🎤 10 Uncomfortable Questions for Grigory Kuzin, Director of Medialogistika

Do you actually watch TV yourself? Or do you spend your workday talking about the future of television, only to go home and scroll through short videos on your phone?

Next question! Now I see why you titled this interview “10 Uncomfortable Questions.”

If you could go back ten years and launch Medialogistika all over again, what would you do differently? And where were you fundamentally right?

I would have launched our mediabaza.ru website much earlier so that clients could self-serve—ordering, enabling, and disabling TV channels directly through an account dashboard. It’s only in recent years that we’ve been implementing what should have been built into the foundation from day one.

Having that in place during the pandemic would have saved a massive amount of energy. When everyone transitioned to remote work, it exposed just how many tasks were still handled manually via phone calls and back-and-forth emails. Had we launched it earlier, I could be sitting back drinking tea today, watching broadcasters assemble channels in our cloud while operators activate them in a couple of clicks on the Mediabaza dashboard.

However, it’s just as important to look back at what we got right from the very beginning.

First, redundancy. We built the system with a generous margin of safety right off the bat. The finance team criticized it, asking why we were paying for two separate delivery routes. But over the past ten years, emergency situations have occurred more than once, and clients never even noticed—the backup system saved the broadcast every time. What seemed like unnecessary expenditure in year one ultimately delivered uninterrupted service.

Second, our import-substitution strategy, which was far from obvious a decade ago. In our platform architecture, we combined top foreign products with in-house developments and solutions from Russian partners, creating domestic alternatives. In recent years, this strategy protected both us and our clients.

So, I would have introduced self-service features to clients sooner. But as for redundant delivery paths and technological independence? I wouldn’t hesitate to build those in from day one all over again.

In 2017, you predicted a boom in OTT versions of TV channels. In 2020, your interview ran under the headline “During the Pandemic, 4K Proved Unnecessary.” Now you are betting on FAST. Do you truly have a pulse on where TV is heading, or are we just selectively remembering the accurate forecasts? What did you get wrong over these ten years?

I’ve made mistakes, of course. But some trends are so self-evident that the surrounding skepticism is what actually comes as a surprise. Three years ago at a pay-TV conference, my remarks about the potential of FAST were met with giggles: “Free channels in the pay-TV industry? What a joke.” Today, broadcasters betting specifically on free, ad-supported streaming with targeted ads are onboarding with Medialogistika en masse.

With other technologies, I had doubts right from the start. Take 3D channels, for instance: the need to wear special glasses is simply too inconvenient for everyday viewing. Demonstrating a technology impressively at a trade show and turning it into a seamless part of daily life are two completely different challenges.

Where I genuinely miscalculated was the speed at which small cable operators would transition to terrestrial delivery. That wasn’t just on us—it was a reflection of the broader market. I underestimated two key factors:

1. Differences in business models. An ISP launching a TV service can easily integrate terrestrial delivery into an existing network infrastructure. A pure-play cable operator, on the other hand, has operated its own satellite dish farm for years under a completely different cost structure. They still rely on satellite reception today, even though I anticipated a swift paradigm shift.
2. Market consolidation. My initial target to onboard 700 companies was based on a total addressable market of 2,000 players. However, the market consolidated rapidly: large operators absorbed smaller ones, steadily shrinking the pool of independent clients.

I overestimated both the velocity of the technology shift and the number of prospective customers. It was a valuable lesson: recognizing the advantages of a technology isn’t enough—you have to gauge the client’s actual readiness for change.

Has there ever been a time when everything worked on paper, but failed on the client’s end? Tell us about a case during Medialogistika’s expansion where you had to admit, “We didn’t see that coming.”

It happened. When we were setting up terrestrial delivery for nearly 600 TV channels to Vladivostok, we calculated the architecture, ran tests, and launched the core hub. But as soon as we connected the key operators, packet loss started occurring. Ensuring a stable video feed over fiber across such vast distances proved far more complex in practice than on paper.

Our engineers urgently developed a hybrid protection scheme. We duplicated the traffic over two separate physical routes, reconstructing a flawless stream on the receiving end in Vladivostok from the healthiest parts of both signals. We also implemented Forward Error Correction (FEC) algorithms to reconstruct lost data packets. On top of that, we deployed a monitoring suite in Vladivostok that analyzes signal quality across hundreds of parameters and relays real-time data back to our Network Operations Center in Moscow.

As a result, Far Eastern operators received an ultra-reliable feed and haven’t needed to contact us since—except to add new channels.

Are satellite delivery issues a threat to the industry, or a lucrative commercial opportunity for you? Would you advise a client to keep satellite as an independent backup, even if it means they spend less on your services?

Yes, I would advise them to keep it. I never tire of repeating this: an operator must pull its signal from multiple non-overlapping sources. Combining terrestrial and satellite infrastructure is the ideal setup. If a client needs satellite for security and peace of mind, we explicitly recommend keeping it.

Speaking of early mistakes: during our first few years, we positioned terrestrial delivery in overly aggressive opposition to satellite, building our entire marketing strategy around that rivalry. Over time, we realized that we are actually partners.

We share a single objective: uninterrupted broadcasting, especially in an era of heightened cyber threats where no single distribution medium is 100% immune. Earth and space must back each other up.

Satellite distribution outages certainly brought new clients to our door. But it would be dishonest to convince them that our cable solves every single problem under the sun. We sell reliability, and reliability demands redundancy.

You speak of partnerships with competitors. But where does partnership end and head-to-head competition for clients begin? In what situation are you willing to pass an order to another company—and when would you refuse to yield under any circumstances?

