IABM Annual International Business Conference 2016
The IABM Annual International Business Conference took place in London on 1st-2nd December 2016 with a record number of international delegates attending. Around a theme of ‘Transformation and Collaboration’, an exceptional collection of speakers led us through all the challenges our industry is facing today – and provided delegates with plenty of food for thought and action to help their businesses not just survive, but thrive in today’s rapidly changing business environment. This article can only scratch the surface of some of the key themes explored – the reader can visit the IABM website to see videos of all the sessions for an in-depth picture.
How is the industry doing? IABM CEO, Peter White, opened the conference with an update on the state of the industry, based on the very latest IABM research. “The IABM September 2016 end-user survey showed that in 2016 only 20% of respondents were getting
80-100% of their revenues from traditional operations, compared with 46% in 2012. Looking forward 2-3 years, this figure drops to just 11%,” White said. “Consequently, this is driving spending on new media activities, and a massive search for efficiency – with 30% putting this as their top priority in their spending, followed closely by total cost of ownership, support and interoperability. Despite all this change, end-users remain optimistic, with 70% expecting either to increase or stay level on advertising revenues and 78% on subscription revenues. Overall, the sector remains in good financial health. One of the key qualitative measures that IABM reports on is its Confidence Ratio among suppliers. From a two-year low of 4.1 at the end of 2015, this has risen to 10 in the most recent survey, reflecting increasing optimism among the supplier community. After a period of uncertainty, we are now facing up to all the challenges the transforming media landscape is throwing at us, with 61% of suppliers now feeling quite positive or very positive. For end-users, this figure is 76%,” White concluded.
IABM Annual International Business Conference 2016 Caryn Cohen Director North America, IABM
IABM has gained traction during 2015 in the North American region and 2016 is set to be even better.
Get on the roller – or you’ll be on the road
Agility is the springboard
Disruption – and how to embrace it by transforming your business – weaved its way through practically all the sessions. “It’s a tumultuous, turbulent time in technology, but there is huge opportunity; keep your head in a swivel,” offered Corey Bridges, CEO of LifeMap Solutions (and one of the founders of Netflix). Bridges was one of several speakers to quote Intel founder Andy Grove’s famous statement that ‘only the paranoid survive’. “The key to success in this disruptive world is to have trouble sleeping – always worrying about who’s going to eat your lunch,” Bridges added.
It’s one thing to tell people they need to change, but what are the keys to unlocking it – and success? A number of speakers agreed that agility is central to success here. Harris Morris, CEO, Wazee Digital, put it into practical terms. “We are in a perfect storm, and facing a massive challenge – different people are needed to do different things while carrying on with traditional operations too. Don’t rest on your laurels – you need to deserve, not preserve. You need to reach every single potential customer. You have to figure out how to do this, and we’re not very good at this at the moment – even Netflix.”
David Ingham, Associate Partner M&E, IBM, added, “Competitive pressure is increasing but many companies are wedded to an incremental transformation approach. The digital economy requires reinvention – driven by new expertise, new focus and new ways of working. The industry will never change this slowly again!” Keynote speaker Rasmus Ankersen, the bestselling author, entrepreneur and performance development expert, galvanized the audience with his presentation – based on the idea that ‘if it ain’t broke, consider breaking it’. “Complacency leads to vulnerability; the best companies treat success with the same degree of skepticism as they do failure,” he said. “Superficially, you may look successful, but the underliers can tell a different story. Don’t wait until the platform is burning before you change – it will already be too late.”
“Media companies need operational agility to compete for eyeballs – they have to cater for multiple sources and deliver to multiple platforms,” added Joop Janssen, CEO, Aperi. “This means they need to instantly turn services on and off and reconfigure them on demand, be able to cope with all formats now and in the future, make innovations and new features available immediately, and pay as they use – through metered and floating licences.” Steve Reynolds, CTO, Imagine Communications, added, “The industry is moving from premises-based infrastructure, which is static, expensive and non-scalable, to cloud and virtualization, which is dynamic, cost-effective and highly scalable. We are entering an APIdriven world – an API economy that is fast, agile and responsive – giving customers the choice where to run their services via dynamic infrastructure mapping.” Larry Kaplan, President, SDVI introduced the concept of the Supply Chain. “Programmable deployment of shared technical resources, wherever they are, is now possible in our industry. The Supply Chain eliminates waste in terms of resource utilization and infrastructure agility.”
