Author: Henry Johnson

On Episode 28 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast we were joined by Robin Kirchhoffer, the Chief Marketing Officer at Dalet. Robin gave us an inside look at the company’s evolving product offering, going from when he first joined the company to what we can expect to see from them in the future. Read on to find out more about the evolution of Dalet’s media management platforms. 

“The product has evolved a lot. When I first joined, we were much smaller, and we were just about to relaunch the OLED Galaxy, which is still being used today. When it was first launched, it was already a groundbreaking product, with a centralised media asset management and workflow solution for the media industry. That product has been growing a lot for the past six to eight years, and we have been adding a lot of functionalities. 

We’re focused on the ecosystem around the product. As the product has evolved to become a cloud product, everything around it has too. Adding other functionalities, such as transcoding media processing features, as well as more orchestration and automation capabilities for the workflow, has freed up creatives’ time. 

For news operations, we didn’t own a graphic solution back then. Now we’ve got an integrated studio automation. In 2019 we made the strategic decision to purchase a cloud-native asset management and workflow orchestration platform developed by VRLab. It’s the next generation of very light, fast and cloud-native solutions – with an analytical core as well. That has given us a new approach and accelerated our roadmap in going to larger media organisations, sports leagues and Federation teams, who are also trying to become a media organisation. They have so much amazing content around the players, and they’re creating experiences for their fans that extend what goes on in the stadium or at the games. 

There’s been big growth for us in that segment, and the Dalet Flex – the new platform – has accelerated that segment. Larger corporations or big brands are looking at breaking a business unit, and today we also have developed a next-generation user room ecosystem, which is compatible with Galaxy and Flex. That’s an ecosystem of apps to trade the news, write your scripts, and organise the work between journalists, editors and producers in your browser tab, in a very collaborative way. News stories break very fast, so we need to enable our customers to work just as quickly. 

For the past 30 years, we have always been about embracing and combining broadcast broadcast-first technologies with digital-first technology. We started our journey into cloud-first quite early by connecting little pieces of satellite products on the cloud to standard on-prem tools. Today we have taken a much broader step to the cloud. Our cloud-native media asset management and workflow orchestration solution, which is today at the core of all the solutions we provide, is the heart of our product. 

We also took the very big step of going private in 2020. That was the best way to free ourselves from the financial restrictions of being a public company and accelerate our innovation on the news side. Cloud-native applications facilitate collaboration beyond borders, and that really makes us newsroom-centric, because it used to be that you had to be on-site to be able to pick up the news to write it, but now you can do everything wherever you are. Everybody is connected. You can extend the power of the newsroom and major operations in general. 

Many of our customers have their own privacy systems in place and rely on that, and some don’t want to go fully onto the cloud because they want to have a more balanced approach. Including on-premises storage for the more valuable assets, for example, and being flexible, is extremely important. You have to be a giant in this transition, adapt, and take the steps that make everything we develop compatible for our existing customers – because that’s how we approach business. That’s why we have had customers with us for the past 10, 15, 20 or even 25 years, because we have been evolving with them. 

We’re offering practical value, not just a little standalone app on one side of the disconnected from everything else. We’ve always been about connecting things and ensuring an integrated solution for our customers. The transition is key. We want to make sure that our customers can always go at this at the pace that they want. We don’t want to force them onto a new technology, we want to make sure that they are happy with what they have from us, they can carry on with it, they can enrich it. The day they say they want to replace their asset management or workflow orchestration with a cloud-native solution, we’ll have two solutions for that at the core of our offering today.”

To hear more from Robin, tune into Episode 28 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

On Episode 19 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast we were joined by Alan McLennan, the Founder and Global Head of M&E, Industry Strategy and Partnership at the PADEM Media Group. He talked us through his fascinating career in the content and media space, as well as his experience of co-authoring a book. He also shared his perspectives on the state of the content and media industry as a whole and told us what he sees for the future of the sector. Read on to hear what he had to say. 

We’ve unfortunately tipped into a marketplace that is now in television management. That is an inherently comfortable place for most networks and studios because it’s not what it was before. It used to be about the innovation of technology and the connection to the audience. Now it’s stepped back. Streaming television is an important aspect of building an audience. But it’s television. It’s what it always has been. Now it just so happens that you get a choice of what you want to watch, with attached advertising that matches your personality, your behaviour, your information etc, which is much more engaging than it used to be. 

The old statement about 50% of my advertising goes in and 50% doesn’t isn’t true anymore, because we have these identifiable points now.  That allows us to grow into lower social economic environments, and that’s really good. But there is a certain component of this that has a separation of classes. We’re starting to realise in the industry that subscription levels have pretty much levelled off, except in new markets where there’s new subscriber bases. As more countries around the world have enough disposable income to pay for our subscriptions, we’re expanding our markets. We’re able to offer up the second year, or even third year kind of programming on a fast basis. 

What’s driving the industry globally is the ability to tap into the creators that are in this economy. When it comes to production, those creators are producing and providing some of the best programming and content that we’ve ever seen. Before, when you went to gatherings, parties, whatever, people would talk about news or politics. Now it’s ‘What series are you watching?’ That’s where the quality of our work comes in. The first run is for theatrical releases, then it’s aimed towards people who can afford a subscription based programme. We’ve taken a number of steps forward, but we’ve also taken some steps back when it comes to our audiences. By taking those steps back, it puts the industry in a more comfortable position with their business through advertising and audience reach – and that’s good – but where the opportunity comes is from new distribution platforms. 

We’ve seen some things from the cable industries – or Comcast for example, who are talking about 10G. What about 5G? Didn’t that just come out? 5G is the fifth generation of distribution, not the technology. It’s the efficiency of that which is mind boggling. It’s 100 times faster and more powerful than 4G, so how powerful is 10G going to be? That’s going to require whole new infrastructures to support the capabilities it brings, which will need new types of distribution. Things like Edge Computers, cable plants, and providers will have to be built out. That is where we’re going. 

To learn more about the future of the industry, tune into The Content & Media Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.