Endemol Shine, Yahoo! veteran Wim Ponnet named President, EMEA

Quickplay today announced the latest stage in the expansion of its worldwide footprint with the establishment of a new office in Europe and the naming of highly-regarded media, sports and technology veteran Wim Ponnet as President, EMEA.

The new office will address heightened industry demand for cloud-native, open architecture OTT solutions. These solutions have been proven to accelerate time to market capabilities, drive cost effectiveness and optimize audience engagement and monetization. Quickplay will leverage market-specific expertise and its global talent and innovation capabilities to tailor fast, flexible, and scalable solutions that can power digital transformation success for pay-TV, telco and MVPD customers throughout the EMEA region.

“Our success with sports, media and entertainment providers across North America and APAC has spurred enormous interest in our ability to drive results for the streaming industry,” said Paul Pastor, Chief Business Office and co-founder of Quickplay. “Wim Ponnet’s skillset and track record in EMEA will spearhead a dedicated presence that will help us immediately to address a growing pipeline of inquiries from providers – all of whom are seeking the superior performance and rapid integration of AI technologies that only cloud-native, open architecture solutions can provide.”

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As chief strategy and commercial officer of Endemol Shine Group, Ponnet was responsible for P&L management of the company’s sales organization, achieving multiple consecutive years of annual growth in excess of 20%. Previously, with Yahoo!, he had been senior director, strategy and operations, EMEA and chief of staff. He most recently served as founding partner and CEO of FanTechCapital, an investment firm at the intersection of sports, media and technology. He also serves on multiple investor and advisory boards for sports, academic and business organizations.

“Every distributor and sports league I’ve worked with has articulated the need for platforms that go beyond delivery of content and instead can truly drive viewer engagement,” said Ponnet. “Quickplay’s cloud native, open architected platform is opening the door to rich fan and consumer experiences that can meet the OTT and sports industries’ strategic objectives today and can harness the business and market potential of Generative AI tomorrow.”

Quickplay’s OTT platform is designed to build and run scalable applications in the cloud using cloud-native technologies, including containers, microservices, a service mesh, APIs, and immutable infrastructure. The OTT technology stack provides significantly better performance, a modular approach for feature expansion, continuous delivery for rapid iteration, and built-in scalability, observability and security. Forward-looking OTT providers such as Allen Media Group, Canada’s Sportsnet SN NOW, India’s aha 2.0, PLDT’s Smart in the Philippines and others are using the Quickplay platform to deliver services with the flexibility and the agility of the cloud, while equaling or exceeding the reliability and high performance of broadcast.

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