HITS

By Robert Gekchyan, Founder and CEO, ANG Digital –

Before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-1400s, all literature in Europe was created by hand, largely by and for the few literate elites — meaning nobility and Roman Catholic clergy – and almost exclusively in Latin. By the most common estimates, adult literacy in Europe was below 10 percent.

The irony of the printing press — the tool that ultimately democratized learning throughout Europe — is that, for the next 20 years, it was used exclusively to mass print the same literature for the same elite, Latin-reading niche. The press remained a local German phenomenon — a nice time saver, but little more.

That is, until 1460, when Albrecht Pfister printed the first secular text in German: The Ploughman from Bohemia. Within two decades, printing presses proliferated throughout Europe, with 1,000 local presses in 110 cities producing 8 million books in the local vernacular. By 1550, the literacy doubled in Germany and tripled in both France and England.

The lesson here is that it’s often not the technology that brings about everlasting change, but how we use it. And all too frequently in the early days following invention, we’re not using it to its fullest capacity. We remain tethered to the paradigm of the pre-invention world, trying to marry new technology to old processes, infrastructure and assumptions about how customers will use it.

Media services’ stalled revolutions – The last decade has seen a number of promising, yet disruptive entertainment technologies emerge, only to fail to take hold:

— 3D was a sea change in the way we experience film at the theater (and at home). But 3D box office has been in decline since 2010, even as the number of releases continues to climb, and 3D television never got off the ground. Was it the glasses? Or was it that studios don’t produce 3D content; they produce 2D content with 3D technology? (Please let’s learn this lesson before we miss the boat on mixed reality; if ever there were a time to rethink the 90-minute linear narrative, it’s now.)

— “Second screen” technology promised to solve “distracted viewing” and viewer churn with simultaneous viewing on connected devices. By 2015, second screen was a thing of the past despite a clear path to rev- enue. Was it because audiences never bought into a synced experience? Or was it because the client could not reconcile that the division that pays for the app and the one that would collect its ad revenue operate separate P&Ls?

— Navigable Special Features have been coveted in home media since the dawn of DVD, and digital download-to-own has been a thing for nearly a decade. But still, most digital releases have no special features. Is it because digital consumers are a “movieonly” bunch? Or is it because the manual, code-based authoring and QC process is so long, so error-prone and so expensive that it’s hardly worth the trouble?

We still have time to save digital special features, but who would have thought the technology would be the easy part? That filming a narrative that fits the technology (rather than the other way around), creating an accounting work-around or scrapping the army of code readers for a visual approach to authoring and QC would be so hard?

The hidden cost of a partial solution

We are 10 years into the digital shift, and each year it has become more and more of a challenge to manage the complexity that comes with that shift. The reason is simple: our solutions to that complexity are incompatible with our legacy processes and thinking.

Take avails. The proliferation of platforms and territories has made good avails “hygiene” too complex to manage. The result is money lost, deadlines missed and agreements breached. A true solution to this problem would address the underlying issue: the human brain is not designed to synthesize information contained in a million cells of data on an Excel (or similar) spreadsheet.

There are at least a dozen vendors promoting avails solutions, most of which just will not work because they fail to fix this issue. Either the new platform is a spreadsheet of a different color with a nice new client UI (same complexity, maybe worse as you must be trained on a new system, but at least you have that pretty UI) or a fully managed service (you outsource the complexity to someone else’s humans).

We do this for most media services. Either we deploy an army of engineers to manage your spreadsheet or we put lipstick on the pig and hope you don’t notice it’s still basically a spreadsheet. This has a halting follow-on effect for the industry, as we factor that complexity and cost into whether we will even participate in a new technology. The only reason we do not have special features on every digital release right now is because our clients are waiting for us to “de-Excel” the workflow to make it cost-effective.

In fact, the human cost to maintain our outdated processes – in the form of provider cost to service, or client opportunity cost and training costs – is not only choking innovation, but preserving a high barrier to entry for many content owners. I have spoken to numerous Independent distributors over the last year who find many media services solutions to be simply uneconomic. Their avails solution is Excel by necessity, not by choice.

Lose the tether

At ANG we believe the time has come to democratize entertainment, just as Gutenberg (and especially Pfister) democratized knowledge.

To accomplish this, either we design platforms and services simple enough to fit within the limits of the human brain’s capacity to synthesize information, or we must engineer humans completely out of the avails management process.

We embrace both solutions. We believe the body of knowledge in mobile application UX design has much to teach us about presenting information in a simpler, more intuitive format. A spreadsheet is a construct, and as such can be deconstructed in a manner that suits the user. To think about it, a spreadsheet is rather ill-fitting for a visual medium like ours anyway. So, we have designed our Generat.IO web platform with this in mind.

With respect to removing fallible and expensive human labor from the avails process, we are impressed by the advances in Artificial Intelligence that have spawned an application called Robotic Process Automation (RPA), available from Infosys, Verint and others. RPA allows software to be configured to process increasingly complex tasks, including web registration, validation, communication with other web-based systems and data manipulation.

RPA can validate every line of a client’s avails, checking whether assets are in fact available at the digital retailer (or, conversely, that they have been removed as contractually required), that artwork and metadata match, and communicating inconsistencies to the retailer and raising alerts internally. Thus, the RPA boils the million-cell spreadsheet down into a handful of action items that would be impossible for the client to synthesize. The client is now more available to make more sophisticated decisions that are more central to his or her core business.

We should never let the opportunity pass to question whether our processes and thinking continue to serve us. Mixed reality experiences are just now emerging; we should be wondering what stories can be told with the benefit of this technology.

The worst thing we could possibly do is to rob ourselves of that promise by forcing the technology into a familiar narrative, just because it is what we are used to.

Similarly, our manual process media services legacy is due for a change. We should be questioning the need for each step in our workflow, and asking how we can accomplish those steps most efficiently. Deployment of RPA is a prime example of the kind of systemic change that must accompany new media technologies if they are to be truly revolutionary.

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