Category: Content & Media

Sports broadcasting is an evolving space, with viewers demanding an increasingly wide range of options and additional content. On Episode 34 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast, we spoke with Anna Lockwood, the Head of Media & Sport at Telstra International, about the challenges she faces when creating innovative solutions to these challenges. Read on for her insights. 

How do you manage such a diverse range of sports broadcasting requirements across different markets and regions?

We have a very international team at Telstra, and we’ve got people who are across all of our different projects in support roles. We also have people who are dedicated to a specific project, who will just work on that event or that project. We scale and grow depending on what we’re doing at any one time, with new staff members, freelancers, and consultants. There’s a lot of bounce in our talent pool, but we’ve got a core set of on-staff team members who do a lot of work across the globe and across projects. We augment that core team depending on what we need for a particular project or event. 

When I started at Telstra, there were 10 people in our little media business unit, and now we have over 200. I think that underlying growth will continue, but at any given time, especially a summer like this one in 2024, when there have been so many amazing sporting events happening, we’ll bounce and grow our talent pool to accommodate the projects that we’re delivering. 

What are some challenges associated with streaming and broadcasting such live events?

We try to prepare everything that we can control, but the real magic is in reacting to things that we can’t control and completely unexpected things. There are plenty of surprises in the live sports environment. It could be technology, infrastructure, or it could be a change in programming, but being very agile is always important. 

It’s always about putting the customer first. We know that whatever happens, we will be the best partner we can be at any time, no matter what region or time zone they’re in or what event they’re doing. Having that DNA in our business to support customers during these very high-profile events has helped our services wrap around their requirements. Having the experience and razor-sharp focus helps us respond as quickly and as effectively as possible when things do go wrong. That’s what gives our customers trust in our services and is the reason they keep on coming back and working with us again and again.

How do you see the world of sports broadcasting evolving over the next five years?

I think there’ll be a lot of continuation of the trends that we’re seeing today, like remote production. Being able to produce from anywhere, no matter where the event is, is moving workflows and capabilities onto cloud platforms and distributed working models. Those are all trends which accelerated during COVID-19, and we don’t see any slowdown at the moment. 

How people experience and view sports is also always evolving. So how, as a services provider, can we use our infrastructure and technology to create the immersive and collaborative viewer experiences that our customers are exploring at the moment? That’s where I see a lot of growth and development happening. 

To hear more from Anna, tune into the rest of her episode 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.     

The talent landscape continues to change in response to new technologies and shifting company priorities. On Episode 33 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast, we spoke with Mathias Guille, the VP of Cloud Platforms at Broadpeak, about his perspectives on these changes. After an impressive global career, he’s seen the changing workforce from a different angle, giving him some great insights on the topic. Read on to find out more. 

What do you think the key talent topics that we need to address are?

Right now, what’s happening in the industry is pretty interesting because most of our customers are facing the competition of Netflix, Disney, and Amazon Prime, but we are working with traditional broadcasters. We are working with operators. We are working with people who are trying to compete with new monopolies. There’s definitely a benchmark on quality, but there is also competition around the agility and the speed of deployment. If you look at people like Netflix and Amazon Prime, they always innovate. They always bring new features to the market. And if you want to compete with that, you need to have the same speed. Our customers need vendors who can bring that agility. 

What it means for our people and those working with us is that they need to deal with the capacity for our customers’ changing plans, pivot, and truly understand their businesses. One of the characteristics I’m looking for in my team is the capacity to deal with ambiguity. If you look at a job from Apple, one of the requirements is having the capacity to deal with ambiguity, and I think that’s a benchmark for the whole industry. Your customers will change direction and priority, and it’s not your fault, but you need to adapt to it. Talent needs to be able to not necessarily understand everything but still be able to move forward and execute tasks in changing environments. 

It’s okay to fail or be wrong at some point. You can try again, and I’m sure your customer can understand that as well. However, dealing with ambiguity in our industry is incredibly important. That’s what I’m looking for right now when I come to hire people for my team. 

