- TMT’s Media Ops Division charge is helping M&E organizations stay ahead of the curve and navigate ongoing changes in the business and technology landscape. Talk about where you see the M&E industry now as opposed to even a few years ago, and what services and solutions does TMT offer to help customers prepare for future growth?
Brian Kenworthy VP Media Operations – M&E organizations are under intense pressures to maximize resources and reduce costs, and they welcome any technological advancement or business process improvement that can make their operations as efficient as possible. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) gives these companies one more tool to help streamline their operational flows, and the cloud is increasingly being embraced as a “future-proofing” solution. As recently as a few years ago, the industry was still experimenting with cloud-based workflows. Now many customers are already determining which workflows to move first as they plan full transitions to the cloud. One of TMT Insights’ core capabilities is giving M&E organizations the benefit of our research and implementation expertise, offering both professional services and MediaOps support for their desired workflows.
- Innovation and digital transformation are at the top of everyone’s priority lists. However, internal resources and budgets are often shrinking while deadlines and competitive pressures increase. How can an organization maintain this balance and continue to thrive?
Brian Kenworthy VP Media Operations – Using the cloud enhances a company’s ability to experiment with new workflows and innovations without incurring many extra costs. They can spin up resources as needed and then turn them off as soon as a test or project is completed. Once experimentation is over and organizations have a clearer roadmap of what transformations they want to implement, they can seek expertise and services from organizations like TMT Insights to deploy cloud workflows effectively. This type of approach, combined with AI and automation, can keep their budgets lower compared to bringing on teams of people to execute.
- What are the challenges, and benefits, of moving a media supply chain to a cloud-based platform?
Brian Kenworthy VP Media Operations – One main challenge is finding the right expertise with a balance of media and cloud-based IT (Information Technology) workflows. Large public cloud providers are approaching some parity, so in many ways choosing a provider is less important than knowing how to seamlessly move both your media asset library and workflows without disrupting production. The far-reaching benefits support a company’s efforts to scale their operation by enabling pay-as-you-go options, redundancy, and best-in-class security. Experimentation and testing are not only cost-effective, but allow teams to try different things without buying infrastructure.
- The global demand for diverse media titles across multiple platforms in multiple formats is increasing at an accelerated rate. While that creates more business, it can also stretch production facilities almost to a breaking point, making it difficult to manage, locate, deliver — and monetize — content. What types of solutions are M&E organizations looking for that can help maximize their content workflows?
Chris McCarthy, VP Media Solutions – M&E companies facing this challenge need to understand what content they have at their disposal and in which media formats and languages, but also where there are issues or actions needed as they intake and process that content at scale for distribution. Providing overarching views into the media supply chain while highlighting critical intervention points to keep the workflow moving is a primary reason behind the development of Polaris, our operational management tool. It is meant to simplify the often-complex nature of supply chain processes for end users and help operations teams manage their day-to-day work more efficiently.
- Companies in every industry must do more with less, and M&E organizations are not exempt from this trend. Talk about how you partner with companies to evaluate and then complement their media operations business processes.
Chris McCarthy, VP Media Solutions – M&E companies are being asked to tackle complex challenges such as delivering entire content catalogs to new distribution endpoints, and also automating as many tasks as possible. It’s a delicate balance. While that requires experienced resources, many companies lack the internal resources to scale their internal technology or engineering teams. TMT launched its MediaOps division to directly address this issue. We partner with companies’ internal teams to build, configure, and onboard new media supply chain workflows or vet and implement new tooling such as AI for specific media use cases. Our team’s deep expertise in media technology enables us to deliver results quickly, allowing our customers to move faster without the need for additional internal resources.
- Looking ahead, what do you see as the challenges, and opportunities, facing the M&E industry?
Chris McCarthy, VP Media Solutions – For the foreseeable future, media companies will be challenged to effectively reach – and retain – existing and new audiences through a combination of broadcast, OTT, AVOD, SVOD, digital, licensing. Everything will all be on the table. Studios and content creators will also continue to merge and consolidate. To quickly adapt to meet ever-changing content demands and maximize new content monetization opportunities, an organization’s technology stack must be nimble and modular. Adopting cloud-based workflows is a prerequisite, but equally important is getting a good handle on metadata in all its forms (e.g., asset inventory, title and rights data, finance data). Companies with flexible, scalable architectures and robust data models will be best suited to monetize their content in a variety of ways as demand changes and new opportunities arise.