Press Release from Salvatore T. Di Muccio
The Playroom, Australia’s largest independent end-to-end facilitator for the broadcast and digital media industries has celebrated its tenth birthday.
The company hired its first employee in July 2002 and launched in September of the same year in Artarmon playing out three Movie Network Channels (Movie 1, Movie Extra and Movie Greats) to the Optus and Foxtel platforms.
The following year saw The Playroom North Ryde launch playing out Ovation, Odyssey, Sky News and ACC channels and managing production, studio, audio suites, online, offline and graphics services for MTV, with MTV’s NZ channel joining the fold and being played out in 2006.
2007 saw a major move with The Playroom relocating to its current Yurong Street HQ along with MTV and undertaking a major building refit which included installing The Playroom Equipment Centre and Library.
More clients and staff followed with The Movie Network Channels signing a multi-year contract in 2008, the same year current MD Tom Kennedy joined the company.
In 2009 The Playroom built a new Apple FCP production environment for Qantas, launched the revolutionary new Playroom Digital Media Hub and added Starpics, FMC and Movie One HD to the growing number of channels it managed and plays out.
2010 saw the launch of Foxtel downloads, the commencement of its i-Tunes encoding aggregation service and the major launch of National Geographic channels being played out by The Playroom.
With the company launching the Wiggles IPTV service in 2011 and its playout of the FX channel in 2012, MD Tom Kennedy had much to reflect on when asked about The Playroom’s decade in business.
Kennedy said, “The Playroom has moved from a simple playout facility to a fully fledged multi-platform digital media hub. It’s wonderful to see the vision we’ve had for The Playroom realised in this way. We see our business doubling in the next five years in traditional and non-linear playout services including VOD (Video on Demand), TVOD (Transaction Video on Demand), SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) and AVOD (Advertising Driven Video on Demand). We are also growing our business in the creation and development of Apps to help relate audiences to a multi-screen environment. Our growth very much matches the market’s growth, particularly in the areas of OTT, On Demand and Direct to Consumer content consumption and we very much look forward to the next 10 years of innovation in our field to service these areas.”