Envivio shares surged more than 32% in after-hours trading Thursday after the multiscreen video processing and software firm posted fourth quarter revenue growth paired with narrower losses.

Envivio swung to a fourth quarter GAAP net loss of $1.6 million (6 cents per share), versus a loss of $5.4 million (20 cents per share) in the year-ago period. Revenues were $12.7 million, up from $9 million.

"We are encouraged by our results, and by the positive business environment as we head into fiscal 2016,” Julien Signès, founder and CEO of Envivio, said in a statement. “While we have been impacted by the consolidation in the market, we are starting to see results from the increased adoption of our video processing software solutions in our customer base.”

Regarding Envivio’s top-line growth in Q4, he said three U.S. service providers contributed “significant revenue from incremental purchases,” adding that the company also received an order from an unidentified tier 1 customer for key expansions, products and services. Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which are in the process of merging, have been among the Envivio’s historic 10%-or-greater customers. Among other recent wins, Bouyges Telecom of France picked the company for multiple services, while Taiwan’s Chunghwa tapped it for its 4K trial using the bandwidth-saving HEVC codec.

"Over the last quarter we have taken a number of initiatives to reduce our expenses and are pleased to report a reduction in our losses as we drive towards profitability,” Signès added.

Envivio, which recently appointed former Time Warner Cable CTO Mike Lajoie to its board, ended Q4 with $37.8 million in cash and cash equivalents, up from $47.9 million at the end of the third quarter.

Envivio’s fourth quarter results represented an upswing in the company’s yo-yo-like financial results. Its Q3 revenues dipped sharply and losses widened as the company dealt tough economic conditions in Europe, customer consolidation in the U.S., and cautious spending on Ultra HD/4K transitions.  

Envivio shares closed at $1.54 each on Thursday, up 14 cents, or 10%. They were up 32.47% (50 cents) to $2.04 each in after-hours trading.

Mike LaJoie, the former EVP and CTO of Time Warner Cable, sure is staying busy for a retired guy.

LaJoie, who retired from TWC at the end of 2014, has been appointed to the board of directors of multiscreen video tech company Envivio. That announcement came just more than a month after LaJoie was named chairman of Guavus, the San Mateo-based Big Data analytics company.

Envivio also announced that Kevin Dillon, a general partner with Atlantic Bridge, has resigned from the board. 

Envivio makes video processing and transcoding products for multiscreen applications, including emerging 4K video services, and recently expanded its horizons with the launch of a virtual, cloud-based software-as-a-service video platform called “Nuage.” TWC is one of Envivio’s known U.S. MSO customers.

"Digitizing entertainment-quality video is a challenge that I have pursued for many years, LaJoie said in a statement. “This opportunity with Envivio will allow me to stay highly involved in that space. As the demand for quality improvements and enhanced functionality continues to expand, Envivio is well positioned to lead with innovative solutions and enhanced value creation. I am looking forward to working with the team."

"The board, management team and I wholeheartedly welcome Mike to the Board of Directors. We expect Mike to help accelerate our vision, contribute to our strategy, and deepen our relationships with cable operators and content owners, as we move aggressively into 2015," added Envivio chairman Terry D. Kramer.

When it comes to video encoding sales, the price doesn’t necessarily have to be right.

That’s one of the takeaways I got from a new customer survey conducted by TechValidate Research on behalf of encoding firm and overall multiscreen video tech specialist firm Envivio, which found that most (68%) tapped in to add support for new services, while 43% were looking to improve their video compression efficiency.

Julien Signès, Envivio’s CEO, said he wasn’t surprised by those results, as there is currently a major emphasis on video quality for video transcoding and encoding. But he admits that such evaluations require a fairly complex process, as customers use a variety of methodologies and criteria to gauge quality. “It’s more of a grey area in a way,” he said.

Following quality, product reliability is the second decision-driver. And that in itself opens up a religious debate of sorts, as some customers still prefer to use hardware-based encoding versus a more software-centric approach such as Envivio’s.