Have you seen hiring trends change in the last five years?

One of the things that we need to build within the team is the capacity to do continuous integration and continuous development. CICD experience was a must when we created the team, and we had to change how we developed software. Everyone is talking about DevOps, and it’s a very important term, but it’s often quite misunderstood by the industry. DevOps doesn’t mean that your developers need to do full ops. It means thinking about the operation. In our team, we have people focusing on the development of the back end or front end, but every one of them does a little bit of operation. It’s also about making sure that the thing that you develop can be automated so you have to spend less time on operation activities in the future. It can be monitored so that you can detect problems in advance and act proactively. 

In terms of skills, having experience in continuous integration and continuous development (CICD) and DevOps is important. Being able to understand hyperscalers and how they are working is also integral. At the end of the day, if you can find people to do DevOps, you’ll have a strong foundation for video streaming itself. If your people have experience running a platform on AWS and know HLS, dash, DRM, etc, you’ll be able to become the best. 

To find out more about ongoing talent topics in 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.     

With so many social and technological changes happening around the world, transformation is a key skill for any content and media company that wants to stay relevant. On Episode 32 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast we spoke with Chris Pulis, the Chief Technology Officer at Globecast, who has a huge amount of experience when it comes to leading transformation projects. Read on for his insights into the process. 

How do you know when to kick off a transformation project?

You have to be in tune with the business. I came into those early projects as someone who saw it as ‘this is something that management has made a decision about’, and I just became part of the overall plan. Later in life, as I ran businesses, I could see that there were changes happening in the business and identify which of those are different areas of the business needed to be addressed. 

I realised that if we want to stay relevant, we have to move off of antennas, because satellites are moving into terrestrial networks like the cloud. We need to start making investments and changes so that we’re not behind. To me, one of the worst things in the world is hearing about changes for the first time from a customer. Our goal is to make sure that we’re ready for that and that we’re bringing these solutions to the customers before they even know what they are. 

But, transformation efforts are difficult. Change drives anxiety, and everybody reacts a little differently to it. Some people have an easier time with it, but it bothers some people a lot. You need to be understanding of that and have a plan that keeps empathy in mind and that also includes education or training. Your plan has to enable everybody to be successful at doing this new thing. As a management team, you will be a support group for this change that’s coming. At the end of the day, it’s about people, and enabling an environment or culture that understands that it’s not going to be easy for everybody.

How do you make sure that teams and individuals are engaged in these transformation projects?

I think it’s important to be very transparent with people. In the entertainment industry, some people have a philosophy of ‘Knowledge is power, and I’m going to keep this knowledge, and I’m not going to share any of it’. I actually subscribe to the opposite philosophy, which says that the importance of power is to share it. By that I mean making sure that everybody understands what the plan is, what the goals are, and if for some reason something’s not clear, then creating an opportunity to come together and clearly define what that is. If everybody knows how things are going to evolve, there will be less anxiety. 

I use town hall meetings on a frequent basis to make sure everybody understands the plan. I take pictures of everything and I share them all the time. I want everybody to feel like they have an understanding of the process. There shouldn’t be any surprises about an ongoing transformation. 

How do you measure success within transformations?

It is a challenge. When you go into a transformation project, you need to put together a plan that says what we are supporting for the business, what we are enabling from an addressable market standpoint, and what new revenue streams we are enabling as a result of this transformation. Sometimes it’s strictly an efficiency play, because you’re moving from a technology that doesn’t scale to a technology that’s significantly scalable with a low incremental cost. You’ve got to sit down and look at the business plan. You can’t just say, ‘We have a new technology and we’re going to adopt it’, you have to think, ‘How is this AI going to enhance our customer experience?’ Figure out the business plan first before you implement the transformational exercise to make that change. 

To hear more about leading transformations, tune into Episode 32 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.     

