Friday 28 February 2014

Futuregazing, part 3: The new commoditisation.

The Build vs Buy debate is changing again. Companies that serve the M&E Industry should take note. blog.mindrocketnow.com

February is a bit late to make predictions for the year, even if it still feels like the year has only just started. Instead, this year I thought I’d write about advances I’d like to see in the industry. These will probably arrive later than 2014, but I think they’re necessary, and sooner rather than later. In this entry, I look at a familiar debate, dressed a little differently.

Commoditising and Specialising
There won’t be more money to spend this year than last. The reality is that the economy as a whole, though growing once more, is still fragile. So money, especially Capex, needs to be carefully husbanded. This is necessitating trying to buy as “off-the-shelf” as possible. And if the solution isn’t available off-the-shelf, the larger buyers are starting to force commoditisation to make it off-the-shelf.

What is currently specialist will be tomorrow’s commodity, and tomorrow will also bring a new specialism. The infrastructure of today’s media business is often blighted from specialism: from hardware, software, even the cables in today’s head end are specialist. However, better integration is bringing “In A Box” solutions to the market. Channel IAB, OTT IAB, Post IAB are all coming soon, or already here. And best of all, it doesn’t matter where the box is, so no need to own expensive data centres, just expensive data pipes.

Big data and analytics is a new capability that media companies are starting to learn to harness. Today, you need to hire an expensive System Integrator with a specialist analytics department to build and manage your analytics solution, but this too is ripe for commoditisation. Tomorrow, you should be able to upload your feeds, and get an analytics solution back. Because the smarts aren’t in the machine that takes inputs to outputs. What needs to be kept in-house because it truly provides a market differentiator, is the understanding of which conclusions are needed by the business, and how to prove them with the data going in. Future Business Analysts need to be Data Scientists too. Commoditise what doesn’t differentiate.

The bonus feature of forcing commoditisation, is that it lowers barrier to providing a product. More vendors = more competition = higher quality and lower price (at least lower Capex, if not Opex). What’s not to like?


Well, this is the nub of the old build versus buy debate that is always going on. We can make the hoary old assumption that if you buy something, it’ll do 80% of what you want to do. So what happens with the remaining 20%? The options haven’t changed over time: you either customise the solution to do the remaining 20% (in which case you go from buy to build); or you get the organisation to do the remaining 20% (and pay the cost of getting the business to behave differently); or you forget about the last 20% (and hope that it isn’t the key to your competitive advantage). Forcing commoditisation is a way of forcing that 80% to 90%, but it doesn’t make the debate go away.



More in this series: part 2, part 4.

Friday 14 February 2014

Life after my iPad.

I broke my iPad. I'm sad. Whilst I save up for a new one, here are the reasons why I love it. blog.mindrocketnow.com

I broke my iPad. I dropped it right at its weakest point, right under the home button. The screen shattered, and the connector socket bent so I couldn’t get any power into it. And my AppleCare didn’t cover this malady; apparently it was missing a +, so didn't cover cackhandedness. So now I’m without an iPad. There, you know the whole gory story now.

What’s interesting to me, is that its enforced absence gives me a refreshed perspective on the niche the tablet occupies. I find that I can do everything I used to do on my iPad, on a different iDevice. My MacBook has the size of screen and software functionality that I need in order to browse. My iPhone has the connectivity that I need in order to entertain myself during my commute. And my Nook is a far better device to hold in one hand and immerse in a book. But the iPad does all of these in one device. My personal use case of this is reading comics: it needs a great screen, connectivity to download, portability because I like reading on the move.

However, the reverse isn’t true. The iPad can’t run all the productivity software, nor does it have the storage, so it can't replace my MacBook as my work device. I look silly holding it up to my ear, so I’d never replace my iPhone to make calls with my iPad. And you can’t hold it with one hand, nor read it in sunlight, so it won’t replace my Nook for holiday reading.

So my conclusion is that the iPad doesn’t fulfil a hitherto unknown and therefore untapped market class. Instead, the iPad skilfully combines market classes in and extraordinarily user-friendly way. That is its genius.


Sunday 9 February 2014

Futuregazing, part 2: Better Integration. And Lego.

The digital islands in the content chain are getting bigger and better, but they’re still not integrated. blog.mindrocketnow.com

February is a bit late to make predictions for the year, even if it still feels like the year has only just started. Instead, this year I thought I’d write about advances I’d like to see in the industry. These will probably arrive later than 2014, but I think they’re necessary, and sooner rather than later. Here is the next lot, in smaller bite-sized chunks this time.

Better integrated workflow
Every step of the digital content supply chain workflow appears to have its own set of rules. Wouldn’t it be nicer if the file made by the content producer was the file viewed by the consumer, with the minimum of re-formatting steps to introduce quality flaws? For example, the final cut that the director envisaged, reflecting the hours of effort in staging, lighting, editing, post (not to mention acting), was the one that got displayed on your TV set? This integrated workflow is an enabler to greater efficiency = lower Opex, and improved interoperability = greater choice.

The first technological enabler is already in place – most content systems are all-IP, or at least heading that way. The next enabler is harder, to implement media interoperability in workflows, formats, metadata. Each digital island has its own versions of each, to suit its own needs. The challenge is implementing this interoperability without losing capability.

Better integrated quality
Very much linked to the previous point is the need to improve quality through better predictability, or standardisation, throughout the content chain. Common to all the steps are need for common understanding of:
  • ·       Measuring quality, e.g. EBU Quality Check criteria
  • ·       Standardising software/ hardware architecture, e.g. RDK for STB middleware, or CCAP for cable infrastructure
  • ·       Standardising interoperability, e.g. UK Digital Production Partnership AS-11 for file-based programme delivery
  • ·       Data gathering and analytics – because information on engagement needs to be how we measure success.


Start valuing through engagement, not sales
I wrote in a previous blog entry about how the business of art ruins the art. By chasing the money, entertainment often forgets that it’s about making a connection with the viewer, it’s about engagement. This engagement will make a viewer stick with the programme, through the break bumpers and product placements. And better engagement with the ads will better sales, more effectively than just increasing the number of eyeballs.

Example: today’s Dancing on Ice on ITV contained an ad break taken over by Lego to celebrate the launch of The Lego Movie. Well-known commercials for Premier Inn, BT and Confused.com were re-made in bricks. I didn’t watch the programme, but I went to YouTube to and enjoyed the ads, after seeing it posted in Facebook. This ad break created direct engagement, which means the break was far more valuable to ITV than the other breaks even in the same programme.

Bonus feature: sharing engagement as the goal, will integrate the digital islands too, as everyone has exactly the same goal to aim for.


Integration is about predictability through standardisation. It’s about not wasting too much effort on the tin, and instead focusing on the beans inside. One of the ways that integration can be fostered is through forcing commoditisation of the parts that don’t help you differentiate. I’ll discuss this more in the next part of this post.


More in this series: part 1, part 3.