Next Generation
Technology Delivery
How broadcast and media can shift
to multi-speed technology delivery
to compete with digital natives
2 | Next Generation Technology Delivery
Survival of the technology fittest | 19
Broadcast companies, especially those that
distribute directly to consumers, have built
their businesses around the notion that
high-quality content is the key to success.
In today’s world, however, high-quality
content is necessary, but no longer sufficient.
We are entering an era of “Digital Darwinism,” where success will be awarded
to companies that can challenge existing business and operating model
assumptions and adapt to the new, fast-changing market and ecosystem.
To meet this challenge, companies must design and execute hyper-compressed
innovation cycles and approach technology with unprecedented agility.
Broadcasting companies, in particular, face
increasing competition from agile digital natives
with vastly different capabilities and global scale.
These digital natives are skillfully using platforms
and ecosystems to bypass traditional competitive
barriers (e.g. frequencies, networks and proprietary
devices) and encroach on traditional markets with
new offerings. They are able to innovate at an
astonishing pace, reacting to market trends at
speed with a keen understanding of consumers
via engaging digital platforms.
This paper builds on our Bringing TV to Life V
business analysis of the fast-changing video
industry. It discusses how incumbent broadcasters
can adopt a multi-speed technology delivery
approach to accelerate innovation and meet the
digital natives on their own playing field.
Next Generation Technology Delivery | 3
At a glance
A wave of disruption is breaking over the broadcasting industry. Digital natives
are leveraging their uniquely digital heritage to discover—and deliver to—a
deep understanding of consumers’ expectations. And they’re mastering the
capabilities needed to personalize offerings and target consumers effectively.
How should traditional broadcasters respond? In our view, a major evolution in
culture, skills, practice, and investment focus is required.
THE RISE OF THE DIGITAL NATIVES
Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Apple… At one time these names were on the periphery
of broadcast and media. No longer. These digital natives are thriving as innovators, using
business platforms enabled by technology to stake their claim on new markets. The keys to
their success include:
$
$
$
$
1. INNOVATION
AT SPEED
2.SOFTWARE-ENABLED
BUSINESS PLATFORMS
3.RELENTLESS FOCUS
ON OPTIMIZING DELIVERY
Digital natives are first and
foremost innovation-driven
companies, applying “startup mentality” at a massive
scale.
The traditional wisdom is
that great content sells.
But most companies underestimate the capacity of
even a weak platform
to innovate and thereby
produce content that
becomes even better.1
Accelerate feature delivery
through software engineering disciplines to enable
innovation.
1 UBS Global Research: IT Hardware - Platforms Beat Products: Platform Economics Transcript, October 2014
4 | Next Generation Technology Delivery
4.COLLABORATIVE
CULTURE THAT’S
UNAFRAID TO FAIL
The raison d’être for
technology delivery is
supporting business
innovation in a constant
“Build-Measure-Learn”
innovation cycle.
HOW BROADCASTERS CAN RISE TO THE CHALLENGE
Traditional broadcast companies can adopt these approaches and practices to level the playing
field and become the disruptors—rather than the disrupted:
1.KNOW WHERE TO
START…AND START FAST
Prioritize accelerated
innovation and new
practices where they
differentiate the most:
digital customer-facing
systems of engagement.
2.ENABLE MULTI-SPEED
DELIVERY IN CORE
APPLICATIONS
$
Decouple core systems
to allow speed where it’s
needed by adopting new
practices: Agile, continuous
delivery and flexible
architectures based on
APIs, microservices, and
virtualized cloud solutions.
3. ALIGN FOR
LONG-TERM SUCCESS
4. FOSTER NEW SKILLS
AND CULTURE
Traditional barriers$between
$
Engineering and IT must fall
as broadcasters shift to an
interactive, softwareenabled future.
The Build-Measure-Learn
model that’s required
to support accelerated
innovation requires a
different corporate culture
and capability from
broadcast’s heritage.
Next Generation Technology Delivery | 5
Competing in the Era of Digital Darwinism
Broadcasters need to look beyond content to multi-channel interaction and
engagement via software-enabled platforms.
SUPER PLATFORMS
$315,584
SUPER PLATFORMS
$315,584
SUPER
PLATFORMS
$315,584
SUPER
PLATFORMS
SUPER
$315,584
PLATFORMS
2015
$181,900
SUPER
PLATFORMS
TRADITIONAL
MEDIA
$181,900
$28,654
TRADITIONAL
TRADITIONAL
MEDIA
MEDIA
$28,654
$17,192
2012
TRADITIONAL
MEDIA
$17,192
THE$181,900
RISE OF THE DIGITAL NATIVES
SUPER PLATFORMS
$315,584
In the era of Digital Darwinism, society
and technology are evolving faster than
SUPER PLATFORMS
$181,900
many companies’
ability to adapt. This is
$315,584
creating an unforgiving and fast-changing
environment where digital natives like
SUPER
PLATFORMS
Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and
$315,584
Facebook vie to establish themselves as
TRADITIONAL MEDIA
the go-to providers for content. They’re
$28,654
$181,900
SUPER
marshaling a digital heritage that gives
$17,192
PLATFORMS
them a unique understanding of how
SUPER
$315,584
PLATFORMS
digital consumers behave and what
2012
2015
2012
2015
$181,900TRADITIONAL MEDIAthey want. And new entrants like Twitch
$181,900
$28,654 emerge at pace as the barriers to entry
$17,192
diminish through the easy availability of
SUPER
PLATFORMS
platforms, software, and infrastructure.
TRADITIONAL
$181,900 2012
MEDIA
$28,654
TRADITIONAL
FIGURE 1 | Digital native
market
MEDIA
TRADITIONAL
capitalization and growth
relative
$28,654
MEDIA
$17,192
to top broadcasting companies
Average Market Capitalization of the Top
TRADITIONAL
Industry Players in the broadcast
and digital
MEDIA Google,
industries. Digitals include Amazon,
$17,192
Facebook and Netflix. Twelve firms used to
calculate average for Broadcast.
Source: Bloomberg.
