Post by Thierry Fautier

INSIGHTS: Synamedia Offloads Its Video Business Following the acquisition of Harmonic's video business by MediaKind in December 2025, we only had to wait six months to see the first ripple effect. Let us first review where Synamedia comes from. It all began in 2005 when Cisco acquired Scientific-Atlanta for $6.9 billion. In 2015, Cisco sold its set-top box (STB) and home broadband business to Technicolor for $600 million. In 2018, Cisco divested its Service Provider Video Software Solutions (SPVSS) business to the private equity firm Permira for a reported $1 billion. After several management changes, Julien Signès, co-founder and former CEO of Envivio, became General Manager of the Synamedia Video Networks division. In 2022, he led the acquisition of Quortex, bringing cloud-native technology and SaaS expertise into Synamedia. With both Julien Signès and Marc Baillavoine, CEO of Quortex, departing in 2025, it became increasingly clear that the Video Networks division would either be sold or merged with another industry player. Permira ultimately chose to sell the business to Lumine Groupe, another private equity firm that already owned both Wiztivi, a connected TV application provider, and Velocix, a CDN software company. The strategic rationale appears to be the creation of a broader end-to-end video platform. However, the key question remains: is this what the market is looking for? The reality is that the largest streaming companies increasingly build their technology stacks in-house. Operators, meanwhile, generally favor either best-of-breed solutions or fully managed SaaS offerings. Very few customers today are looking to purchase an entire video platform from a single vendor, which has traditionally been the strength of Synamedia's sister division to the Video Network one. The divested business, now rebranded as Quortex to emphasize its cloud and SaaS focus, will face formidable competition from industry leaders such as AWS Elemental and MediaKind (which now also owns Harmonic's VOS360 cloud video solution and the entire video business). In developed markets, most major cloud video transformation projects have already been awarded to one of these two leaders. As a result, Quortex will likely need to focus on the next wave of adopters, customers with smaller budgets, longer sales cycles, and more limited scale requirements. Of course, the Video Network group CDN will have to be merged with the Velocix one, but the most important is the AI strategy to be deployed, part of an upcoming post on the The Media League newsletter. The multi-million-dollar question stands: The scope of the Video Networks business has not changed, so what will enable Quortex to achieve greater market success as an independent company than it did under the Synamedia umbrella? David Justin Ben Keen Paul Markham Tommy Flanagan Bart Spriester Jean-Marc Racine