7. What business are you in?
a) Creating, marketing, distributing
and monetizing great content
b) Server provisioning and
maintenance
Focus: Tech talent working on
low-value activities
11. Using best talent or just proximate talent?
Are you optimizing for collaboration
AND security?
Time wasted waiting on resources to
free up on-premises?
Organization: Constrained by
physical locations
15. Process: Linear, monolithic
product development
Are your releases keeping up with
audience expectations?
Can you quickly pivot to new form
factors and experiences?
How quickly can you understand and
act on data?
25. AWS makes it easy to build innovative products and
quickly get those products to market. The breadth and
depth of AWS services and their pace of innovation for new
capabilities have allowed us to consistently improve the
quality and speed of the Clippers CourtVision product.
— Rajiv Maheswaran, CEO, Second Spectrum
26. Are teams empowered to try new things?
If successful, how quickly can they scale?
If unsuccessful, does it have bottom line
impact?
Finance: Fear of failure
28. — Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services
Invention requires two
things: the ability to try a
lot of experiments, and
not having to live with
the collateral damage of
failed experiments.
34. Our Goal
KKStream provides our customers
the Best Market-Proven Streaming
Technology and most Reliable Services
starting from Japan
aiming all over-the-world
35. Agenda
1. Migrate to OTT? Why?
2. Challenges
3. What we have done
4. Conclusion/Takeaway
image source: undraw.co
37. Reach large scale
of audience
Increase the
usability and
features
Economically scale
out/in without
investing physical
infrastructure
image source: undraw.co
39. Challenges
1. Private network vs. Public network
General
2. On-premise vs. Cloud
3. Traditional TV vs. OTT
image source: undraw.co
40. Challenges
1. Integrate with on-premise encoder
that can’t be changed.
JP Market
2. In time alert (1 min.) when system
is going to be unstable.
3. Catch-up TV needs to be frame-
accurate cut by the program time and
published within 15 minutes.
image source: undraw.co
56. Life under and after COVID-19
KKStream saved our clients
CDN consumption through
PTE such that there are
more CDN margin for either
keeping video quality or
reducing network impact.
Save 2PB
bandwidth
Can Help
For the AWS Media & Entertainment team, what we’re hearing from customers isn’t questions on how to save money, or at least the conversation doesn’t start there. It’s about how to innovate faster in an environment where the old business models are stagnating to declining and audiences have more choice than ever before.
What’s the importance of innovation for you/your company?
What are some of the biggest blockers in your organization for innovating as fast as your audiences?
What I wanted to focus on today is not about what Amazon has done innovation, but rather how some of the pioneering media brands have used the cloud to solve some of the biggest organizational blockers to innovation.
To start, consider how much the industry has changed. Before, entertainment meant the family gathered around the TV to watch one of three broadcast networks.
Now every person in the house has their own screen set to wholly different experiences (broadcast sports, Twitch, YouTube, Netflix, gaming, etc). As a result, media companies have had to rethink everything from the bottom up:
Rethink how they produce content
Rethink how they distribute and monetize
Rethink how they gather and act on user data
The key to this transformation is to reorient around the consumer – from targeting households to now the individual.
The truth is there is no crystal ball that anyone, not even Amazon, can use to predict fickle consumer tastes. Especially in a world of near limitless choice and no 2-year contracts to hold them down.
Jeff B gets to the heart of this in his 2016 shareholder letter. If you assume your customers are dissatisfied, then you will be on a mission to continuously innovate on their behalf.
AWS is already helping established and emerging media companies at each step of the media value chain – from content creation, to media supply chain, to monetization and distribution. Several of the largest media companies have announced that they are either all-in on AWS or AWS is their preferred cloud provider, including The Walt Disney Company, Fox, Verizon, and Comcast NBCUniversal, with others like the NFL and Formula 1 selecting AWS as their machine learning provider to create next generation fan experiences
In this discussion, we will talk about what some of AWS’s customers are telling us. This is how some of the most innovative media companies are using AWS to
Ensure they are focusing on creating, marketing, and distributing great content
Creating an organization with a truly global view to their audience, their talent, and their capabilities
Develop agile, flexible processes that allow them to pivot to where their audiences are going
And foster an environment of experimentation, where you fail with limited costs but succeed with scale
Starting with focus, it comes down to understanding your business. Are you, as a media company, in the business of creating, marketing, distributing, and monetizing great content? Or are you deploying talent and resources towards server provisioning and maintenance?
