With the traditional media business metamorphizing from one that’s focused primarily on content, to one that embraces technology as the foundation of their business, it’s a transformation from a media business to a “media-tech” company. Playing a starring role in the shift to mediatech is the cloud managing end to end content value chain.
Moderated by Accenture Associate Director, Media, Software & Platforms Industry Practice lead Srikanth G Rao, the panel that included Zee Network Head Enterprise IT and Content Technology Vishal Somani, Serendipity Founder Tarun Katial and Desynova Co-Founder & Partner Harish Prabhu saw an insightful discussion on how media cloud can power operational scalability along with business agility to roll out new business models and content.
Rao touched upon the major shifts that have taken place in the media industry where streaming is no longer a secondary business and media consumption habits are constantly evolving.
Laying out the context, Rao shared, “Consumers expect innovation and companies are coming together to form partnerships to enable what the consumer is looking for. Underlying the shift is media tech.” With the rapid pace of technological integration and upgradation, there has been an uptick in the need to bring various facets of entertainment business under one umbrella to ensure seamless operations.
Somani feels that today’s scenario is an unknown forest. He shared, “Everyone is trying to figure out where the convergence of various offerings is going to come from. From content creation to distribution, linear tv is going to start to look at the way they do business to the way digital OTT platforms started digitally, I think no broadcasters can look at the bimodal way of working. We can’t have separate treatments for these things. All of it has to come together with the help of technology.”
According to him In two years, technology will play a major role in reshaping the industry
content processing life cycle. “From capturing to distribution, it is getting agnostic of delivery platforms. We have to use the scalable and agile content supply chain which is agonistic of the distribution platform. I can see the large media houses moving to cloud from on-premise environments.”
Citing the Youtube growth story, Katial shares, “Broadcasters took too long to realise that the change was inevitable, Disney woke up to the reality much later than they should have. When you are competing against an established platform like with over 100 million subscribers already..The belief that tech can change the way consumers consume content came in very late. People are moving to linear broadcast and streaming from television.”
Katial has been using AI to evolve mechanisms that can pave the way for differentiated content.
To address the scarcity of varied stories and imagination, he feels that democratisation of talent is a must. He shares, “If you look at the talent, it is all overlapping it is the same people doing the same thing. The democratization of talent hasn’t happened. We decided that we wanted better quality and more imaginative writers and they get easier access to the ecosystem.”
Katial informs that their AI bot through our app is meant to enable young and budding writers to learn about writing various genres that appeal to them. “Then you have the opportunity to go back and see. You can write on the platform. You can get the serendipity score is equivalent of IMBD score post release. It is about deploying the bot for the coming in of the new writing talents.”
Shift is happening towards technology in every media house whether big or small; monetization opportunities are on the rise. Over the period of time, everyone has realised that it is not sustainable to rely on international partnerships.
This shift, informs Prabhu, is being enabled by cloud technology which is much more advantageous than people realise. He shared, “Many companies who were operating in the offline way of operations had to overnight tweak their operations and cloud technology helped them adjust faster or have little disruption in their operation.”
The session concluded with the panelists echoing that while technology will enable the shift, what will always remain at the heart of that change is the user and the way companies can engage the consumer by giving them better experiences.