6 | Next Generation Technology Delivery
2015
2012
2015
Their results are impressive. Netflix
addedTRADITIONAL
3.3 millionMEDIA
subscribers in the
$28,654
second quarter of 2015, raising its
global$17,192
subscriber base to 65.6 million
subscribers2 (international subscribers
TRADITIONAL MEDIA
2012for over
2015 70 percent
2012
accounted
of this2015
$28,654
growth in the second quarter).
$17,192
Google-owned YouTube emphatically beat
expectations
announced
2012 when
2015 it recently2012
2015
a 40 percent year-on-year surge in
advertising. And Amazon has benefitted
significantly from their bundled value
proposition (accelerated shipping, video
streaming, music and cloud storage).3
Figure 1 highlights the market
capitalization success of digital players—
and compares it to that of traditional
broadcasters.
Many of these companies are creating
their own content. But that’s not what’s
driven their success. They are first and
foremost innovators. They have created
software-enabled business platforms that
allow them to innovate rapidly, at scale.
The key elements of success to date are:
1. Innovation at speed
2. Software-enabled business
platforms
3. Relentless focus on improving
the platform and optimizing
delivery
4. A collaborative culture unafraid
to fail.
2 Netflix Hits 65 Million Subscribers.” Stastista, July 16th, 2015.
http://www.statista.com/chart/3153/netflix-subscribers/
3 Amazon.com Updating The Long Thesis.” RBC Capital Markets, June 15, 2014.
https://rbcnew.bluematrix.com/docs/pdf/1d9b1041-3977-4a12-a89b-d358f2ab6c66.pdf
“Many content industries—you see it in publishing, you see it in movies, you
see it in newspapers—think that they are immune to the force of the Internet
because they have the best content. I argue that’s a fallacy, that most of
these companies underestimate the capacity of even a weak platform to
innovate and thereby produce content that becomes even better.”
MARSHALL VAN ALSTYNE | Associate Professor at Boston University and Research Scientist at MIT,
as quoted in UBS Investment Research October 2014
Content + Platforms Creating New Markets
Twitch has captivated the world with its ability to create a
billion-dollar business in three years by building a platform
that streams PC and console gameplay, live e-sports events
and original shows. Like the ESPN of video games, Twitch’s
viewing figures for events such as the recent Evolution
2015 gaming championship are starting to rival those of
the most popular broadcast TV shows and events. Twitch
has become the de facto “social video” destination for
gamers. Perhaps this isn’t surprising: Accenture Research
(Accenture’s 2014 Digital Consumer Survey) shows that
gaming and user-generated content are becoming more
popular content segments.
Twitch is a platform business, in both technology
execution and business concept. Built on Amazon Web
Services, it’s been able to quickly scale and innovate
to support over 100 million unique monthly viewers.
According to network researcher DeepField Inc, it’s become
the fourth-largest source of US internet traffic, trailing
only Netflix, Google and Apple. As Twitch grows, it not
only generates ad revenue but also provides access to a
whole new consumer base to which Amazon can sell
gaming software and equipment.
Next Generation Technology Delivery | 7
DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
EXPERIMENT
CANARY TESTING
Hypothesis
New code run on about
1% of production traffic
Prototype
Automatic comparison to
baseline on 1,000+ metrics
to generate insights
Select Rollout
Measurement
Visualisation of metrics
to facilitate
decision making
Analysis
Source:
Accenture
analysis.
FIGURENetflix,
2 | Netflix
and
Canary
Testing
Netflix has accelerated the “Build-Measure-Learn” loop concept using software engineering practices and analytics capabilities to enable low-cost
innovation and real-time customer insight development. Teams develop hypotheses about how to improve their platform. Then they develop
multiple prototypes and carry out rollouts to a small subset of customers. The results are measured and compared to a baseline of 1,000+ metrics to
generate insights and results. Using data visualization, they can quickly validate hypotheses, generate insights and take action to scale or refine.
Source: Netflix, Accenture analysis.
$
1. INNOVATION AT SPEED
Digital natives are first and foremost
innovation-driven companies. In part,
they have built their acute understanding of digital consumers by mastering
and accelerating the Build-MeasureLearn loop concept.4
They translate ideas into products for
small-scale customer testing, to gain real
customer insights via analytics, and to
iterate quickly so they can zero-in on
customers’ unspoken—but demonstrated—
wants and needs. The quicker the learning
loop, the faster the business can learn,
grow and adopt new products. Digital
natives use technology to apply these
principles on a massive scale, at speed
(see Figure 2).
$
2. SOFTWARE-ENABLED
BUSINESS PLATFORMS
The traditional wisdom is that great
content sells. While that may be true,
research shows that an effective
software-enabled business platform is
a real threat to standalone products.
A platform that brings together an
ecosystem of consumers and business
partners becomes more valuable as
more people use it. It allows the
business to constantly evolve and
tailor offerings in response to market
dynamics.
Netflix over Blockbuster, Apple and
Spotify over Columbia House, Amazon
over Borders. These cases all graphically
illustrate the triumph of softwareenabled business platforms over content
alone, however excellent that content
may be. Broadcasters are subject to
the same rules of disruptive innovation
as have been applied to so many other
industries,5 documented by Clayton
Christensen in “The Innovator’s Dilemma:
When New Technologies Cause Great
Companies to Fail”. Christensen further
advises a focus on being a learning
organization when he says, “But in
disruptive situations, action must be taken
before careful plans are made. Because
much less can be known about what
markets need or how large they can
become, plans must serve a very different
purpose: They must be plans for learning
rather than plans for implementation.”
Digital industry platforms and ecosystems
are fueling the next wave of breakthrough
innovation and disruptive growth across
industries. The approach exemplified by
the digital natives transforms IT from a
back-office function to a critical enabler
of business speed, innovation and
competitive differentiation.
4 As described by Eric Ries in “The Lean Startup” (http://theleanstartup.com). As he explains: “The
fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then
learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that
feedback loop”. He goes on to explain that start-up concepts can (and do) apply to businesses of all sizes.
8 | Next Generation Technology Delivery
Accenture Video Solution 3
Google created a central tools team with the sole charter of improving developer agility through faster feedback cycles.
Representative areas of optimization to improve agility and feature velocity:
Google
created a central tools team with the sole charter of improving developer agility through faster feedback cycles.
