Rowan Brunger, Amino

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Set top boxes have long been looked at, theoretically at least, as single-purpose devices that would do nicely as digital signage media players, but it's fair to say a lot of software company developer and support teams have painful memories of trying to use consumer devices from China as Android-based players. They weren't reliable in terms of performance, or even in terms of what showed up from shipment to shipment. So what if a company that was expressly in the business of commercial-grade set top boxes for the pay TV and cable markets got into digital signage? That's the deal with a UK company called Amino, which now has two lines of business - pay TV and pro AV applications like digital signage. These are devices that are engineered to last for five or six years, and in a lot of cases, they are happily ticking away for a decade and longer. High reliability and remote management are inherent in the product design, so meeting that common pro AV demand was largely automatic. I had a good chat with Rowan Brunger, Amino's UK-based Sales Director, about the hardware, how the company goes to market, and what's involved if software companies and solutions providers want to add Amino devices as a hardware option. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Rowan, thank you for joining me. I bumped into you last year and basically said, what do you guys do? Cause I'd never heard of you and we'd intended to do a podcast and finally got around to it. So for those people who don't know the company, what are you all about?  Rowan Brunger: Thanks, David. Thanks for having me on. So yeah, great to be here. We are a company called Amino and we've been around for about 25 years. So we have two sides to our business. Primarily, we've been a set top box manufacturer within the pay TV world and in the last few years, we've made a move to expand our enterprise TV and digital signage side of the business which is rapidly growing some momentum in terms of those 25 years we've been around, we've probably got 25 million devices in circulation and we've got quite a compelling device management system that we've tweaked from our experience in the pay TV world brought over to the pro AV arena for managing the states of media devices.  David: So when you say pay TV, you basically in the context of what North Americans would understand that basically means cable TV.   Rowan Brunger: Yeah, cable TV. So tier one, tier two, satellite providers where we would typically either have an Amino box or we'd OEM a box for the actual operator. So we're used to selling in big numbers to operators and what really differentiated us in that market which we're using in this one is the remote device management. So as you can imagine, if we're sending hundreds of thousands of boxes out, we want it to be relatively zero touch from the consumer's environment. We want them to plug the cables in and we do the rest remotely. So that's really what spawn orchestrate products, which is our device management platform that we've tweaked and made more applicable to the pro IV market to manage our media players. David: When you opened up the digital signage/enterprise TV market, was that based on inbound requests, Hey, we would really like to use a set top box. Do you support this market or there may be multiple answers but I'm curious if you kind of looked at where linear TV or cable TV was going, given streaming and the way that was bubbling up and realized, okay, we needed to, we need to open up a new market.  Rowan Brunger: I guess a combination of the various different scenarios you've given there. I mean, it's key to say we've always had a foot within the digital signage and enterprise video world. There's amino products that have been out there for sort of 10 years plus. I guess one of the main alliances partners we had in the past was Triple Play. So we manufactured a lo