While reliability and quality has historically been one of the trade-offs of software-based encoding running on off-the-shelf hardware, Signès is convinced that the gap (and the perception of that gap) is closing rapidly.

Overall, he said product picks are coming down to “summary features,” based, for example, on the number of types of screens that a platform can support, if the system can support multiple codecs, something that continues to be important as operators and content owners start to gravitate to HEVC/H.265.

“Features are where we feel software grants you a big advantage… and is as good as a hardware solution,” Signès, but notes that “some people are still in denial.”

Still, price still factors into those decisions, right? Absolutely. And it depends on the size of the customer.

Among tier 1 providers, they tend to dictate a target price, and it’s up to the vendor to fit it. Without that, “it’s tough to be considered,” Signès said. 

While many get ready for some R&R this weekend, thousands of video industry people will be burning it on both ends in Amsterdam as the confab continues to roll on.

Here’s a looks at what else is making news there. Check out our earlier IBC news roundups here and here.

-TiVo’s shot at achieving global domination is well underway. The DVR and video software company said it’s expanding its European footprint to include sales, marketing and account management staff offices in Austria, England, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, noting that they’ll be dedicated to personalized video products – a move that happens to come on the heels of TiVo's acquisition of Digitasmiths. TiVo, which already working with Com Hem in Sweden, Ono in Spain and Virgin Media in the U.K., isn't saying how many staffers will be based at these expanded international posts, but the company employs 635 people worldwide today. So we reckon that the number we were looking for is something less than 635.

-Alcatel-Lucent said it’s working on a new architecture that will help pay TV providers store a customer’s favorite TV shows in the cloud at low cost while also maintaining compliance with content rights and copyright laws. Under U.S. rules, cloud DVRs must make a private copy for each recording request made by a given household -- horribly inefficient from a storage standpoint when compared to areas of the world that alllow multiple subscribers to stream off of the same recorded copy. Alcatel-Lucent said will be getting around this via a “virtual private copy architecture” that combines a tiered storage system with its Velocix Content Delivery Network (CDN), claiming that the approach can reduce storage costs by up to 75%. The company is developing a prototype of the architecture and expects it to be ready for trials in mid-2015, followed by commercial availability toward the end of next year.

-SeaChange International is demoing a new platform that integrates Freesat’s next-gen Freetime service with SeaChange’s multiscreen Adrenalin video backoffice platform. They’re pitching the combo, which includes a catch-up and recommendation engine,  to IPTV, satellite, cable and terrestrial operators. Freesat, a joint venture of the U.K.’s ITV and the BBC, is a subscription-free service with more than 200 channels, plus on-demand, that’s in over 1.85 million homes. 

-Envivio has shed more light on the tech partners who are tied into Nuage, its new multiscreen video platform. They include Microsoft (content protection), Adobe Primetime (video playback, authentication, DRM, and ad insertion/decisioning), Dolby (audio processing), and 1 Mainstream (automated video app platform).

-Brightcove has unveiled Brightcove Perform, a video playback system for multiscreen video that supports management APIs and its “HTML5-first” Brightcove Player. As the performance of Perform goes, the company is making the lofty claim that it can load up to 70% than competitive players, including YouTube’s. That player will also be available soon as part of the company’s flagship Video Cloud online video platform.

-Verimatrix said Swisscom has selected its Video Content Authority System (VCAS) to secure the operator’s new TV 2.0 service, which runs on an Android-powered set-top and marks Swisscom’s move away from Mediaroom, the former Microsoft IPTV platform that is now part of Ericsson. Swisscom TV 2.0 supports live TV and a seven-day replay service for 250 channels.

-EchoStar is using IBC to offer a sneak peak at a  home automation and security platform that will feature “do-it-yourself” installation and enable the control of thermostats, security cameras, door sensors, lights, doorbells and switches. EchoStar said the new product is expected to debut in “various territories” in early 2015.