Representative areas of optimization to improve agility and feature velocity:
DEVELOP
BUILD
TEST
SUBMIT
50% code
changes per month
Approximately
50,000 builds per day
Approximately
120 million auto tests
per day
Approximately
10,000 code changes
per day
“Our job is to accelerate Google; we manage everything related to writing code, testing, debugging; our tools provide a
uniform experience throughout the company.” ASHISH KUMAR | Engineering Manager, Google
FIGURE 3 | The Pace of Technology Delivery
Representative areas of optimization to improve agility and feature velocity.
From public sources and Accenture research
Rather than a heavy investment in
proprietary equipment and appliances,
digital natives’ infrastructure is a uniform
utility in the cloud. Differentiation
and features are defined by software
(vs. equipment), which allows for lower
capital costs. More importantly, however,
this allows agile changes in features and
product.
Netflix offers a particularly interesting
illustration. In 2007 Netflix was in the
mail-order DVD business. Technology was
monolithic, as it is for broadcasters today.
Everything was tightly coupled and
delivered in large releases. If a developer
broke something, testing stopped, and all
feature progress halted. The same thing
happened in production, where one defect
would block functionality from customers6
(where the “learning” part of the BuildMeasure-Learn loop is realized).
The company has evolved dramatically.
Netflix is now fully supported on
Amazon’s Web Services (AWS), and has
shifted to API’s and microservices for
interfaces. This effectively decoupled
components of its platform, allowing
feature-independent changes and a continuous deployment approach. As a result,
Netflix was able to rewrite 80 percent of
its code base in a 24-month period.
Software-enabled platforms generate a
wealth of new usage data. According to
Netflix,7 more than a billion metrics per
minute flow into Atlas, its time-series
telemetry platform. Using this data,
the company was able to predict the
success of “House of Cards”, and invest
confidently in follow-on content creation.
They continue to invest in their platform,
and announced plans to spend over $700
million on technology and development in
20168; 12.7% of their 2014 revenues.
Compare that to 4% of revenues in the
Media and Entertainment Industry and it
shows the value digital natives place in
technology.9
5 2015 Accenture Technology Vision. “The Platform (R)evolution: Defining ecosystems, redefining industries”
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/it-technology-trends-2015.aspx
6 Adapted from “The State of the Art in Microservices” by Adrian Cockcroft
7 ibid.
8 Netflix’s View: Internet TV is replacing linear TV, July 2015
9 Gartner: IT Key Metrics Data 2015: Key Industry Measures: Media and Entertainment Analysis: Multiyear,
December 2014
$
3. RELENTLESS FOCUS ON
IMPROVING THE PLATFORM
AND OPTIMIZING DELIVERY
High-performance technology is all
about enabling business agility. It is
enabled by three primary factors:
frequent introduction of business
requirements, lead time for change,
and mean time to recover from failures.
A continuous delivery capability is key to
mastering delivery and accelerating the
Build-Measure-Learn cycle required for
innovation. The software development
process is in essence digital natives’
“manufacturing plant”. And just as a leading manufacturer invests in automation
to improve speed, quality, and flexibility,
they have invested in automating and
accelerating changes to their platform.
The digital natives achieve continuous
delivery via agile methods and development automation to constantly improve
the platform (see Figure 3).
Next Generation Technology Delivery | 9
4. A COLLABORATIVE CULTURE
UNAFRAID TO FAIL
The culture includes a different breed
of technologists who operate at the
front end of enabling rapid business
innovation. Technology organizations in
digital natives are small, data-driven,
and entrepreneurial. Their ethos and
raison d’être is to support constant
innovation for the business. Although
there’s a long-term disruptive outlook,
short-term, rapid decision-making is
the norm. The crucial capabilities are
speed and a data-driven approach.
Small, incremental changes can be
reversed or improved easily when
backed with a continuous delivery
infrastructure.
10 | Next Generation Technology Delivery
This practice is backed by management.
At Google, for example, technology teams
implemented a “reliability budget” with
production reliability targets. Failures
lower the SLA scores, and once the budget
is consumed, the teams are not allowed
to push additional releases and features.
This approach incentivizes developers
to value stability (and not just feature
changes), and it provides controls that
allow testers and the business to permit
changes (rather than focusing on
stability).
A number of digital natives have succeeded in growing a team-based culture
that can deliver end-to-end without
excessive handovers between teams.
These companies have a significant
advantage over traditional organizations
with their large, often impersonal silos
that focus on one specific function and
don’t easily identify with the business
problem to be solved and/or the solution
that is being delivered.
Just as important to digital natives is
the way the business interacts with
technology. Integrated teams and enabled
business product owners embrace rapid
innovation, a learning culture and a
mindset adaptive to rapidly changing
customer expectations and competitive
pressures.
Given the disruptions in the broadcast industry and the market expectations
for growth, the technical delivery capabilities of the broadcast industry are
not fully aligned with making their business organizations successful. This
can cause problematic constraints where either technology capabilities limit
business agility, or worse, limit the ability for the business to confidently
move into new direct-to-consumer revenue models which are more akin to
those currently successfully enabled by digital natives.
CURRENT CHALLENGES OF TECHNOLOGY DELIVERY
AT TRADITIONAL BROADCASTING COMPANIES
The key challenges faced by traditional
broadcasting companies include the
following:
organizations lack the architectural skills
and systems integration rigor to manage
rapidly evolving IP-based solutions.
•Silo’ed
In the same companies, the IT organization is typically restricted to running
corporate functions and applications
that support the media supply chain (e.g.,
scheduling systems, ad trafficking). While
they are supporting business solutions,
the amount of innovation is limited
as these are generally core enterprise
systems which need to support a relatively
saturated business model (e.g., broadcast
ad sales), and thus speed-to-market for
anything disruptive or consumer-facing
is not part of their remit.
technical organizations
•Legacy
content and control
supply chains
•Digital as an isolated versus
enterprise enabling capability
•Lack
of ‘product management’
embedded in technical delivery
SILO’ED TECHNICAL
ORGANIZATIONS
Disaggregated delivery silos hinder
integrated solutions and create a
“quality vs. speed” mindset.
Traditional broadcaster technology
organizations are highly segregated.
