QuickPlay Media Takes Over Network Control Center from Qualcomm’s Flo TV

[Clarification 11/5/11, 11:10 am. See below.] Toronto’s QuickPlay Media says its goal is to stream video to any IP-connected device on behalf of any media network or wireless carrier.

To accomplish this, the Canadian startup founded almost eight years ago has raised about $42 million in venture capital, and established several offices in the United States and London for its 150 employees. More importantly, though, QuickPlay also acquired the data and network operations center that Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) built for in a San Diego office park for its independently operated Flo TV subsidiary.

“This is probably the best facility in the world for delivering video content,” says QuickPlay CEO Wayne Purboo, who opened the network center to journalists and wireless industry analysts in mid-October. The network operations center, or NOC, looks like NASA’s mission control, only darker. Rows of computer-equipped desktops face a wall with more than two dozen 50-inch TV monitors. A data center on the other side of the wall has more than 300 terabytes of storage capacity.

QuickPlay is using the 30,000-square-foot control center, which includes a nearby satellite dish farm, to manage the satellite-based feed and Internet Protocol (IP)-based distribution of both live and on-demand content for customers like AT&T, T-Mobile, Sirius XM Radio, Motorola Mobility, Research in Motion, and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Wayne Purboo

“We’re still in significant growth mode,” says Purboo, who closed the purchase in July. “We are building a cloud-based, IP video head-end to manage and support video delivered across multiple devices,” Purboo says. Flo TV never became a profitable business for Qualcomm, but Purboo says, “We believe there are significant cost savings to delivering video over IP.” With Qualcomm’s NOC, Purboo says QuickPlay can provide its premium-quality infrastructure to media companies at a lower cost than they might face if they tried to build their own network.

QuickPlay is growing fast to ride the growing wave on Internet streaming video. The company’s revenue has grown by 360 percent from 2005 to 2010, enough for QuickPlay to be named to Deloitte’s list of the 500 fastest growing companies in North America. The network ops center in San Diego, though, is key to everything that QuickPlay is pulling together for the next generation of Internet-connected devices.

Purboo won’t say how much QuickPlay paid for

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.