Quickplay acquires 440 Digital

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. – Quickplay today announced a strategic expansion into media services and media asset management powered by the acquisition of 440 Digital. In conjunction with the acquisition, 440 Digital founder and longtime Walt Disney Company media services expert Robert Longwell will become Quickplay's Head of Media Services.

Longwell, who built and managed the world-class media services team that helped transition Disney to digital, is leading the integration of 440 Digital's best-in-class automation technologies into Quickplay's cloud-native OTT platform. The acquisition is designed to extend Quickplay's end-to-end Video Pipeline, Video CMS, and User Experience capabilities to the onboarding and management of content – including media workflow automation and digital mastering – that occur prior to distribution.

Leveraging 440 DIgital's automated processes, Quickplay Media Services will provide a wide variety of services, including onboarding of content providers and distributor endpoints; management of ingress and egress drop-off locations; identification, tracking, and quality control of media assets; pre-processing and enrichment; audio and video transcoding; metadata aggregation and normalization; subtitles and closed caption conversion; avails, planners and content rights management; and preparation for and delivery of media packages.

Winner of an Emmy Award for the first player to enable online viewing of full episodic content, Longwell spearheaded digital supply chain innovations that underpinned Disney's transitions to HD, accessibility services, multi-platform viewing, and more. During 17 years with Disney, Longwell specialized in designing systems and building automation to support complex content ingest and platform delivery requirements, including integrations with more than 150 SVOD, MVPD, TV Everywhere, Electronic Sell-Through (EST), and social media platforms. He is the holder of patents for streaming playback and dynamic ad insertion.

Quickplay