Let me give you a few examples. We pass clients to Rostelecom when it is more convenient for the operator to connect via their infrastructure. However, the client still receives Medialogistika’s service, while Rostelecom earns revenue as the last-mile partner. Everyone wins.

Another example is our collaborative project, Medialogistika 2.0. Under a single contract, the client received a signal simultaneously from two independent networks—ours and Synterra Media’s. This is a textbook case of how competitor collaboration dramatically enhances fault tolerance.

We also run joint projects with satellite providers: Medialogistika delivers the signal to the teleport, and from there it goes out to air via a satellite vessel. We complement each other.

If a joint solution delivers greater value to the client and makes financial sense for both parties, we collaborate. I don’t subscribe to the mindset of “never yield a client under any circumstances.” The priority is delivering results for the customer and generating revenue alongside our partners.

You want operators to self-provision channels and broadcasters to self-manage services. Does that mean the ideal version of Medialogistika is one where your employees are no longer needed?

I conducted a live poll at a conference once. The room was mostly packed with operators, alongside a few channel representatives. I asked: “Would you prefer broadcasters and rights holders to enable and disable TV channels on their own, or would you rather continue doing this through Medialogistika’s account managers?” The overwhelming majority voted for our managers.

I think that speaks volumes about the trust our team has earned. Provisioning or deprovisioning a channel isn’t always a purely technical transaction. Often, it involves underlying commercial or contractual friction between the broadcaster and the operator. Our employee acts as a mediator—helping both sides navigate the issue, align expectations, and find a resolution.

Clients choose Medialogistika not just for the hardware and codebase, but for the human touch. Every client has a dedicated account manager whom they find easier to call than navigating an interface, because that manager understands their unique business context and can solve non-standard problems.

That said, building this team didn’t happen overnight. During our first three years, turnover was high simply because specialists operating at the intersection of media and telecom didn’t exist in the market.

Ultimately, we cultivated our own “special forces”—engineers and account managers who are equally proficient in hardware systems, content distribution, and the nuances of partner relations.

Automation is meant to eliminate routine administrative burden. But where flexibility and a personal touch are required, automation falls short.

Your new service, Mediabaza, is yet another dashboard. Clients already manage dozens of them. Why do they need yours?

The goal is to consolidate fragmented systems into a single glass pane, eliminating the need to generate endless email threads and manually transfer files from content selection all the way to air time. Here are two typical scenarios:

• The OTT/FAST Scenario: An online cinema owner wants to launch a FAST channel dedicated to comedy movies. In the Mediabaza marketplace, they select titles, acquire digital distribution rights, upload their own catalog, and request channel assembly. From there, AI assists in building the broadcast grid, motion graphics package, and EPG data. Ultimately, the client receives a ready-to-stream playlist URL with configurable ad insertion ready for integration into their player.
• The Cable Operator Scenario: An operator selects a bundle of 200 channels in the marketplace and hits “Order.” The requests are automatically routed to the rights holders. Once commercial terms are agreed upon, the broadcasters issue digital authorization certificates in a couple of clicks.

All transactions, contracts, and channel lineups are displayed transparently in a central registry. Mediabaza cuts through the chaos and eliminates manual overhead.

You’ve been delivering TV channels from Point A to Point B for ten years. Haven’t you gotten bored?

I definitely would have if we were merely pushing raw bandwidth. From day one, my passion was building something that no one before us had managed to pull off.

When we launched Medialogistika, skeptics kept insisting, “We tried that, it doesn’t work.” But ours took off. We started with small regional broadcasters and, within a few short years, became the core content delivery vendor for all major operators nationwide.

Streaming platforms followed shortly after. For them, adopting terrestrial distribution right out of the gate was a no-brainer, avoiding long-term satellite lock-ins.

At the same time, we actively helped shape the market. For instance, we helped Match TV launch Russia’s first linear internet stream (an OTT channel)—even before Channel One did. In fact, the term “OTT channel” in its modern industry context gained traction largely through our push.

From there, clients kept bringing us new operational challenges: ad insertion, media asset storage, localization, subtitling, and metadata management. That steady stream of requests is precisely what evolved into Mediabaza.

Today, the new frontier is FAST channels. We’ve already adapted the platform to support them, so boredom hasn’t been an option over these 10 years.

Suppose that ten years from now, channel distribution becomes a commodity feature of generic cloud infrastructure, and companies stop buying it as a standalone service. How will Medialogistika generate revenue then? Are you preparing for that future, or hoping it won’t affect your business?

I actually dream of the day when all broadcasting shifts entirely into data centers. For us, that represents an opportunity to leverage the full power of MSK-IX’s core infrastructure.

Medialogistika was built inside an “operator for operators” that manages key internet exchange points. Therefore, migrating TV operations to clouds and data centers is our natural evolutionary step. MSK-IX already interconnects the country’s largest data centers housing the server racks of major media holdings, streaming services, and satellite operators.

Where will the revenue come from? From managing and servicing that virtualized environment: inter-datacenter connectivity, guaranteed delivery of heavy video streams, and, within Mediabaza, cloud-based content assembly and processing.

Even if television transforms into one giant continuous cloud, a video stream still needs to originate somewhere and reach the viewer without dropping a frame. Whether that’s a traditional linear channel, a live sports broadcast, an influencer’s livestream, or eventually a personalized AI-generated series, the cloud doesn’t eliminate the fundamental need for stream reliability and redundancy.

So ten years from now, we might use the term “TV channel” less frequently. But our brand promise—“Your Source of Confidence”—will remain unchanged.