By: Sunil Bhosle, Dy. Head – CMT Practice (Media & Entertainment)

Disruption and the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry go back a long way. From tapes that went burst with the onset of MP3s two decades ago, to the emergence of cord-cutters who never intend to own a television or buy a cable subscription, massive changes have been a constant theme for your business. Today, we are in the middle of another such transformation. The unprecedented growth in the demand for content across the globe presents you with wide-ranging opportunities to grow revenues and strengthen brand loyalty. At the same time, the expectations of the new-age consumer, empowered by a host of disruptive digital technologies, continue to evolve drastically.

In this direct-to-consumer (D2C) world, the conventional content delivery and distribution paradigm has undergone a massive change. Consumers, especially those who see themselves as digital natives, prefer to get their entertainment and information anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Innovative offerings and enriched user experience being provided by over-the-top content providers are fuelling this trend. Added to that, consumers can now easily access their favorite TV shows and hyper-curated content even as part of their mobile subscriptions, with telecommunication companies entering the M&E business as part of a vertical integration strategy.

As a traditional broadcaster, how do you then survive, and indeed thrive, in such an ultra-competitive environment where consumer attention is the key currency? How do you engage your audience who demand granular levels of customization and convenience, perhaps more than your content itself?

The answer lies in the same place where your challenges stem from–digitization. There is an urgent need to re-imagine the way you have been producing and delivering content, even as you look to enhance user experiences through digital platforms. You must actively consider overhauling existing business processes that were designed for the traditional TV landscape, and re-architecting for to the digital era.

In other words, you have to digitize your supply chain–the way you produce and manage content, as well as the manner in which the same is distributed across both traditional channels and D2C platforms, including OTT. However, this digitization cannot be restricted to just one end of your process. It must be a holistic exercise, incorporating the latest technologies, so that you can streamline your digital media supply chain effectively. Doing so will enable you to monetize assets better, while minimizing risks related to IP theft and customer data breach.

Here are some important pointers you need to keep in mind while you embark on this journey:

• Make sure your digitization is end to end, spanning all your production stages and partners across the value chain–right from content provision to content delivery.
• Explore multiple options for building unified digital content libraries with advanced and automated search facilities, before finalizing one that suits your organization. Include a metadata catalog to improve distribution.
• Leverage Cloud solutions to upgrade your storage capacity, and be better prepared to handle on-demand content delivery demands in a cost-effective manner.
• Invest in digital media technologies that can intelligently manage content delivery for omni-channel distribution. Monetize content repeatedly by easily repurposing the same for different platforms through an advanced digital asset management platform.
• Produce your content keeping in mind the way it will be consumed via different channels/platforms and desired user experiences. Ensure your production workflows facilitate this by switching progressively from SDI to an IP-based infrastructure.
• Evaluate your underlying business processes and see if they can be further enriched through increased adoption of automation and other relevant technologies. Look at updating, or complementing, your legacy IT systems with new cloud-based software-as-a-service setups that enable increased flexibility and scalability, while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Finally, invest in technologies that will bring you closer to your users. Use advanced customer analytics and Big Data to measure user engagement across multiple channels and platforms.

Acquiring and retaining customers will increasingly be a challenging proposition for you and your peers, as new technologies and entry of nontraditional competitors disrupt the core M&E business model. And, with growing consumerization of content being the order of the day, you will have to proactively coordinate with your supply chain partners to reduce risks of content theft and under-monetization. Adopting a judicious approach toward redesigning some of your processes and systems would be a significant enabler in that regard.