As AI continues to develop, so does its impact on the content and media industry. To help us understand the impact this phenomenon will have on the future of work in our industry, we invited Micky Edwards, the VP of Business Development EMEA & APAC at TAG Video Systems, to speak to us on The Content & Media Matters Podcast. Read on for his insights on AI. 

What is generative AI, and how does it differ from other types of AI?

Generative AI is an artificial intelligence that can react to things in real time as they are going on. Artificial intelligence has been around for quite some time, but it’s all been pre-programmed, so it was looking at and understanding things that were already known. Generative AI is the next step up, and it’s looking at how it can bring that information together to start making different things. The fact that it can start to do contextual things like understand the context of what’s going on, and then produce some text is incredible. 

What is the impact of AI on jobs and the future of work? 

A lot of people are worried that generative AI will take jobs away, but I think it’ll allow people to go and do something different. I think it will positively impact the future of work, because it may allow people to have a better sort of work-home balance as well as do some of these more repetitive tasks that you have within the industry. These tasks that would take somebody many hours to do can now be handled by generative AI while they go and do something else, giving them more free time as well. 

The whole process that we’re going through at the moment is learning about AI’s limits and how it will help us to look at our work-life balance. It may be that you’ll end up doing more job sharing, where you’re doing part of a job, but the other part of the job is being done by a machine, which means that somebody else can come in and do something else, while that’s going on. I’m not totally convinced that it’s a bad thing. 

AI is also expanding the knowledge of what’s achievable with programming and operations, across not just our industry, but multiple industries. There’s always going to be a requirement for some things, like having a person stand behind a camera, and they have robotics and AI controlling it, but actually, a skilled operator can still get those shots that a computer system just can’t process. So yes, AI will come in and make things different, but I’m not sure it’ll be a bad difference. There will definitely be some upsides to not having humans do the repetitive jobs within the industry.

How do you see generative AI being used in the industry as a whole?

I think where we’ll see AI really coming to the forefront is in a new generation of FAST channels. So these are free to air, without subscription, ad-supported television. Broadcasters want to reach out to produce these as cheaply as possible because the only revenue they’re getting is through ad insertion. So, we can see a point where generative AI will have access to the content, and there’ll be some rules that it has to follow, but it’ll be able to take that content and be able to produce these FAST channels, and then self-manage them. It’s already doing ad selections and things like that, depending on the content type and by looking at the people that are watching it and being able to select the correct ads for them. That will help some of the broadcasters who are perhaps struggling a little bit to make any money out of FAST channels. I see that it as definitely a positive for them to be able to use generative AI to help do that. 

To hear more from Micky, tune into Episode 31 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.     

Significant advances in VR and XR have occurred in recent years. On Episode 30 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast, we were joined by Gianluca Meardi, the Co-founder and General Manager of V-Nova, to discuss how these advances will impact the industry. As this technology advances, the way we consume content will also change. Read on to find out more. 

What innovations are you most excited about seeing in VR and XR?

I’m really excited about the possibility of transforming the movie entertainment scene. I believe that what we are doing is a singularity in in movie industry, and is the most important innovation in that industry following the introduction of sound, because it’s the first time that you are able to step into a movie and move in any direction inside it. Obviously, you need XR and stereoscopic displays, but these will come a bit later as we are currently concentrating on XR headsets. But it’s really impressive because you can enter a movie and do things like circle around Kung Fu Panda or look behind Tom Cruise in a movie. You have never been able to step into a movie with that cinematic quality before. 

It’s not a video game. This is in real Hollywood quality in terms of definition, graphics, light, etc. If you consider that a single frame of Avatar, the James Cameron movie, is rendered for between one and seven hours per frame, and you have 24-48 frames per second, then this experience is impossible to do in real time with a video game engine. To have that kind of quality, we pre-render the scenes so that each frame is not a frame anymore but it’s a cube of space where you are able to move around and experience it. 

