welcome!

Pieter-Jan: Yeah, good being here actually.

Claire: So, tell me a little about THEO technologies.

Pieter-Jan: So, THEO Technologies is actually known very well under our main product, which is THEOplayer. And THEOplayer is a video playback solution. It's a sweet that allows you to bring video at best possible quality, best possible user experience to any kind of platform - be it your mobile phones, your smart TVs, your set up boxes. That's actually what we're known for best, but we're launching as well now is the full THEOlive solution, which is an ultra-low latency solution, which is very, very interesting.

Claire: Okay, can you tell me how you're different than from some of your competitors?

Pieter-Jan: Yeah, if I look on the player side, the biggest differences are on the user experience side, they're on the quality side that we provide stability and support. I think especially the support part is something that's very important for us. We don't really see our customers as customers, we see them more as partners. What we want to do is, we want to remove the burden that they have of developing every day. Developing for all of these platforms is difficult and usually we're all in a market where resources are precious. We don't want our customers to have to worry about the video playback, we want them to worry about what makes most sense for their business. I think in the end, that's really what differentiates us. You see it very clearly in the customers that we have. It's usually high tier ones, operators, broadcasters, big OTT platforms. That's where we actually make the biggest difference.

Claire: Okay. What are you showing here at the show?

Pieter-Jan: So, at the show, we're showing the player. There's a lot of new cool improvements that we've done. We're actually making it even easier our customers to develop, for example, on React Native. We are presenting here the first commercial video player, which has a React Native SDK. On top of that, it's the THEOlive product that we're showcasing as well. It's actually very cool, it allows you to set up an end-to-end stream, which has less than one second of latency which is very cool, but it can do it and stream towards millions. And you can set it up. We've tested this with our HR team, our HR team can set this up in under 30 minutes.

Claire: Wow.

Pieter-Jan: Yeah. It's a very nice project. We've spent a lot of time on it. It's finally starting to pay off.

Claire: That's great. So, what do the next 12 months hold for the business?

Pieter-Jan: Yeah, in the next 12 months, we're of course expanding our player. There's a lot of very cool things which we're doing, a lot of improvements in the use cases. There's multi-view use cases we're seeing. There are a lot of very exciting things around advertisement which are coming up. And beyond that, there's a lot of work going into the THEOlive product as well. We're tackling new use cases, DRM - all of it is going to be DRM protected. And there's going to be a lot of very exciting events that we will be doing very soon. I can't explain about them yet, but it's very nice.

Claire: Well, I look forward to hearing more. Well, thank you so much for coming into the studio today.

Pieter-Jan: It was absolutely my pleasure.