And one of the first principles we see in innovative media customers is focus, specifically focusing their talent on that which is strategic
For Netflix, they were looking to become the firstly truly direct-to consumer global TV network.
I invite everyone to read this post from the Netflix blog when they completed their migration to the cloud back in 2016. They touch on many fascinating topics around how cloud has enabled scale and complexity unimaginable in an on-premises environment, but key to becoming a cloud native company has been how it has allowed their developer and engineering resources to shift away from being System Administrators to instead true DevOps accelerating innovation: But that move wasn’t just about lift and shifting infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud. It was about making sure they had the right skills for a new way of operating, so either retraining or bringing in new talent in order to get these new skills necessary to take advantage of what it means to be a cloud-native organization.
Something common we hear from our largest customers is they want to stop thinking about infrastructure and instead focus on creating, distributing, marketing, and monetizing great content…the things that build closer bonds with their audience.
As you consider what Netflix has been able to deliver despite relatively small headcount, you see the importance of tying talent back to strategic, revenue-generating activities versus what we at AWS call undifferentiated hardware provisioning and maintenance
Next is organizational constraints,
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specifically looking at the organization as the people and resources that you house in a physical location. In media, and particularly in content production, collaboration is a necessity across internal and external service vendors from filming through to visual effects to editing to sound mixers to finalizing and so on.
And as media companies start taking a global view about their audiences, they can also take advantage of talent and capabilities that extend beyond the studio lot. For example, taking advantage of editors in Nashville, or thinking about computing power for rendering beyond the limited number of servers that fit into a physical footprint. And as you collaborate internally and externally, moving faster than physical hard drives or tapes shared though normal mail, and more securely.
So how do you produce more, faster? You can’t easily spin up more artists on demand. But you can approach time as a commodity.
Artists are the most valuable and expensive resource for creative houses and studios. With cloud capacity, time becomes the commodity you can control.
With our studio customers, one of the biggest trends has been about global collaboration for content. Different creatives in different locations coming together to develop IP. The old way of shipping hard drives just can’t keep up with audience expectations for a constant stream of new, high quality content.
For the Russia World Cup in 2018, Fox Sports had a full production crew over in Russia to cover each game on site, a studio team in Moscow providing live coverage and commentary, and editors in Los Angeles delivering highlights to the Moscow team for live coverage of each game. Normally it would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring each editor to Moscow for the duration of the World Cup along with space and equipment for them to work. But by working with partners IBM Aspera. Reach Engine, and Levels Beyond on the AWS Cloud, they were able to provide full end-to-end coverage using their best global talent for each distinct portion of the workflow.
The next blocker to innovation is the product development process, which is traditionally linear and monolithic.
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As you look to delight audiences with short attention spans, are your product releases keeping up with their expectations? As new form factors like augmented reality or 8K emerge, are you able to quickly integrate into the experiences you deliver?
And how quickly can you course correct based on performance and audience data? Like recently Sony had to redesign the main character in the Sonic the Hedgehog movie based on social media outcry after the trailer was released.
We think the way to build agility into your process is with a cloud-native architecture.
But what exactly does it mean to be cloud native? How does it enable agile product iteration and development so you can ideate, prototype, test, and scale new audience experiences in weeks/days/hours, not months/years. How quickly are you able to understand what your data is telling you and then using that to pivot?
Let’s take walk through a simple analogy of what the product development cycle looks like in the traditional way which is very much towards hard-wired monolith applications
Under traditional development, you build up your finished toy through a linear method, where the final product is at the tail end of several dependencies. That is, you can’t build the full toy until you’ve done the injection molded parts which rely on molds which rely on clay models of the toy, etc.