Quality is about the whole viewing experience
Big data – know your audience
The quality of the content that media companies offer to their audience is the backbone that enables that total monetization – while containing costs. “Now there is a real transition to viewing on streaming devices – more is being consumed so discovery of content is the number one priority,” said Morris. “Rip out cost so you can reach everyone cost-effectively - and don’t leave revenue on the table. We as suppliers can do this by eating less – just as the survivors of the dinosaur age did, making them nimbler, faster and lighter. This means you can run faster, so shortening development cycles to days instead of months or years.”
“Social media is driving viewer engagement and is increasingly important in news,” said White. “Analytics are at the heart of social media success, and we are seeing broadcasters partnering with analytics technology vendors to enable them to better understand their audiences – a major advantage that internet-based operations such as Netflix, Google and Amazon already have. Big data is becoming increasingly central to all media operators’ businesses.”
Tom Griffiths, Director of Broadcast and Distribution Technology for ITV, built on this theme. “A great looking picture without compelling content is a waste of time. My priority is delivering this total experience for less money. How do we monetize our content outside traditional TV? We are investing to save – can we deliver that quality for a lower operating cost?” Andy Quested, Head of Technology, BBC HD & UHD added, “People will pay for quality, but they won’t for the lack of it. Is the move from HD to UHD a diminishing return? It’s about total immersion; you want the glass removed and we’ve still got a way to go to achieve this. We also need to consider the digital shelf. HD lasted less than 10 years – Planet Earth 1 was HD, Planet Earth 2 is 4K.”
Everything is moving into the cloud The cloud was also a central theme of the conference – all agreed that everything is moving into the cloud, and everything we need will run as services in the cloud on a licence model – a major driver of the disruption we are experiencing. What the cloud brings is agility – instant services and only paying for what you use. In the short term though, media technology suppliers will feel the pinch. Graham Pitman, Chairman of Yospace and Vice Chair of IABM, put this elegantly: “Finding a commercial model that works for both suppliers and end-users is quite difficult – suppliers will have to go through a hungry holiday!” Paul Flook, Head of Broadcast Engineering, ITN added, “Our current utilization is appalling – 15-20%. I would like to be able to spin up a pay-by-use resource in five minutes without
even having to think about it – all without licencing issues,” he said. Marina Kalkanis, CEO of M2A Media, added, “Using the cloud means you can flex services and deliver a quality that’s appropriate for that content and audience. Latency can be as important as picture quality – seeing the goal scored in stunning quality but 60 seconds after the event is no use to anyone!” Post production facilities are also turning to the cloud. Roy Trosh, Group Technical Director, The Mill, added, “We are receiving more and more demands for photo-real rendering – whether it’s the Waitrose robin or the SSE orangutan. This means we need more and more compute power, so we are becoming a bigger and bigger user of the cloud. All our big features are rendered in the cloud.”
Collaboration and standards Collaboration was another major theme than ran throughout the sessions. “Competition has not gone away, but individual companies no longer have big enough budgets to bulldoze their own standard through; people know they’re going to have to work together,” said Naomi Climer, Trustee, IET/IBC Council/Chair of DCMS FCCG. Mike Cronk, Chairman of AIMS, VP Core Technology, Grass
Valley, added, “The reason we need more collaboration is that the pace of change is increasing. AIMS recognized that a whole lot of things needed to happen to enable IP, but much faster than the old ways would allow. AIMS members are fiercely competitive, but they know that if they go their own way without interfacing, they will die. People are building SMPTE 2110-based systems before the standard has even been finished. A fast-fail methodology needs to be adopted – implement as you go.” Howard Lukk, SMPTE Director of Standards, added that the organization is committed to getting the main parts of the SMPTE 2110 family of standards completed by NAB 2017 and every effort is underway to make this happen.
Conclusion The conference brought together suppliers and end-users as never before. The will to collaborate to transform their businesses and the wider industry shone through. Peter White summed it up: “As long as suppliers continue to tap into end-users’ needs and desires, there is clearly a healthy potential business outlook; ongoing collaboration between suppliers and end-users will be key in realising this.”