“Our European success validated the maturity and scalability of our technology”
Founded in Helsinki in 2009, Amino (formerly Booxmedia) provides a full suite of cloud-TV technology “as a service”, enabling broadcasters, content owners’ mobile and multi-play operators to launch end-to-end TV services. The solution encompasses media capture, encoding, transcoding, storage and delivery and provides ready-to-deploy award-winning “TV as an App” for iOS, Android, Windows mobile devices as well as browser interfaces and smart-TV widgets.
From start up to scale up
In the early days of the company’s existence, Amino provided its own consumer service in its home market, Finland. Soon, one of the largest and most innovative service providers of the Nordics showed interest in the technology. Amino started up a collaboration with this carrier, enabling them to launch TV everywhere services by using Amino’s off the shelf cloud platform.
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To conquer Europe
Copying this success to service providers in other European countries seemed a logical next step to Amino’s CEO Jukka Sintonen. Sintonen: “We were looking to conquer Europe, but were newcomers in the field of international business at that time. Coincidentally, we met with a business acquaintance who recommended to speak to Aexus. Their business model, approach and focus areas matched very nicely with our strategic plans. Aexus’ commercial model was the dealmaker. Being a small company, we could not afford to spend high costs on hiring staff or opening a local office. Having our own team of dedicated people was an idea we put to bed quite early.
“The agency approach that Aexus proposed suited us very well. Also, Aexus proved to have good contacts to the relevant players in the key segments and had developed a successful methodology for penetrating these accounts.”
Local presence
“And obviously, the fact that they had a local presence, spoke the languages and were able to build and extend personal relationships with the main stakeholders and find out the real customer concerns was very useful too. Together with Aexus, we decided to focus in on the Benelux and Germany first”, Sintonen continues. “Aexus took responsibility for the initial prospect screening and qualification, but also for all logistics. We brought our executives in for well-qualified strategic customer meetings;
“Aexus acted as the liason officers in the meetings, managed the account relationships and helped us bring projects to closure.”
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Initial success
“During the first roadshow we carried out together, we met with a variety of leading media companies in the Benelux and Germany, one of which became a major reference for us. Following that initial success, we signed up several other accounts together in the area. The fact that we had been able to establish a strong customer base including well-known names and brands in a number of European countries validated the maturity and scalability of our technology. As a result, we were able to establish a strategic partnership with a globally operating technology company specializing in the development and delivery of IPTV/OTT solutions.”