Core media technology is the domain
of Engineering, with innovation based on
the latest specialized equipment created
specifically to support the creation, packaging, and/or distribution of traditional
content. While technically adept at
specialized media equipment, these
To make matters even more complicated,
individual business units or markets have
their own semi-autonomous technology
organizations driving divergent solutions—
especially when they view core technical
organizations not aligned to their goals .
These ‘digital islands’ give the appearance
of innovation, but are limited to very
specific business functions. A common
example is the ‘digital’ organizations
within broadcasters, which deliver frontends to existing business models—like
catch-up TV and promotional sites to drive
demand on traditional broadcast channels.
The nature of the work performed by
these groups has created deep-rooted
cultural differences. For example,
engineering organizations are worried
about ‘time to air’ more than standard
processes, taking advantage of the more
vertical nature of their distribution
systems to make changes to their systems
to get content product out the door without adding too much procedural overhead,
while IT organizations are worried about
not breaking critical business systems
which have numerous interdependencies,
leveraging best practices from enterprise
systems integration. IT thus views those in
engineering as ‘cowboys’ while engineering views IT as ‘slow’. What’s needed is
the best of both worlds—agile and high
velocity with predictable quality.
Next Generation
Accenture
Technology
Video
Delivery
Solution
| 11
3
Segregated digital capabilities hinder effective feedback loops that can drive
improvement in both the core and emerging business models.
LEGACY CONTENT AND CONTROL
SUPPLY CHAINS
Leveraging traditional supply chain
technology for purposes of economies
of scale across all distribution channels
contributes to an environment where
new products or concepts can take
multiple months to develop, trial and
launch.
In broadcasting, most technology
investments are understandably tied to
supporting the dominant revenue model
of the business. This includes media
equipment which allows for higher quality
content to be distributed on broadcast
channels as well as business systems
which enable linear advertising revenue
to be optimized. When digital product
requirements are introduced into these
organizations, technical organizations
treat them very similarly to their traditional requirements and attempt to leverage as much of the legacy investment as
possible in order to fulfil those needs.
While in the short-term this allows for
economies of scale, as the requirements
for growth are transferred more towards
digital-enabled products, the legacy
supply chain’s innability to support those
requirements will become inhibiting. This
is especially true from a technical delivery
perspective as “keeping the lights on”
12 | Next Generation Technology Delivery
nature of the traditional supply chain,
built on on-premise hardware hosting
legacy software stacks, is not aligned to
the “deploy, test, and fail-or-scale fast”
model of digital.
This creates a problematic culture that
ranges from technology delivery to
business and technology governance,
where investment and innovation are
geared toward solutions that are becoming less effective competitive barriers.
While the release strategies and investments on this supply chain can be
delivered in a manner that ensures that
traditional business functions are not
hindered, the resulting economies of scale
unfortunately create an environment
where dependent downstream digital
products may take multiple months to
develop, trial and launch. As one executive
put it: “I wish I didn’t have to spend
US$2m and six months to find out that my
customer didn’t like something.” The legacy supply chain delivery approach, while
adequately supporting a broadcaster’s
main commodity of creative content distribution, is unfortunately ill-suited to the
era of Digital Darwinism, where IP-based
solutions, commoditized software, cloud
computing, and standardization enable the
digital natives to achieve learning cycles
tens or hundreds of times faster.
DIGITAL AS AN ISOLATED VERSUS
ENTERPRISE ENABLING CAPABILITY
Segregated digital capabilities hinder
effective feedback loops that can
drive improvement in both the core
and emerging business models.
In most broadcast organizations, digital
capabilities have been evolved as
offshoots of the traditional business,
concentrated on next generation technologies to enable lower-priority business
models (e.g., ‘me too’ catch-up services)
or to help promote their traditional
business models (e.g., marketing sites for
particular brands). This means that most
of the output is dependent upon upstream
systems where any digital innovation is
highly isolated from the core business.
As consumer demand shifts to on-demand
and digital engagement, it should create
an opportunity where digital can better
enable the traditional business—giving
more insights around interests in content,
providing the ability to respond quickly
to feedback, and enabling a new way to
communicate directly to consumers versus
broad marketing. The problem is that
these capabilities are not being leveraged
into the traditional business—either
technically or operationally.
“Project” mindset and governance hinders the ability to learn and respond
quickly to the realities of a highly disrupted media industry.
The challenge here is that ‘Digital’ skills
are not embedded into the traditional
business and technology teams, so they
do not have the experience to leverage
these capabilities because they are being
built out in a separate organization
supporting a different business intent.
These are both cultural and organizational
issues as feedback loops enabled from
data collected on digital channels do not
make their way into the organization in a
manner that is easily digested or viewed
as relevant to how the traditional business
operates. For example, the way audience
is measured in traditional broadcast is
very aligned to advertising currency
(e.g., viewership by gender and age group),
while on digital channels, measurement
is a lot more nuanced and complicated,
based on multi-dimensional context,
implicit and explicit actions, and frequency. Applying these standards that come
from digital feedback into the traditional
business becomes problematic as they can
be viewed as incompatible and distracting.
If one looks to the competition in the
digital natives, the opposite is true—all
data collected from engagement on the
digital platform is leveraged in one way
or another in their core business, and the
insights derived from it make their way
back to their products and offerings.
LACK OF ‘PRODUCT
MANAGEMENT’ EMBEDDED IN
TECHNICAL DELIVERY
“Project” mindset and governance
hinders the ability to learn and
respond quickly to the realities of
a highly disrupted media industry.
In traditional broadcast engineering and
IT, projects are funded which have specific
outcomes and end dates, driven generally
from a CapEx budget and then moved into
support mode provided by shared services.
The problem with this model is that in the
digital world what is known or expected
at the beginning of a project can change
dramatically as it is being executed. While
this can be very frightening in traditional
delivery models, in Agile models, this is
expected and encouraged—as embracing
change driven by knowledge gained
throughout the delivery and deployment
process creates more relevant outcomes.
