Wim Ponnet, formerly the Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer at Endemol Shine Group, has assumed the role of President for Quickplay's newly established EMEA division.
OTT technology firm Quickplay has announced its latest expansion strategy, which involves establishing a new office in Europe and appointing media, sports, and technology veteran Wim Ponnet as President of EMEA.
The new European office is set to address the surging industry demand for cloud-native, open-architecture OTT solutions. These proven solutions accelerate time-to-market capabilities, enhance cost-effectiveness, and optimise audience engagement and monetisation. Quickplay will harness its market-specific expertise and its global talent and innovation capabilities to provide fast, flexible, and scalable solutions customised to drive digital transformation success for pay-TV, telco, and MVPD customers across the EMEA region.
Speaking about the expansion, Paul Pastor, Chief Business Office and co-founder of Quickplay, said: “Our success with sports, media and entertainment providers across North America and APAC has spurred enormous interest in our ability to drive results for the streaming industry. Wim Ponnet’s skillset and track record in EMEA will spearhead a dedicated presence that will help us immediately to address a growing pipeline of inquiries from providers – all of whom are seeking the superior performance and rapid integration of AI technologies that only cloud-native, open architecture solutions can provide.”
Wim Ponnet’s previous role as the Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer of Endemol Shine Group saw him responsible for P&L management of the company’s sales organisation, achieving multiple consecutive years of annual growth exceeding 20%. His prior experience at Yahoo! included roles such as Senior Director of Strategy and Operations, EMEA, and Chief of Staff. Most recently, he served as the founding partner and CEO of FanTechCapital, an investment firm at the intersection of sports, media, and technology. He also holds positions on various investor and advisory boards for sports, academic, and business organisations.
Ponnet added: “Every distributor and sports league I’ve worked with has articulated the need for platforms that go beyond the delivery of content and instead can truly drive viewer engagement. Quickplay’s cloud-native, open-architected platform is opening the door to rich fan and consumer experiences that can meet the OTT and sports industries’ strategic objectives today and can harness the business and market potential of Generative AI tomorrow.”
Quickplay’s OTT platform is designed to create and operate scalable cloud-based applications using cloud-native technologies, including containers, microservices, a service mesh, APIs, and immutable infrastructure. This OTT technology stack offers significantly improved performance, a modular approach for feature expansion, continuous delivery for rapid iteration, and built-in scalability, observability, and security. Forward-looking OTT providers such as Allen Media Group, Canada’s Sportsnet SN NOW, India’s aha 2.0, PLDT’s Smart in the Philippines, and others have chosen the Quickplay platform to deliver services with the flexibility and agility of the cloud, while matching or exceeding the reliability and high performance of traditional broadcasting.