Normally, you would experience a movie on your sofa, so we are aiming to give you a shorter experience that you can be more immersed in physically. For instance, we are now producing a musical video XR where you can really experience the song together with a lot of special effects, etc. When we create a physical space for people to explore cinema in the same way, that is going to be really impressive. 

Do you think that these innovations in XR are gonna change the way that individuals consume content moving forward?

I think that we are placing together different facts. On one side, people are consuming more and more content because during the pandemic people got used to more streaming solutions etc. I think that XR and VR solutions will gain more and more importance over time because of the release of products like Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s Quest 3, with PlayStation, Samsung and Google entering the arena of VR and XR headsets in the coming months. There are a lot of different types, and I really believe that we have gotten to a moment in time where they are okay in terms of definition, and they are getting lighter and more powerful. 

We are working with Qualcomm to leverage their chip sector to perfect the experience in our technology. Our consumers always love going to see movie experiences in movie theatres, but if you try to put together that viewing habit and this new revolution in terms of VR or XR headsets, your viewers will not have the same flat experience. You need to give the audience something more than a flat view, and this cannot be done with VR 360 videos because they make you feel sick due to the lack of parallax in those experiences. 

This is what we are proposing: the first experience with cinema-like quality, where you are able to move and see whatever you should in terms of parallax geometry variation. That is not possible with other technology—you need technology like ours to move around the scene with a full parallax full of geometry variations iterated. This is the most important invention, I think, in our technology.

To find out more about the advances in VR and XR technology, tune into Episode 30 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.     

As the sports streaming industry increasingly moves from traditional broadcasting to digital streaming, there are a number of challenges that organisations across the media industry are juggling. On Episode 29 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast we spoke to Fabio Gallo, the General Manager of Europe and Asia at ViewLift, about his insights into the topic. Here’s what he said: 

What is the impact of this shift from traditional broadcasting to streaming within the sports industry? 

There is a huge transformation right now in the market. The biggest transformation is from traditional distribution, which was mainly business-to-business, to a more business-to-consumer or even direct-to-consumer model. What’s helping lots of our players there, like entertainment broadcasters and sports organisations, to transport content digitally around video streaming platforms. 

I think the big challenge for broadcasters is to not only focus on video quality or the technologies around the streaming platform. There are many things that have to be taken into consideration, from marketing to pricing or business strategies. There needs to be an understanding of the average revenue per user, how you can improve your quality of services, and how you can get better at understanding consumer behaviour. 

Offering personalised content is clearly very important. Companies like us can help those companies to make something very different from what they currently do, not just from a tech perspective but even from a strategy perspective or marketing perspective. Smaller companies or organisations probably don’t have the resources to do things alone. We help companies like that launch different solutions in different markets because every market is different. We can help companies according to the geolocation or market registration.

What are some of the challenges being faced by the sports streaming industry at the moment?

The biggest challenge in sports organisations is balancing profit and loss. There are plenty of sports organisations out there – probably 60-70% – who have yet to launch direct-to-consumer video streaming services. That is a huge market, but at the same time, they’re tiny organisations. Relaunching a service is always about the product but also how much resources the vendor will put into it. What could be the marketing strategy? How can you set up your business strategy from a pricing perspective? How you can tackle the Indian or Brazilian market versus the US, UK or Spanish market? It takes so much expertise to help organisations thrive and to succeed.

How is ViewLift leveraging new technologies to tackle these challenges?

We are talking about artificial intelligence and blockchain. Everything that we do is our own IP, so if we talk about having a very strong recommendation engine that is based on machine learning algorithms that our team created to help companies that have thousands of hours of content in their video libraries. We are working towards different projects in artificial intelligence and working closely with many partners, from cloud partners to fan engagement partners and advertising partners. 

We also like to hear a lot of feedback from clients, so we need to have conversations with our clients on a weekly or monthly basis to collect information to use as a starting point for our journey. We have a lot of roadmaps depending on geolocation, because you need to understand what the struggles are in each country. Innovation is great when it’s in Western countries, but there are many areas where good quality video streaming is more important because you have to get the basics right first. 