This requires a digital ‘product’ mind set
versus a ‘project’ mind set where the outcomes are managed over a longer period
of time but benefits are created along the
way. The challenge is that budget cycles,
approvals, and the methodologies
that measure success at traditional
broadcasters, at least in the traditional
business, have not been structured in
this manner. This results in a ‘project’
being delivered based on a need that was
understood months and months ago versus
by an accountable party who is always
looking at outcomes of the ‘product’ over
its lifecycle and adjusting over time.
Moving to a ‘product’ model is not only
challenging from a budgeting perspective
but also from an operating model perspective, as this model requires constant
negotiation around delivery between
business and technology—allowing
innovated results to be delivered based
on consistantly balancing value, cost, and
risk. In traditional broadcasters, this type
of business engagement is rare as projects
are generally executed by collecting
requirements upfront, where ambiguity at
the time of planning and estimating is not
part of the methodology or commitment
strategy. This unfortunately leads to
many projects stalling due to lack of
information or worse, projects moving
forward with very incorrect assumptions
which are eventually disproven. In digital
native organizations, product managers
embedded into the technical delivery team
help guide outputs in shorter releases of
value, measure effectiveness, and adjust
the needs for a next release.
Next Generation
Accenture
Technology
Video
Delivery
Solution
| 13
3
If these digital native software companies are the new benchmark, how
can traditional broadcasters match their pace given legacy architectures,
investments, and skills?
14 | Next Generation Technology Delivery
CONSUMPTION DEVICES
NETWORK
CORE MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
FROM LEGACY
MEDIA COMPANY…
+
TV
Newspaper
Proprietary Network
Database
Appliance
( HARDWARE + SOFTWARE )
Hardware
Software
...TO MODERN
MEDIA COMPANY
Any Connected Device
Multiservice Network
Software
Software
Internal
APIs
Third Party
APIs
Enterprise
Data
Third Party
Data
Software
Customer
Analytics
Platforms
FIGURE 4 | Broadcast Architecture Evolution
THE FUTURE FOR BROADCASTING:
A NEXT GENERATION TECHNOLOGY OPERATING MODEL
What’s needed is an evolution in
organization, practice, technology and
culture. In short, a new technology
operating model that enables new service
rollout in weeks rather than months
or years.
As in other industries, software-enabled
business platforms are replacing
purpose-built hardware in broadcasting
(see figure 4 above). As they do, the need
for software engineering disciplines
begins to displace traditional engineering.
As broadcasters make the shift, they can
achieve and sustain high performance
through the following approach:
1.Know where to start…
and start fast
2.Enable multi-speed delivery
in core applications
3.Align for long-term success
4.Foster new skills and culture
1. KNOW WHERE TO START…
AND START FAST
$
Prioritize accelerated innovation
and new practices where they
differentiate the most: the digital
systems of engagement.
Driving change of this scale can be a
daunting task; knowing where to start is
half the battle. It’s important to identify
areas of the business where higher pace is
necessary and other areas where a more
moderated approach would best manage
risks. A strong integration strategy is
required to link the two approaches.
Next Generation Technology Delivery | 15
As digital video products become more sophisticated and consumers
become more demanding, significant pressures are put on video
product development.
PRODUCT & UX
Nearshore
Delivery Models
THE FACTORY
Continuous Development and Integration
Arch
Local Industry
Experts for
Product Management
Test
Automated Testing
UI/Front-end Teams
User Stories
Metadata and
Content for Simulation
and Prototypes
Middleware
APIs and Services
Embedded Systems
Engineering
Delivery
OPERATIONS
Release
Mgmt
Device/Firmware
Operational Tools
Back-end Services
Complex Tech Stories
DevOps/
Continuous Delivery
Infrastructure
Security
Data Management
Best-of-breed
Technology
Partners
Ops/
DevOps
Content Development Support
Device Integration
Content Providers
Device Manufacturers
Data Management
and Advanced
Analytics
EXTERNAL DEPENDENCIES AND PROVIDERS
(May include additional bespoke inputs as required, e.g. ISPs/infrastructure)
FIGURE 5 | Accenture’s Digital Delivery Factory for Media
An obvious place to start is with the
digital systems, and digital video in
particular. As digital video products
become more sophisticated and
consumers become more demanding,
significant pressures are put on video
product development. These pressures
are exacerbated by time-to-market
and budget constraints—meaning that
development needs to become more
efficient while the technology becomes
more diverse and complex.
Traditional long-cycle development
processes, which have been heavily waterfall—and specification-based—especially
when leveraging legacy technology such
as set-top boxes and content supply
chains—are becoming less and less
relevant to successfully launching such
products. These products must be evolved
continuously. The expectation is that every
couple of weeks, more features and more
fixes can be shipped to continue making
the product fresh, relevant, and reliable.
16 | Next Generation Technology Delivery
Companies
To respond to these challenges, Accenture
has developed an offering called “Digital
Delivery Factory for Media Companies”.
This is a collection of skilled product
delivery teams, processes and methodologies, and supporting tools that allow
broadcast and media companies to
efficiently build media-based products
to respond to the demands of the market.
The offering allows a number of different
internal and external implementation
teams to build and operate, using nextgeneration technology delivery techniques
and integrated solutions which can
be shipped and iterated as product
requirements are generated. Accenture
has successfully launched this highly configurable model for a number of different
clients—all of which have been under
very tight pressure to get to market and
require continued innovation post launch
to accelerate the Build-Measure-Learn
loop to meet evolving consumer demands.
The process of launching the offering not
only provides short-term tangible benefit,
but is in itself a Build-Measure-Learn
exercise for the rest of the technology
organization. Evolution must not be
restricted to an organization’s digital
systems. Innovation and agility have to
be quickly and meaningfully applied to
the core business capabilities supporting
these channels in order to truly unlock
the value of the content organization.
TRADITIONAL BUSINESS
EVOLVING BUSINESS
Scalability, efficiency, safety and
accuracy—what a traditional engineering
organization does best.
DIGITAL BUSINESS
Non-sequential, agility and speed,
like a digital native.