In many ways this makes intuitive sense. However, this method is very rigid, and more importantly, in a highly competitive environment like M&E, too time consuming.
But when you think of rapid development in a cloud-native approach
Think of microservices as a big bag of blocks available for your product teams to use to build.
They use business requirements as their instructions for what functions they need to deliver at the end
And then within a short amount of time…hours or days or weeks, not months or years…
….they are able to stand up a proof of concept or minimum viable product
Let’s zoom in on this proof of concept. First, it lacks fine detail. It’s recognizable but not exactly what was asked for.
But it’s easy to modify and extend. And this is the important part. There are tradeoffs but media industry is a place where speed matters. The ability to stand up a proof of concept to get initial testing or audience feedback.
And as you get into this feedback loop, you can start specializing and refining components for this product.
Again, here the emphasis is on speed so you can start learning from consumers without losing months and making a large upfront investment in specialized components for production
Looking at these two methods – linear and monolithic versus rapid development – there is no right or wrong but definite tradeoffs. For Media & Entertainment, product development needs to prioritize quick iterations and optimizations based on real audience feedback.
Comcast uses AWS in a hybrid environment to innovate and deploy features for its flagship video product, XFINITY X1, several times a week instead of once every 12-18 months under its old architecture.
In addition to serving their own customers, Comcast has been able to built a business from their cutting-edge, cloud-based X1 platform. Other US cable operators like Cox Communications deploy white-label versions of X1.
For Second Spectrum, which built this application with the Clippers, the ability to quickly innovate in this market is key as they continuously add new features and new extensions to the fan experience.
Key to rapid development is making failure part of the iterative process.
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Are you set up to take advantage of the talent of everyone across your organization, from marketing or production or any group, to find new ways to engage your customers? If successful with ten customers, can you expand to a hundred or a thousand or millions? Or if something doesn’t pan out, does it means months of work and millions of dollars down the drain or else a few weeks and a few thousand bringing you closer to success? The closer you connect action with result, the faster you travel up the learning curve
You have to go into this comfortable knowing that most of these tests will fail: are you set up to fail 9 times out of 10; and then take that one success and build on it to reach millions or tens of millions?
Core to how we designed features and services on AWS is the idea of testing them quickly to understand the potential innovation value to you and your customers. As Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, says, “invention requires two things: the ability to try a lot of experiments, and not having to live with the collateral damage of failed experiments.” This collateral damage can take many forms: sunk costs, lost time, and perhaps worst of all, developing a culture of caution and not wanting to mess up.
After moving to the cloud, Live Nation generated a 10x increase to the innovation pipeline. One of the keys was reducing the cost of failure. With no large fixed costs, and moving to an OpEx model enabled by the pay-as-you-go nature of AWS, your calculus for testing and scaling changes. If things work you have compute and storage services scaling up to demand. If things don’t work, well then you spin down. Now you are talking about tests that take a few days of developer time and a few hundred dollars, not teams of data scientists and developers with fixed upfront server costs working months.
You can read the full economic analysis for Live Nation’s move to the AWS cloud on the Media Blog. Besides TCO for on-premises versus AWS cloud, our economics team took a deeper dive into how this enabled Live Nation to become much more nimble and efficient
In conclusion, architecting innovation for media companies isn’t about the technology stack, it’s about first thinking through business strategy, focusing your talent on the work that differentiates you in your audiences’ eyes, and then figuring out how to empower your frontline folks in tech, marketing, product and other business groups to test and scale quickly, with low costs for failure but scalable returns for successful insights.
Netflix, Comcast, the NFL, Live Nation, and many others: these are AWS customers who have looked at some of the blockers that kept them from moving as quickly as they wanted in a fast changing media landscape. As you go through your own journey to the cloud, we would be proud to talk about your story and how AWS can help you become the next case study in architecting innovation.