To find out more about the changes happening in the sports streaming sector, tune into Episode 29 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 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.     

Content delivery is a huge part of the content and media industry. On Episode 24 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast we sat down with Gautier Demond, the Vice President of Sales for Content Publishers North America at Qwilt, to talk about the different ways we can deliver content to consumers. Gautier has led a varied career across sales, engineering and architecture, giving him a range of perspectives. Read on to hear what he had to say about content delivery networks. 

Qwilt is a leader in open caching technology, which is a different way of doing CDN. Traditionally, CDNs have relied on big pops from all over the globe, that then leverage peering to get access to the eyeball network and deliver content. That has been working, but over the last few years we’ve seen bottlenecks appear either on capacity or that access to the eyeball networks. When it’s a Tuesday and you have an iOS update and Microsoft Update and the Champions League streaming at the same time, you’ll see serious congestion on the networks. That’s a problem. 

The way open caching changes that is by partnering with the ISPs and deploying caching architecture at a density and granularity never seen before inside the ISP network. We’re able to bypass those traditional bottlenecks. So why are companies allowing us to deploy within their networks? The second part is the business aspect of open caching, which is our revenue sharing model, where we share a percentage of our revenue with the ISPs that provided the deployment. 

In traditional CDNs you have three major players who are constantly bumping heads – you’ve got the content creators, the CDN and the ISPs. There’s always been tension between the CDN and the ISPs, because you send all that traffic to their network, but they’re not seeing any revenue from it to be able to invest into growing their network. Open caching allows us to share revenue with them so it benefits everyone. Instead of being in an adversarial relationship, you’re gonna be in a partnership. They’re getting engineering assistance, support, data… It allows us all to perform better. Working together allows for high density, which results in tremendous performances. It’s not rocket science. 

In the CDN world, we’re all subject to the algorithm. Over the last few years there has been a transition towards the contract side to accommodate that ability to switch traffic without incurring any financial penalties for the customer. Also, the platforms that perform the best are going to get the most traffic. The way we are judged is by our performance, which is measured on the client’s device, and that decides if your company or your relationship with the content provider is successful or not. So data is something we use daily, because we need to know what to improve and focus on. Everything is definitely data. 

To learn more about content delivery networks, tune into Episode 24 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 23 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast we spoke to Martin Sebelius, the SVP and General Manager of EMEA and LatAm at Accedo.tv, about the importance of diversity in the sector. Here’s what he had to say on the topic: 

Diversity is challenging for us. We’re not exclusively recruiting from schools that we already have recruited from, or settling for posting our job ads on the usual job boards – we’re trying to look further. Also, it’s not only where you look, it’s how you look, how you explain a position and what the company does. We probably do it in a man’s way, so we’re limiting ourselves in a very bad way. 

We need to make sure that we have a work environment that is equally inspiring and engaging for both men and women. We’re working on finding out what those parameters are, and how to improve them for the people that we already have. The big question is ‘How can we provide equal opportunities to grow as individuals and grow careers at Accedo?’. 

The benefit of improving cognitive diversity is that we do better business when more perspectives have gone into something. It’s a better outcome. Why is that? Well, if you have a team that wants to or needs to achieve something, and that team is homogenous, it’s probably easier as a project manager or leader to achieve that goal in the short term. But in the long run, yes, it’s stable, but it’s probably also stagnating. You won’t innovate without different ideas. 

Another benefit of diversity is that when you bring in different backgrounds, perspectives, views, ideas and inspirations, it stirs things up in a good way. It impacts the quality of what Accedo delivers, which is an experience. So who’s the subject of that experience? Well, that’s a diverse set of human beings. How can you pretend to bring optimal value in that setting if you don’t have diverse teams? You can’t.

 

To learn more about Martin’s work at Aceedo.tv, tune into Episode 23 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.