Category: Content & Media

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.     

Changing consumer habits have drastically impacted the TV and streaming industry for the past few years. On The Content & Media Matters Podcast we were joined by the Vice President of Strategy, Business Development & International at Sling TV, Liz Riemersma. Liz has a background in marketing and business development in a variety of sectors, and has spent the past seven years within the TV industry. These are her thoughts on the challenges currently facing the sector:

Over the past couple of years, many of the players in the industry have collectively forgotten what their DNA is. Prior to the rise of direct to consumer platforms, media companies were focused on making media, and content distribution companies were very focused on distribution, and platforms were really focused on what the end user was experiencing in terms of using their operating systems. Now we’re at a point where platforms are making content, distribution companies are making platforms, content companies are doing distribution, and some of them are dabbling in licensing platforms. It’s created a very confusing landscape. 

The reality is that all of those companies had a starting point with a financial structure that underpinned what their business was and was not. For example, we’re a distributor. We have no strength, history, or knowledge in making content. That’s a completely different cost structure and a different environment entirely. It would be pretty clear that we are not in the content business, right? We spend all of our money and effort on improving the end user experience via our technology, our distribution and the way we are reaching customers. 

If a media company comes into the space, and they say, ‘I’ve got all these investments in media and generating original content, but I’m also going to act as a distributor. I’m going to be marketing people directly. I’m going to be investing in technology and getting that pushed through to the end user.’ They’ve basically doubled their load financially. All the while they are pulling the rug out from their distributors. Your distributors are paying you $5 per sub and now you’re losing money on their platform. A lot of those decisions have been because people are seeing cord cutting coming online. There’s definitely fear around our revenue and ARPU. But, companies have underestimated the costs that are associated with moving from one business model to another. I don’t think that they were prepared to do it. Companies are loading up their business model with something that’s not necessarily their business.

Now that the incumbent media companies have all had some level of experience in going direct to direct to consumer, they understand the financial prospect of what that means. They’re going from a place where you’re free of any distribution costs with $5 per subscriber that you’re getting from your distributors to a negative $5 per consumer on their own platform. I do think that you will see a little bit more conservatism when it comes to the content they are keeping on live TV, because their money is coming from live TV. If they can’t supply that demand, they are being financially irrational.

To learn more about the state of the TV and streaming industry, tune into Episode 22 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.     

AI is nothing new now. We’ve all seen it taking over people’s posts on LinkedIn, generating blogs and featuring in a plethora of panel discussions. What’s new is the impact it’s having on the sports media industry. On Episode 21 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast we were joined by Meghna Krishna, the Chief Revenue Officer at VideoVerse, to discuss the changes that she’s seeing AI make in the sports space. 

How do you see AI changing content creation and OTT streaming moving forward?

A lot of the customers that we’re working with have created automated highlights using AI. Obviously there’s a human in the loop and there are constant feedback cycles being developed too, but there’s so much requirement in terms of content, data and analysis, and interactivity that it’s humanly impossible to meet those requirements as they grow. AI will become a big part of providing those services. I would say that anyone who’s not using AI for video analysis currently needs to catch up quickly, because it’s the only way you’ll be able to generate the volume and quality of content that your competitors are producing at the speed with which they’re doing it. 

Personalisation is another area that AI is helping us develop. I’m more interested in watching the content that appeals to me instantly – I don’t want to be scrolling through 500 pieces of content to find the one thing that I’m interested in. An individual understanding of your customers is going to be an essential part of meeting their content requirements – hence the need for AI. Advertising, merchandising, clickable ads and shoppable videos are all going to be serviced with technology and AI too. Football is not only watched in 50 countries, it’s watched across the word, and the commentary translation is being done by AI now too. AI is becoming all encompassing. It’s not just in one or two places, it’s everywhere you look.

How is AI improving the experience of sports fans across the globe?

Personalised videos and ads that I can connect with are changing how people interact with content. With personalisation comes interactivity. The NBA had this place in the Metaverse where you could actually go in and be a part of the game which was an immersive experience that you can have while sitting at home. That gives fans the opportunity to feel like they’re getting the same experience as being in a stadium. 

There have been a lot of other smaller changes, such as more people watching games on social media. 52% of the younger generation is saying they’re watching sports on social media rather than broadcasts. Because these games and highlights are being published in real time it’s easier for people to do that. If you put a layer of AI generated data and analysis over that stream it completes the experience for the user without the need for live TV. 

How does AI help with the monetization of content?

If you’re serving personalised ads, the customer is seeing what they want to see, and not something that’s irrelevant. If they’re more likely to see it, they’re more likely to interact with it and you’re more likely to get monetization out of it. With AI you can actually get the highlights to the sports fans earlier, so they’re more likely to watch it. The value of a game goes down every minute after it’s over, so if your recaps are happening in real time you can monetise it far more effectively. 

We are seeing that a lot of youth sports teams that were not anywhere online are now coming onto social media because there are viewers for them there. We’ve had a recent youth organisation that publishes their games on social media and their app, and their views go up from 25,000 to 300,000 within a matter of months, because they were able to publish highlights quickly. That is a huge monetisation opportunity right there.

Want to hear more from Meghna? Tune in to Episode 21 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.