-Second-screen specialist Visiware said its Sync2TV platform reaches more than 50 million users, with 500,000 of them “engaged” with several single TV shows. Visiware said it’s working with several producers and networks, including Disney, Embassy Row, Endemol, ESPN, NBC Universal, the NFL, ITV, M6, Sony, and TF1, among others.

-Harmonic has released its Polaris playout management suite of tools and integrated them with its Spectrum media server family. Harmonic also unveiled new multiscreen packaging and origination capabilities for its VOS software-based media processing platform that adds  packaging-on-the-fly and low-latency origin server capabilities that were originally developed for its ProMedia multiscreen applications. Sky Italia is one the first customers to deploy the VOS platform for its broadcast and multiscreen services.

-Speaking of Sky Italia, it has also deployed Imagine Communications’ Magellan SDN Orchestrator, a distribution system for both ASI and IP transport streams across broadcast routers and commercial IP switches that’s tied into a common software-defined network infrastructure

Multiscreen video company Envivio posted second quarter revenues of $11.5 million, about the same it posted in the year-ago quarter, and an increase from the $8.4 million in posted in the first quarter.

The company also swung to a GAAP net loss of $4.1 million (15 cents per share), widened from a loss of $2.5 million (9 cents per share) in the year-ago period.

Company CEO Julien Signes said the sequential growth validated its differentiated product strategy and that its business model is continuing to gain traction in Envivio’s target markets.

Among recent moves, Envivio hopes to generate growth from Nuage, a new virtualized, cloud-based video platform that’s designed to help the company’s partners rapidly deploy multiscreen services, and complement Envivio’s on-premise capabilities.

On Wednesday’s earnings call, Signes said Envivio, which counts Comcast and Time Warner Cable as customers, notched a win with a tier-1 operator in Latin America, and that it secured a win for Muse, its software-based transcoding product, with a tier-1 U.S. operator, with trials slated for this year ahead of anticipated deployments in 2015. He the company is also seeing “strong momentum for adoption” of the company’s 4K/Ultra HD and HEVC compression products.

Signes said the company is prepared to move ahead amid the coming loss of Ira Goldfarb, Envivio’s SVP of global sales and services, who is leaving the company later this month.

“We have invested in building our worldwide sales organization and we feel that we have very solid leadership and field teams in each of our regions and markets,” he said. “With my oversight, we are confident in the ability of our sales organization to continue to grow and drive new business opportunities as we evaluate the evolution of our sales organization.”

Looking to expand its product portfolio and revenue-making potential, Envivio has launched “Nuage,” a virtualized, cloud-based video platform that’s designed to get multiscreen video services spooled up in a matter of days.

Known mostly for multiscreen encoding, Envivio’s new software-as-a-service offering aims to significantly broaden the vendor’s capabilities and comes in response to customer demands, company president and CEO Julien Signès said, noting that the new cloud-based offer, delivered via Amazon Web Services, will complement content that Envivio serves up from private clouds.

“Some bigger operators want a hybrid solution,” Signès said. “We can run on-premises or the cloud, or both. We’ll make that transparent to the end user.”

He said Nuage also aims to ease multiscreen complexities and lower costs for partners in part because it avoids the need to separately integrate support for myriad devices, streaming standards and content protection platforms.

Nuage is designed to support both live and on-demand premium-quality video, including content that is formatted for 4K/Ultra HD.

Envivio hasn’t announced any public cloud customers yet, but there’s one unnamed “major operator”  in Europe that is already using a hybrid approach that works with Envivio at the headend and via the cloud, Signès said. Comcast and Time Warner Cable are among the vendor’s known multiscreen clients in the U.S.

Envivio’s new product set will put the company in closer competition with vendors that specialize in online video publishing, including Ooyala (being acquired by Telstra), Comcast-owned thePlatform, and, in some circumstances, Brightcove.

The company will look for Nuage to generate new growth opportunities. Envivio posted first quarter revenues of $8.4 million, up 13% from the year-ago period.  Envivio reports second quarter results on Wednesday, Sept. 3.