HITS

HITS Spring: Ooyala Founder Says Connected Supply Chains Help M&E ‘Survive and Thrive’

A connected supply chain can significantly help media & entertainment (M&E) companies overcome increasing challenges that include the need to implement new technologies while budgets continue to remain stagnant or decline, according to Ooyala CTO and founder Bel Lepe.

Innovating quickly is an important goal for M&E companies, he said May 17, speaking during a breakout session at HITS Spring: The Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit. Citing the findings of an IABM survey, he said during a session called “Survive and Thrive – The Value of the Connected Supply Chain” that the “highest priorities for a lot of these media and technology companies” include 4K Ultra High-Def (UHD) production/delivery or, lower down on the priority list, virtual reality (VR) production/delivery. Big data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) was another area that the companies polled said they had a desire to invest in.

“These are the things that they want to be focusing on,” but what you’re seeing is the adoption or their ability to actually make good” on adopting AI or leveraging AR at many organizations has been a challenge, he said, adding: “I would contend that is because of the complexity of their supply chain.”

Turning to the cloud aspect of all this, he explained: “Usually, the unit economics of cloud and the fact that you can leverage cloud in an on-demand model makes it something that’s very, very attractive – especially for certain operations around things like encoding or hard-to-predict consumption.”

But he was quick to add: “There are also quite a few inherent complexities associated with getting to [the] cloud. Most often than not, most cloud deployments are private and they’re on-prem or they’re off premise. And so, you start to have this very slow migration from private to hybrid to public. And, all of a sudden, the systems that power your production and distribution processes are spread out across that many more environments. So, this is another very major factor that is playing a role in how efficiently one can run their content supply chain.”


If budgets at M&E companies were keeping up with all this need for innovation, the challenges might not make as much of a difference, he noted. “But, of course, the point of this whole story is that this is yet another component that is making it even harder to produce quality content and to make sure that you’re creating content that connects with audiences. And so, it is the case that media and technology budgets are simply not keeping pace.”

Pointing to the findings of another study, this one by IABM and S&P Global Market Intelligence, he said 40 percent of the companies surveyed indicated their tech budgets were staying the same or even decreasing. As a result, he said, pilots produced by major broadcast TV networks have been declining over the last 10 years. So, what we have is an “increasingly complex environment and the budgets aren’t necessarily there to be able to allow media and technology companies or media companies to keep pace,” he said.

M&E companies should, therefore, turn to a connected supply chain, he said, noting it offers five major values: the ability to streamline operations, minimize costs, maximize revenue, and gain powerful insights, along with seamless integration that makes connecting current and future integrations to its flexible media platform easy.

The connected supply chain’s plug-in framework makes it easier for an organization to introduce AI and other new technologies faster and “do it in such a way that you only have to introduce it once,” he said. Metadata that is generated can then be used by content editors and others within the organization, he noted. Lepe went on to cite the advantages of Ooyala’s Flex Media Platform specifically.

HITS Spring was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH); the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and the Smart Content Council. The event was presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by Expert System, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, Ooyala, Veritone, Amazon Web Services, Avanade, Avid, IBM Security, MarkLogic, Aspera, Light Point Security, MicroStrategy, SAS, Scaeva Technologies, Western Digital, Brainstorm, Zaszou IT Consulting and Bob Gold & Associates.

To access the Ooyala presentation, click here.