• GOAL: Agility
• GOAL: Reliability
• VALUE: Price for performance
• VALUE: Price for performance
Support for core business activities
of the organization, with
opportunities for greater flexibility
and responsiveness
• APPROACH: Waterfall, V-model
• GOVERNANCE: Plan-driven, approvals
• SOURCING: Enterprise suppliers,
long-term deals
• APPROACH: Agile, kanban
• GOVERNANCE: Empirical, continuous,
process-based
• SOURCING: Small, new vendors,
short-term deals
• CULTURE: Engineering-centric,
removed from customer
• CULTURE: Business-centric,
close to customer
• CYCLE TIME: Long (months)
• CYCLE TIME: Short (days, weeks)
Manage Risk
Pursue Opportunity
TECHNOLOGY OPERATING SPECTRUM
FIGURE 6 | Technology Operating Spectrum
2. ENABLE MULTI-SPEED
DELIVERY IN CORE APPLICATIONS
Decoupling core systems to allow
speed where it’s needed by adopting
new practices: agile, continuous
delivery and flexible architectures
based on APIs, microservices, and
virtualized cloud solutions.
Traditional broadcast and supporting
business systems are complex and tightly
coupled, with many interfaces and dependencies—a reflection of the organizations
that created them. The technology
complexities are compounded by a
culture of perfection via extensive testing
and handoffs between the silo’ed organizations. The result is a long and expensive
enterprise release process as dependencies
across many delivery silos are managed.
The future technology operating model for
broadcasters must enable “multi-speed
delivery”, combining broadcast availability
with broadband flexibility. Different parts
of the technology portfolio will have
different appetites for risk vs opportunity,
and the operating model must be capable
of responding to many types of demand
simultaneously across this. See Figure 6.
From a technical perspective, changes are
required across four key pillars to enable
multi-speed delivery: Architecture, Cloud
Infrastructure, Software Engineering
Practices, and Technology Governance.
Next Generation Technology Delivery | 17
“Engineering teams should be able to concentrate a maximum of their time
on quality and innovation. At Google that time is achieved, at least in part,
by making the hard and the mundane simple and automatic.”
PATRICK COPELAND | Engineering Director, Google
ARCHITECTURE
FROM
SOFTWARE
ENGINEERING
PRACTICES
CLOUD
INFRASTRUCTURE
FROM
FROM
Monolithic and tightly
coupled across appliances
and applications.
TO
Waterfall delivery in large
periodic releases; Environmental
constraints hampering
flexibility and responsiveness;
Manual processes.
TO
Digital, core applications,
and ecosystem partners
loosely coupled via APIs
and microservers.
TECHNOLOGY
GOVERNANCE
FROM
Premise-based and functionally
specific and unique solutions
TO
Multiple integrated fit-forpurpose methods; continuous
delivery in digital and frequent
delivery for core applications.
Automation everywhere.
Stage-gate based capital
planning and approvals
aligned to waterfall delivery
and periodic releases.
TO
Cloud-first approach with
standard technology platforms
to support rapid development,
scalability, and lower cost.
Multiple governance including
the addition of capacity
and business outcome based
models to support continuous
delivery and innovation.
FIGURE 7 | Enabling multi-speed delivery in core applications
Enable a multi-speed application
architecture: It’s not feasible to throw
out an entire legacy system and start
from scratch. But it is possible to
decouple systems of record and systems
of engagement via open service architectures. Abstraction to decouple systems—
especially those that need to move at
different speeds—is a requirement for
multi-speed delivery. This initial step
will help manage the ability to balance
high-opportunity changes and high-risk
changes in parallel.
Broadcasters can achieve this through
extensive use of APIs and microservices to
expose core system data to faster-moving
digital channels and ecosystem partners.
This requires an extremely strong
integration strategy, which relies on
“isolation and emulation” to allow parallel
development while controlling the risk of
incompatibility. This is especially effective
18 | Next Generation Technology Delivery
in solutions that rely on the transaction of
metadata and media, as many of the
resulting digital solutions rely heavily on
the separation of media flow and control
flow, with metadata being the only way to
link them. By using simulated metadata
strategies, components of a digital media
solution can be built and certified in isolation, and when they are integrated into
a wider solution, the chances of incompatibility are heavily decreased. For example, think of a VOD catalog and all the
different combinations there are that
could trigger different content discovery,
transaction, consumption, and reporting
logic for an OTT solution . With a strong
simulator for both media and metadata,
one could certify a full consumer product
without the underlining supply chain
being built.
Legacy simplification also plays a part
in enabling speed and reducing overall
costs. Simpler architectures enable faster
change, reduce pressure on resources
with scarce skills and reduce costs.
Simplified and decoupled architectures
are critical enablers of multi-speed
delivery, and emphasize the importance
of having a strong, centralized enterprise
architecture organization (as noted in
the next section).
TECHNOLOGY NEEDS TO RUN DELIVERY AT MULTIPLE SPEEDS—from agile and continuous for the
parts of the business at the “opportunity” end of the Technology Operating Spectrum to traditional
waterfall approach for core legacy back end systems.
WATERFALL
AGILE + DEV OPS
STRATEGIC ARCHITECTURE ROADMAPS
DIGITAL
Support digital iterations
CORE
ER1603
ER1602
SYSTEMS
OF RECORD
Support digital iterations
RELEASE N
ER1604
RELEASE N+1
RELEASE PROGRAM MANAGEMENT COORDINATION
FIGURE 8 | Multi-Speed Delivery Framework
Software engineering practices:
Agile and iterative methods can support
changing user demands, while traditional
waterfall methods are still relevant to core
systems. In some media product development, such as platforms that support
set-top boxes, the line blurs. In these
cases, specification-based development is
still required for core functionality, while
product development needs to support
greater flexibility in user experience and
non-device based capabilities. Enabling
multiple integrated delivery methods is
the essence of multi-speed delivery.
Different methods require different levels
of business participation. With Agile,
interaction with the business via the
product owner is more frequent. With
Waterfall, it is less so, and care is needed
to ensure that what is being delivered
remains market relevant. The varying
models for engagement highlight the
importance of the business engagement
function (as noted in the next section).
Enabling continuous delivery via
automation of the software factory is
another key aspect of leading software
engineering practices. Development and
test automation via “DevOps” practices
enables frequent deployment to production, where the real Build-Measure-Learn
loop takes place. This solves the “time to
market” vs “predictability and quality”
conflict between engineering and IT
organizations—as it allows both to be balanced using the same enabling capability.
