Avail-TVN a leader in digital media services

As the Olympic games unfold in London, a digital media services company founded in the Flathead Valley nearly a decade ago has a key role in connecting television viewers to the games.

Avail-TVN, which has one of its main national offices in Kalispell, partnered with NBC Olympics to support the delivery of the largest volume of video-on-demand content ever provided to NBC Olympics Distribution Partners by NBC Olympics.

Avail-TVN is providing a wide array of services, including broadcast signal acquisition and file capture, C3 watermark verification, dynamic asset management and distribution of the content. In participating systems, subscribers are able to access Olympic highlights and full-event replays on demand just hours after it occurs live from London, thanks to Avail-TVN.

It’s all in a day’s work for the largest global provider of digital video services.

At Avail-TVN’s Kalispell office, tucked behind MacKenzie River Pizza off U.S. 93 South, company founder and Chief Technology Officer Mike Kazmier explains the company’s intricate technology workings in layman’s terms.

“We connect those who create the content with those who distribute the content. We put it in the right format,” he said.

The Kalispell office complex and its work force of 30 “pretty highly skilled people” — a mix of systems engineers, network engineers and software development specialists — provide research and development services, putting content into 22 different formats the company supplies to some 400 service providers so those providers can offer their customers the most current digital video services.

Avail-TVN also provides services to more than 300 content providers, including every major Hollywood studio, cable and broadcast network, as well as video-on-demand-only programmers. In addition to distribution to a vast footprint, the company offers linear origination, uplink and transcoding, video-on-demand file management and delivery – including fast-turn services for time-critical assets — and advanced advertising services in support of C-3 and Dynamic Ad Insertion.

If all this sounds high-tech, it is.

Suffice to say if you’re watching Olympic events on your smartphone using NBC’s Live Extra app, Avail-TVN had a hand in making that happen.

“We’re the connection point,” Kazmier said.

Kazmier, 37, and his wife, Charlene, a 1994 Flathead High School graduate, moved to the Flathead Valley in 1999 because this is where they wanted to raise their family. They have two sons, Brady, 11, and Collin, 12.

As an entrepreneur with a background in systems and network engineering, Kazmier had quite a track record before starting Avail Media.

He started Digital Mountain, a wireless research and development company focused on convergence, which was sold in 2002 to broadband service provider Sofast Communications.

Kazmier then served as both chief technology officer and chief executive officer of Sofast and spent four years working to integrate MPEG-4 and convergent services into the fixed wireless market.

In addition to his pioneering of convergence in the wireless arena, he led the struggling Internet service provider from heavy losses to cash-flow neutral during his tenure. Before Digital Mountain/Sofast, Kazmier was the director of network operations for Venue Tech Systems, a company that designed and deployed wireless, mobile point-of-sale systems into sporting venues, including Coors Field, First Union Arena, and Madison Square Garden.

He founded Auroras Entertainment in late 2003. It started in his Whitefish home and was built “virtually” through 2004. After nine months in Whitefish, Kazmier moved the office to Ashley Square in Kalispell in early 2005.

In 2006, Auroras merged with two other companies to form Avail Media. Those companies were a competitor, Broadstream Communications based in Bellevue, Wash., and Syndetik, a newly formed holding company formed by Ramu Potarazu, Avail-TVN’s current chief executive officer, and Jon Romm, Avail’s current chief operating officer.

In 2007 Avail acquired View Now, a small On Demand content distributor from Kasenna, and in 2009 the company acquired TVN Entertainment.

Avail-TVN’s headquarters are in Reston, Va., and in addition to the Kalispell office the company has a main data and distribution center in Burbank, Calif. The company now employs 400 people worldwide.

Kazmier, an Evergreen, Colo., native, laughs as he remembers his father admonishing him as a teenager.

“He told me, ‘If you’d spend as much time on books as you do on the computer, you’d make something of yourself,’” he recalled.

As chief technology officer of Avail-TVN, Kazmier is responsible for the overall technical strategy and architecture of the company’s digital media services, including research and development as well as corporate information security.

“It’s been a real-life MBA for me, learning along the way,” he said.

Kazmier learned early on to surround himself with talented employees and said he’s “adamant” about paying competitive wages and offering a work environment that’s conducive to productivity. A ping-pong table near the cubicles stacked with computer monitors that rival a NASA control center lets employees take breaks as they need to.

While Avail-TVN dominates the digital video services arena in North America — it provides 98 percent of those services — the company also is expanding globally.

In May the company announced that The Carlyle Group, a global alternative asset manager, will lead $100 million of new investment funding, enabling Avail-TVN to acquire United Kingdom-based On Demand Group, a provider of video-on-demand services to some of the biggest television brands outside of the United States.

Carlyle joins existing Avail-TVN investors and is the company’s largest investor, according to a press release about the financing.

“It’s a leaping point forward,” Kazmier said, explaining that the international marketplace for digital video services is more fragmented than in the U.S. “It gave us a great immediate acquisition.”

Avail-TVN will use the investment to fund international expansion and the development of new products and services for the company’s global client base of content providers and multichannel video service providers.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.