To build or buy, is that really the question: Cost savings
This blog was written by Hamish Muiry, Head of Sales.
A Fresh Start in The Cloud
In cloud parlance, one of the infrastructure provider’s key value propositions is ‘time to value’, i.e. reducing the time that you get something good for your money. More commonly, referred to as ‘speed to market’. Undoubtedly, this can yield competitive advantage over rival OTT platforms assuming the sports rights mix is generally similar in attraction to the consumer. Be first, be the best, or be the cheapest. In stifling economic times you need to be the best and the cheapest, the value play quickly gets lost. Speed to market therefore, can be interpreted in a couple of ways; 1. how quickly a service can be made available end to end for direct to consumer streaming from nothing. And, 2. how quickly an individual event can be made available to the viewer at short notice.
On the first point If broadcasters have all the time, budget, and resources ahead of major events you can see why it’s tempting to build an event orchestration platform in-house. For those selling into large broadcast orgs, national broadcasters are the best example of this. Funded by the taxpayer, there’s loads of money for projects and a great logo on a CV to attract some of the best technical talent. They will also say that “our business is unique” or “we have very specific challenges”. That’s probably true, as the longer the broadcaster has existed it’s had to pick up workflow quirks and idiosyncrasies. There’s likely a lot of legacy tech debt that needs to be unpicked or integrated with. There may be projects significantly down the road, or overdue, or even entrenched where cutting losses might seriously dent the egos attached, so delivery teams will plough on to the finish line, even if the race has stopped. I would argue that is exactly why a fresh start transformation is required. The cloud enables services with a set of partners following best practice in architecture and security in the cloud can, in months, deliver minimum viable product workflows that can run either lower tier content or provide resilience or disaster recovery for top tier sporting events. Pivoting and finding a new direction based on new tools and approaches is surely part of grown up management and strategy.
On the second point, there’s often not so much notice for the technical rights teams to work with if they need to build to accommodate the distribution of a particularly valuable property or add infrastructure resiliency to support a higher level of concurrent event streams. Further, what if uptime reliability has been an issue? This can particularly affect a distributor’s brand reputation and can incur significant fines from rights owners or regulatory bodies, if a more resilient architecture is required. For both these reasons, having third video pipeline SAAS services, which are readily available to deliver high quality and high resiliency distribution to large audiences off the shelf, can be a great option for short notice.
“There’s no loyalty in SAAS!”
Yet the temptation to build remains strong. So the decision needs to be taken at the highest levels of the broadcaster, and indeed become a culture. After all, it’s those individuals steering the ship that are answerable to shareholders, investors, governments.
Financially involved parties will be keen to see a return on their investment early, or at least see that it is tracking in the right direction. Being able to show early progress with increasing revenue helps to manage pressure on top executives and results in a positive and more dynamic working culture. Lower down the ranks, being able to demonstrate an uptake in subscriptions early is fantastic for the morale of those working on services. This will help talent retention and domain knowledge within the organization.
Shipping to market quickly provides immediate feedback which either reinforces or informs the business model. The beauty of leveraging cloud and a partner product is the ability to get to market and fail fast, or better yet, fail forward. The beauty of this is being nimble enough to optimize without taking on financial risk and you have the ability to replace the partner/s that are not delivering. It’s a buyer’s market right now and the competition between overlapping software providers is providing a great opportunity for broadcasters to experiment with the partners that don’t make the grade. I recently heard the expression “there is no loyalty in SAAS”. Whilst chivalry may be dead, you can see the benefits for the industry of technical innovation through competition.
Don’t reinvent the wheel.
With buyers spoilt for choice, it is understandably very confusing for them to understand the differences between product and services offerings. At M2A, we have an orchestration platform for the AWS Media Services. Now, many other providers do as well. Others have orchestration across multi-cloud and hybrid. Some major in CMS with a minor in live video, others focus entirely on the live video automation. It is a spectrum of choice and it can be hard to understand where collaborative points between vendors may be. That said, first principles of doing what is right by the customer allows vendors to come together to find the most optimum solutions for the problem. Setting aside pure commercial motives.
Live video pipeline orchestration is now largely commoditised. We have the wheel. It needs to be bolted on to the rest of the car and that’s where engineering teams can add value in working with APIs to integrate scheduling systems and CMS, etc. Yet, the temptation to reinvent the wheel from scratch remains strong. The winners in this space will be the players that can distinguish themselves from their OTT competition, around quality of rights, user experience and personalisation, fan engagement and augmented streams. Engineering effort should focus on the value add rather than on replicating commoditised yet finely tuned video pipeline automation.