To give an indication of how important
this is in the new media ecosystem, some
digital natives invest up to 20-25 percent
of their R&D budget in this capability.
Embrace the cloud: Standardized and
automated platforms enable accelerated
delivery—and cloud is a key component of
that. Lead-times to install and configure
infrastructure, operating systems
and test environments are simply not
considerations for developers within
digital natives. Automation and virtualization are used to insulate and accelerate
development. Traditional technology
organizations spend more time testing,
deploying and releasing software than
designing and building it.10 Contrast
that to the digital natives who use
standardized platforms to keep developers
focused on innovation and new features.
10 Adapted from “The State of the Art in Microservices” by Adrian Cockcroft
Next Generation Technology Delivery | 19
“What we’ve built is a PaaS over the top of the AWS infrastructure…
leveraging as many Amazon features as seemed interesting and useful.
Then we put a thin layer over that to isolate our developers from it.”
ADRIAN COCKCROFT | Former Cloud Architect, Netflix
For future solutions, technology
organizations should adopt a “cloud-first”
mentality. Cloud platforms have evolved
to provide better performance and
resiliency than most traditional companies
can afford to build on their own. The
shift away from capital investments for
infrastructure allows OpEx expenditures
to be aligned specifically to evolving
business needs—and the rapid “scale or
fail” required with platform innovation.
The Star case noted on page 21 is a great
example. Star acquired the rights to the
Cricket World Cup championships and
demand exploded. With a solution built on
Amazon Web Services, it took just four
people, working overnight, to double the
system’s capacity. In a traditional model,
that would have taken months of ordering, installing, and testing equipment
and software.
Technology governance: Achieving
rapid agility also requires velocity in funding models, business engagement and
corporate governance models. Stage-gate
based capital approval requests don’t
work well for the accelerated BuildMeasure-Learn loops required for
innovation. Capacity needs to be reserved
with appropriate measurements and
success checkpoints in place in order
to support velocity while properly
measuring value and reacting to
challenges, including market failure.
20 | Next Generation Technology Delivery
3. ALIGN FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS
Traditional barriers between
Engineering and IT must fall as
$
broadcasters shift to an interactive,
software-enabled future.
The solutions developed by a technology
organization tend to reflect the organization that creates them. In broadcast companies, silo’ed technology organizations
were ideal when media product could be
easily separated from supporting business
solutions due to a one-way distribution
pipeline.
Digital software-enabled solutions require
the dismantling of those walls to create an
open ecosystem that allows viewers, content, business capabilities, engagement
partners and providers to move across a
number of mediums with a feedback channel incorporated into the product development process.
Successful broadcasters of the future will
have a ubiquitous technology organization
that is able to manage consistency across
converging technology environments.
While there will be changes unique to each
company, there are three key common elements of organizational alignment in this
new model:
1 Holistic enterprise architecture:
The technology shift from hardware and
equipment to software platforms requires
a holistic view of the business, information, process and technology to drive the
evolution of the technology landscape and
align the organization’s needs to this
strategy.
2 Strong technology/business relationship: As the technology / business relationship changes, all are well served by a
strong business-unit advocate within
technology. These people get the best
from technology for the business and help
to transform business practices. This
requires a more collaborative approach to
business problem solving and minimizes
time-consuming traditional requirements
collection.
3 Integrated technology delivery:
A combined Engineering and IT organization is required to deliver and sustain
solutions across engineering and IT.
As software dominates new features, this
organization will bring the best of engineering and IT practices.
Getting these three areas right will
help keep the business and innovation
agenda up front and maintain focus
on the migration toward integrated
software-enabled business platforms.
Accenture Video Solution 3
Technology leadership teams must adapt the culture of the technology
organization to attract and source the right talent and strategically upskill,
augmenting the industry know-how in the current organization.
4. FOSTER NEW SKILLS
AND CULTURE
The Build-Measure-Learn model
needed to support accelerated
innovation requires a different
corporate culture and capability
from broadcast’s heritage.
Accelerating delivery and innovation
is fundamentally a cultural and skills
problem—not a tooling problem.11
Enabling and incentivizing new behaviors
and growing next-generation software
skills are both critical.
Be ready to fail: Today, the engrained
ethos of perfection results in repeated
testing until a solution is flawless.
This is the antithesis of the accelerated
Build-Measure-Learn loop required for
innovation. The “Opportunity” end of
the Technology Operating Spectrum
requires considerable experimentation
to figure out what will or will not work.
The digital era affords much more room
to try new things as long as they lead to
the goal of a better experience for the
consumer. This is completely contrary to
the worldview of traditional broadcasters
where a second of outage could do
irrevocable damage to their market
standing. In the future operating model,
incremental changes are rolled out
to a subset of customers, limiting the
effect of a change that may impact the
consumer experience. By taking this
approach the business can quickly respond
to consumer feedback, resulting in
increased engagement and brand loyalty—
essential currency in the disrupting media
marketplace. Broadcast companies need
to adopt a very different cultural mindset
where experimentation and even failure
is simply a springboard to success. That
requires buy-in from executive leadership,
giving employees the tools to experiment
and bringing in new talent willing to take
risks for higher rewards.
Develop new talent: The technology
and delivery skills needed for today are
different and will change in the future.
Future solutions will deliver via an
ecosystem of partners, with open
collaboration instead of in-house, silo’ed
solutions. Technologists of the future
will understand the business processes
and technology ecosystems. And
they’ll know how to leverage them for
competitive advantage.
Introducing talent from outside companies
and industries can help to infuse the ‘why
not?‘ ethos needed to adopt a continuous
IT delivery capability that enables rapid
innovation and a learning business operation. However, competition is fierce for
the technical skills that are now required
for success. When a 2013 survey asked
US-based executives at large companies
if a skills gap persists in their businesses,
nearly half expressed concerns that they
will not have the skills they need in the
next two years—with the greatest demand
being for IT skills (44 percent).12
The answer? Technology leadership teams
must adapt the culture of the technology
organization to attract and source the
right talent and strategically upskill—augmenting industry know-how in the current organization.
