Letter from Expert - Media & Entertainment

The media & entertainment industry has seen quite turbulence over the past few years. There were several stimulations of change, and the M&E companies took on these challenges one at a time, responding to the pandemic repercussions and geopolitical conflicts, to name a few.

Looking from a distance, one thing that has changed dramatically is the adoption of the latest digital solutions, tools, and technologies. While the M&E sector has always been innovative in bringing out content to its consumers, the pandemic forced them to re-strategize the way they function. Other industries like Retail, Hospitality, and Travel and tourism, which leveraged M&E contributed to the challenge.

Most of the players witnessed a drop in businesses in the initial phases of the lockdown and their operational expenses soared, forcing them to take tough decisions on continuity. However, the early adopters of cloud who were already on their journey to digitize were able to negotiate this challenge and responded positively.

I think the media and entertainment companies must invest in building their foundation with building blocks that give more agility. To compete with their peers and gain commercial prominence, they should look at solutions adopting microservices-based architecture that can scale horizontally and vertically. A good strategy may include faster time to market, switching from CAPEX to OPEX model, and adopting SaaS-based solutions while ensuring a robust security environment where they operate.

Let’s take a closer view here. Technology today allows Content creators to share/upload content to a cloud-based storage system with ultimate ease. It can be done using any handheld device connected over the internet with a simple web interactive platform, thus eliminating the entire time spent on logistics. Then unfolds the actual power of the cloud. The content gets ingested, transcoded & edited all managed by cloud-native services or a SaaS-based product on the cloud, and viola, you have your content ready to be published/syndicated to various live streams over a distributed CDN.

As a Media service provider, if you are the first to get high-quality content On-Demand available for consumers, irrespective of the genre, the stickiness quotient increases. Technology plays a major role while increasing operational efficiency allowing M&E companies to focus more on what they should do – ‘create awesome content.’

And it is no surprise that the M&E industry is witnessing a massive adoption of next-generation technologies, indispensable for providers across different channels, such as OTT platforms, broadcasting, online gaming, and so on. It helps M&E companies deliver data security, enhanced experiences, and personalized content discovery & distribution. What’s more? The foray of the metaverse is changing how we create, assemble, share, and consume content.

Focusing on customer lifetime value (CLV) and embracing dynamism is critical for M&E companies to increase profitability and generate revenue. Measuring CLV will also reduce the dependency on gut feeling in making strategic decisions, ebbing customer churn and attrition in return. Cloud infrastructure investments have spurred as business leaders look to establish a digitally competent ecosystem. To remain at the forefront of competition, companies must create and maintain a collaborative environment coupled with a perfect balance of cloud skillsets.

Long story short, M&E companies must rethink their business models, considering consumer demand shifts, content production, and distribution. Technology will keep democratizing the media and entertainment landscape. Nowadays, a common yet unavoidable insight is that content is of the people, by the people, and for the people. Capturing the data between these paradigms helps understand what the consumers like and don’t like. Finally, it allows companies to deliver services that give consumers more choice and power.