It’s an exciting and outright historic chapter in Calgary’s transformation to the new normal.
Just as many years ago when legions of oil and gas land men huddled at kitchen tables negotiating deals and driving the heart and soul of Calgary business, contemporary and innovative Calgary business leaders like Terry Mochar are upping their game.
Mochar, CEO of Worldplay, is one of many working hard in Calgary’s technology sector as the city continues its changing business landscape while developing into a national and international IT hub.
“We are really about helping organizations distribute video and the reason we do that: if you think about how the world has changed, how people are sharing ideas, how they’re building community, how they make decisions about what they buy, a lot of that is being done by video.
“And as the world has shifted towards that, small [and] medium organizations are waking up realizing that nobody’s reading an extensive web page anymore or pages of text, especially the millennial generation. They’re taking in the 60-second video on what you do, who you are, why they should engage or talk about your product,” Mochar says.
He makes the concept sound so simple.
“Worldplay helps organizations expand, reach and engage audiences around the world using online video. We are a disruptive technology company that has revolutionized the video platform market by giving businesses affordable, white-label, enterprise tools to manage, control, distribute and monetize their video content.
“When we started Worldplay, there was a need for something very simple out of the box … give a great back end for managing content but a front end for engaging with content.
“That’s really what we’ve done. We’ve built a platform – a media company right in the box.”
The Calgary-based technology company has been chosen by Hockey Canada to power its video management system, providing (a rare) made-in-Canada solution. Worldplay’s Vidflex Enterprise platform now provides the technology to host and distribute all of Hockey Canada’s on-demand videos to players and fans across the country and around the world.
For Terry Mochar, the late-November Hockey Canada decision is a win-win situation and achievement on several levels. “It is a testament to the strength of our Canadian-made video technology. Hockey Canada’s needs are quite complex, and our video platform meets their current requirements, with the scalability to grow with their increasing video engagement across Canada.”
Is Calgary growing as an IT hub?
“The Calgary technology sector continues to grow and Worldplay is proud to contribute to the economic diversification that is occurring in a changing business landscape. However, there are also some built-in challenges to being part of the growing tech sector in Calgary and attracting top-tech talent to help companies like ours to keep pace with our rate of growth.
“Calgary is an amazing place to live, with a relatively affordable cost of living compared to Silicon Valley, Toronto or Vancouver. And, we have an exciting, innovative, growing technology sector,” he points out.
“However, Calgary continues to get overlooked in favour of other Canadian markets because the support for technology innovation is simply not strong enough yet. In order to fuel the sector’s growth, Calgary needs to strongly communicate that story to help attract talent.”