Traditional broadcasters need to think
transformation rather than incremental
fixes. They need to create a workforce
plan that will match the digital demands
of the business and technology, including
the use of analytics, mobility, cloud and
other emerging technologies—coupled
with strong digital systems integration
skills. It will be critical to develop new
digital career paths and roles, such as
service design strategists, product owners,
data scientists or scrum masters who can
serve as catalysts to convert traditional
‘analog‘ approaches to digital ones. Roles
need to be created that are shared with
the business and are sourced from the
larger ecosystem. They’ll need to establish
the incentives for employees, promote
the value proposition and use the organization’s brand and culture to offer key
differentiators that influence and attract.
11 Adapted from “The State of the Art in Microservices” by Adrian Cockcroft
12 Skills and Employment Trends Survey, Accenture 2013, http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/
PDF/Accenture-2013-Skills-And-Employment-Trends-Survey-Perspectives-On-Training.pdf>
Next Generation Technology Delivery | 21
WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?
India’s leading media company, Star, is at the epicenter of the convergence of the telecoms,
electronics and media sectors. A subsidiary of the global major 21st Century Fox, Star is a
market maker with breakthrough initiatives in content, distribution and monetization,
reaching 720 million people in India each week with 42 channels in seven different languages.
Constantly evolving how it operates
to match fast-changing consumer
behavior, Star India was focused on
providing consumers with seamless
access to content from a single online
destination. A successful outcome
would help it to reinforce its status
as India’s most compelling storyteller,
as well as shape how content is
consumed in a new world with new
screens and new habits. Star India
launched hotstar, a convergent web
and mobile platform, to bring its
powerful content portfolio to a
single online destination. Based on
Accenture Video Solution (AVS),
hotstar offers one of the country’s
most popular content catalogs to a
population of more than 1.2 billion
with general entertainment, movies
and sports.
22 | Next Generation Technology Delivery
With a platform 100 percent in the
cloud, the hotstar implementation
was completed in three months,
launching in January 2015. It took
only six days to exceed one million
app downloads, and 17 million in
three months. No digital service
anywhere in the world has seen
such a ramp-up, including Twitter,
Instagram and Spotify. Hotstar,
in conjunction with starsports.com,
created history by scoring 25 million views of the India vs Pakistan
cricket match in the ICC World Cup
2015—only two months after
launch. This is amongst the most
ever digital views for a single
game in a sporting event
across the globe in one country.
Built on Akamai & Amazon Web
Services, Star provided only VoD
mezzanine files and live feeds.
There was no need for a transcoding
infrastructure farm, because that
function was performed in the cloud,
on a just-in-time basis.
Summary
Broadcast and media are not immune to technology disruption. The advantage of great content
alone is not sustainable. As recent research and industry experience have shown, software-enabled
business platforms enable rapid innovation and the ability to optimize consumer engagement
while producing and distributing content that is even more relevant to their demands. To take
advantage of these capabilities, broadcasters must transform their technology operating model.
1. Embed a Build-Measure-Learn
loop into your nascent or evolving
digital capabilities.
Innovation isn’t about being fast, it’s
about learning fast. Efficiently responding
to feedback is the key to continuously
learning and adapting to digital consumers’ often unspoken and subtle needs. This
agile learning loop increases customer
engagement and new product success,
allowing broadcasters to pilot and adapt
new products and content experiences
quickly for a multi-channel audience.
Broadcast and media currently have a
tremendous asset in great content and
curation. By following the digital natives’
example on agile software-enabled
platforms, broadcasters can iterate and
innovate—optimizing how they create,
promote and fulfil content to their
audience.
2. Build a “digital mindset” in the
traditional technology and business
teams.
Don’t let the learning stop at the
consumer engagement layer. Harnessed
properly, the feedback loops enabled by
digital channels can unlock new value
to traditional business models around
planning, scheduling, segmentation,
and optimization. This requires merging
the traditional engineering and content
supply chain skills with next-generation
software engineering and digital. This
is fundamentally a cultural and skills
challenge—more than a methods or
tooling problem.
3. Attract and grow software
architecture and engineering skills.
As software-based solutions continue
to displace purpose-build appliances or
legacy on-premise business applications
in the broadcast and media value chain,
traditional engineering must evolve.
Next generation technology skills are
not broadly available—and the digital
natives currently have the upper hand in
attracting top talent. Develop a workforce
strategy to attract and grow the leadership and delivery skills needed for the
ongoing evolution of your business.
The B2C media industry is no
longer one-directional, and by
actively planning and adopting
these changes, the broadcast
and media C-suite can
develop these capabilities to
complement their content.
In doing so, they place their
organizations in a position
to thrive in the era of
Digital Darwinism.
4. Pilot then accelerate multi-speed
technology delivery capabilities.
Increasingly, technology is your business.
The digital natives treat the software
development process as one of their key
assets and have invested in automation
and architectures for speed, quality, and
cost. Follow the lead, investing in creating
next-generation technology delivery
capabilities in your organization. The
defacto goal for all future solutions
should be open API-enabled architectures,
automation, data-driven capabilities, and
cloud-based continuous delivery models
to build toward the software-dominated
future. Develop a roadmap for your
organization for where speed is needed,
find the burning platform project to rally
both next generation and traditional
engineering around for the new practices
and process…and make it happen. As
these practices become the new way of
working, both broadcast reliability and
broadband flexibility are achievable.
Next Generation Technology Delivery | 23
Authors
About Accenture
Mark Miller
Accenture is a global management
consulting, technology services
and outsourcing company, with
approximately 336,000 people serving
clients in more than 120 countries.
Combining unparalleled experience,
comprehensive capabilities across
all industries and business functions,
and extensive research on the world’s
most successful companies, Accenture
collaborates with clients to help them
become high-performance businesses
and governments. The company generated
net revenues of US$30.0 billion for
the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2015.
Its home page is www.accenture.com.
Managing Director
Accenture Communications,
Media, and Technology
[email protected]
Youssef Tuma
Managing Director
Accenture Media & Entertainment
[email protected]
Peter McSharry
Senior Manager
Accenture Communications,
Media, and Technology
[email protected]
To learn more, please visit
www.accenture.com/pulseofmedia
Join the conversation:
#pulseofmedia
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