A company you’ve never heard of wants to develop a streaming dongle business

Synamedia’s Senza is the dumbest streaming device I’ve ever used. It only costs about $10, and the hardware alone can’t do much more than load a video stream from a bare-bones menu system.

But that’s the point. Synamedia, which primarily provides content protection and other services to broadcast providers, is trying to rethink the broadcast box by moving everything smart to the cloud. With a nod to cloud gaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now, and Xbox Cloud Gaming, Senza’s entire interface is rendered on remote servers, then streamed to a small, low-power box. This allows Senza to do things that would otherwise require more expensive hardware, such as brilliant animations and split-screen channel views.

It’s not something you’ll be able to buy, though. Synamedia offers Senza to Internet providers, TV providers, and media companies that want to run their own broadcast platforms. By allowing more players to enter the business with little upfront cost, Synamedia hopes to improve the business model for streaming devices.

“What we want to do, to some degree, is use this as an opportunity to see if we can democratize access to TV again,” said Nick Thexton, Synamedia’s senior vice president of media cloud services.

Proof of concept

Synamedia sent over a prototype to show how the Senza would work, although its capabilities are pretty basic. I can navigate through a bunch of menu panels, watch a handful of streaming services, and watch a few demos, and that’s about it.

For a $10 device, it’s more efficient and less expensive than you’d expect. Amazing animation kicks in while scrolling through the menu tiles, and a demo of Disney’s poster art The Little Mermaid art expands to 3D when selected, but animation is also slow and prone to stuttering.

The most impressive demo includes a multiview setup from a set of sample videos, with the ability to play up to four videos at once. Multiview is tricky to render on traditional streaming devices because of the computing power required. Streaming services that support multi-viewing may limit you to powerful devices like Apple TV 4K (as FuboTV does), or process certain video combinations on their servers as YouTube TV does, thus limiting which channels you can pair together.

By offering the entire interface to the cloud, Senza could theoretically make multi-viewing more accessible. The same goes for other interactive features such as karaoke or e-commerce integration.

“We’re trying to give people a different set of experiences, not just plain old TV, but actually giving the opportunity to grow a variety of things,” Thexton said.

Pay as you go

TV providers already have other ways to distribute their services on their branded hardware. DirecTV, for example, uses Google’s Android TV platform in its Internet-based boxes, and TiVo offers a customized version of its Android TV streaming dongle to broadband providers like Astound. At retail, that same TiVo dongle costs only about $25—not much more than what Synamedia is asking before cloud computing fees.

But Synamedia’s business model is different from most streaming platforms. Instead of taking a share of revenue from ads or subscriptions, it will charge video providers for cloud computing services, with some Synamedia profits built in. Thexton says providers only pay for the time viewers spend browsing the interface—a few dollars a month—rather than watching the video.

That means TV providers will incur ongoing costs just to keep the devices running, but Thexton says they get value in return. They won’t have to share the revenue they generate, worry about device maintenance or security patches, or compete with platform providers like Google for real estate on the home screen.

“You don’t need to ask for our permission to be the first application on this platform,” he said. “There is no Google, no search, no one between us and you.”

Partners needed

Launching a new streaming platform isn’t easy, however, and Synamedia doesn’t come out of the gate with a wide range of partners.

The biggest of which is BeIN, the Qatar-based sports channel owner. SuperCloud, a Fort Lauderdale-based MVNO, also plans to use Senza to deliver a live TV package to its 5G home internet subscribers. Other partners include Barvanna, which offers trivia and other content on bar and restaurant televisions, and OTtera, a white-label distributor of ad-supported broadcast channels. Synamedia wants to offer a large selection of third-party apps for its devices, and it showed Pluto TV in the image I received, but I’m told that was for demo purposes.

Lena Wasikowski, Synamedia’s head of content, says that because Senza’s applications are based on HTML5, supporting the platform requires only “minimal technical integration,” but the company is still talking to various streaming video services.

“They really wanted to see this was a publicly launched service before they finalized the technical integration, but that will come more as we launch with different TV operators,” he said.

There is, perhaps, the most important challenge: Most people are very happy to buy their own streaming devices or use any software built into their smart TVs. And even in cases where people might accept a streaming device from their TV provider, big players like Comcast and Spectrum already have their own products.

All of this is to say that Senza won’t be taking over your living room anytime soon, but the idea of ​​using cloud computing on streaming devices is worth considering regardless. Most people already buy the cheapest live streaming hardware they can; maybe it’s a way to bring about a better feeling going forward.