Ooyala: “Content supply chain efficiency could make or break Disney+”
April 16, 2019
Following the unveiling of Disney’s new streaming service, Bea Alonso, Director of Global Product Marketing at Ooyala, has shared her thoughts on the importance of the supply chain to the platform’s success.
Alonso said: “This is the first big move in the content arms race currently underway in the industry. To date this has been driven by Netflix’s enormous investment in online content licensing, and the creation of original content, but Disney making plays to get a slice of the pie comes as no surprise. This platform’s content supply chain, and specifically how efficient it turns out to be, however, could make or break the venture. It all comes down to powering a streamlined media factory: deploying a content supply chain which delivers great experiences but also stops budgets from skyrocketing out of control. Netflix is known for its end-user experience and mammoth investments in original content, but its biggest differentiator is its supply chain, particularly when it comes to enabling such rapid expansion into niche, regionalised markets with uber-efficient anytime, anywhere distribution.”
“The way to improve speed and efficiency in a content supply chain is to connect and manage all its components, making it as flexible and organic as possible. With a disconnected content supply chain, a content producer may need to work with an asset management system, a separate content archive, and different ingest and distribution platforms, all running in silos. Such supply chain needs rethinking to provide an operations centre: a single point of truth and workflow orchestration across the entire organisation. Automation has been such a big topic in the industry for just this reason. For example with AI a content producer could more than halve the time it takes to regionalise a particular piece of content, allowing them to scale rapidly. Automation helps customers deal with a much more fragmented market, and compete in the content arms race, by delivering more volume of engaging content to their audiences in less time and at lower cost.”
“The only way for content producers to start to compete with Amazon or Netflix, and achieve the same scale quickly, is to shape-up their content supply chain,” Alonso concluded.