ES Broadcast has set out its strategy for the coming months, with a focus on unifying its expanding service portfolio under the broader ES Media Group vision, following the appointment of Brian Clark last month as global commercial officer.

Clark joined the business on 1 November, having most recently worked as a consultant after a senior career at NEP, where his last role was vice president of global sales. His appointment is part of the company’s intention to accelerate commercial growth while reshaping how the market understands the breadth of capability across ES Broadcast and the wider ES Media Group.

A central challenge the company is addressing is perception. While ES Broadcast remains a well-established and important brand, Clark together with ES Media Group’s founder and group chief executive Edward Saunders explain to SVG Europe that they are keen to ensure customers recognise the full range of services now delivered across the group, beyond traditional hire and resale. And it is that breadth of services that attracted Clark to the organisation.

He explains what drew him back into a full-time leadership role. He says: “I was consulting for just over a year, and I genuinely didn’t have much interest in getting back on the employment ladder until I started talking to Ed about what the future of television looks like and where ES sits in that. And there was a real vision of ‘right, let’s go for it’, but without the usual corporate finance constraints that often come with bigger organisations. We have that scale without those constraints, but we’re not that well known for everything we can do.

“You talk to people and they’ll say, ‘Oh, hire. They hire a lot of stuff. They do a lot of resale.’ And yes, that’s part of it, but that’s not all ES does. And that really fascinated me, especially when you look at the OTT and streaming side of the business.”

That streaming capability has become one of the group’s fastest-growing areas. ES provides a 24/7 managed support service for streaming platforms from its Madrid office, supporting major broadcasters and rights holders including Sportian (LaLiga), Mediaset, RTVE, Telemadrid and Atresmedia.

“We have a 24/7 managed support service streaming solution out of Madrid,” explains Saunders. “We’re the provider for Sportian (formerly LaLigaTech), Mediaset, RTVE, Telemadrid and numerous others. That’s grown massively in the last 18 months. A year ago, we were at about a million, and this year we’re at six million, so there’s a real trajectory there.”

These services are delivered through CrossMedia, ES Media Group’s system integration and OTT brand. Founded in 2018 as the OTT and streaming arm of Crosspoint, CrossMedia delivers OTT at scale, supporting around 30,000 hours of live events annually and delivering more than 850 petabytes of CDN traffic each year.

For LaLiga’s streaming platform, Sportian, CrossMedia provides encoding and packaging services for live events and replays across more than 30 sports. For RTVE Play, CrossMedia enables high-performance CDN delivery and efficient content packaging for major sporting and cultural events such as the UEFA Nations League Final, UEFA Women’s Euro, Tour de France, EuroBasket Women and Eurovision Song Contest.

While sport and live entertainment remain the core of the business, ES Media Group is extending that expertise into adjacent sectors.

“Sports and live entertainment are still our core,” says Saunders. “But we’re leveraging that experience into corporate environments and consultancy, which we’ve just launched and have already been awarded work for. We’re also working with government agencies. It’s still content and content migration, but our archiving business, combined with some AI partnerships, is about recreating, reimagining and re-monetising that content.”

And those content migration, archiving and AI-driven content monetisation are identified as key growth areas for the coming months. However, both Saunders and Clark acknowledge that the group has more work to do in communicating these capabilities.

“All of that is ES Media Group,” Saunders notes, “and people don’t always see everything that’s going on across the different divisions”. Looking ahead, the company’s leadership describes an overarching “master strategy” built on aggregation.

“You’ve got component strategies that create that master strategy,” Saunders explains. “The master strategy is the aggregation of all our services into a unified approach with our customer base. Each division then has its own strategy that feeds into that.”

Clark’s remit as Global Commercial Officer is to help connect those components across the full value chain. He explains: “My role is about leveraging the experience I’ve gained and looking at every aspect of the value chain. It’s choosing the right bets that fit for ES, improving communication between teams, and opening people’s eyes beyond engineering-level engagements to C-suite conversations, where we can really add value.”

Innovation and monetisation form a critical part of that conversation, particularly for rights holders under pressure from illegal streaming. “There’s innovation that people don’t even realise ES can do,” Clark says. “It’s about monetisation, hyper-personalisation and the cutting-edge technology that’s already been developed and deployed.”

Saunders adds that the group is actively engaging rights holders on new approaches.  “We’re starting to present a number of innovations to customers, mainly rights holders, around new monetisation strategies that help protect them against the loss of revenue from illegal streaming.”