How the leisure industry is learning from Netflix to edge towards pre-Covid levels

By Phil Davies

IT COULD be claimed that the fitness industry has long been at the forefront of technological innovation, with the latest gadgets promising to revolutionise the way we approach health and fitness.

From wearable technology to advanced fitness apps, it’s clear that technology is trying to change the game in many ways.

However, while these advancements have certainly helped people achieve their fitness goals more efficiently, there is one area where technology seems to be falling short.

According to a recent report by UK Active and Sport England, 85 per cent of leisure management operators report feeling limited by the leisure management system they currently use.

Clearly software is falling short when it comes to aiding businesses in their digital transformation journey and providers need to do better. How should they begin to tackle this though?

Perhaps it’s time for the industry to start looking outside of their comfort zones to other sectors which have already experienced the pain of digital transformation, to companies like Netflix and Amazon.

How, you might wonder though, can the fitness industry learn from a company like Netflix, which uses technology to try to keep us glued to a screen?

Or from Amazon for that matter, which uses technology to remove the money from our pockets as efficiently and quickly as possible. Well, let’s take Netflix as an example.

Through necessity, Netflix was, and is, a pioneer in auto-scaling applications. When the world gets home from work and decides it’s time to watch the latest episode of Stranger Things, their platform must adapt quickly to this sudden spike in demand.

Phil Davies

A senior director at Gladstone Software once told me: “Hope is not a strategy.” load.

While he was referring to financial forecasting, his words hold true for technology as well.

It’s not just how these big hitters utilise technology we can learn from though.

The fitness and leisure industry is no different to this in that it experience noticeable spikes in usage. They might come at a different frequency but those spikes will inevitably arrive.

When the new year dawns, for example, and the guilt-ridden masses head in force to the gym, or their local gym’s latest membership offer strikes the right tone and coaxes an unexpected number of new members through the door, tried and trusted legacy software’s might just land gym owner’s in trouble.

There are two potential situations here. Either there is unused capacity sitting there waiting for such events, or there isn’t and systems will begin to creak.

Usually, it’s the latter and there is not much that can be done about it. If the software is running from a server sitting in a room at the back of a facility or, God forbid, on a PC sitting under the counter in reception, then there is no way it can respond.

This is why companies like Netflix invested heavily in auto-scaling technology.

Frameworks such as Kubernetes were created to harness the flexibility of the cloud, to scale an application up when it needs to and then back down again when the load has passed.

Pick an LMS which uses tech such as this and not only will your customers appreciate the uninterrupted service but you’re not going to be paying for all that capacity when you don’t need it.

Without utilising an auto-scaling technology such as Kubernetes, a business is adopting a “fly-by-theseat-of-your-pants” approach to seasonal demand. It’s just hoping it has enough capacity to cope when things get busy.

Digital transformation is starting to happen, of course. It is inevitable. Phrases like containerised applications and microservices architecture are becoming more common when we talk about the next generation of LMS applications and such things can provide real value to business operating in the leisure sector. Again, these are technologies pushed forward by big hitters such as Netflix, Google and Amazon, but what are they and what can the leisure industry learn from them?

A microservices architecture, for example, effectively breaks down software into small elements and boxes these services up in neat little independent bundles.

This provides several benefits. Firstly, if one part of the application is having a problem, those issues will be isolated, and a problem with one part of the LMS won’t bring the whole application to its knees.

Secondly, when trying to fix a bug in some software, most of a developer’s time is spent finding it. If the application is broken down into small pieces like this, bugs become much easier and faster to find.

The fact that everything is in its own little isolated container helps ring fence where things scale too. For example, if the bookings microservices are busy but the new member ones aren’t, then why scale the whole application? You can just scale the part of it which is under n Phil Davies is the chief technical officer at Gladstone Ltd.

There are cultural paradigms at work in companies like Netflix which we should adopt too. They put failure at the heart of what they do.

Everything they build is built knowing that it will, at some point, fail. Developers know this because someone else in business is going make it fail.

Enter the Chaos Monkey. This is a piece of software which goes around randomly terminating processes in their production environment. Yes, you read that correctly.

They deliberately cause chaos in their production environment. Why would they do such a thing? Well, if developers know that at some point their code is definitely going to fail then they are forced to build software which is resilient to such random acts of naughtiness.

There is rich stuff at work in these other businesses, both technically and culturally which we as an industry can appropriate.

We must learn from those who have already made this journey and unleash the chaos monkey.

We should acknowledge that these digital behemoths do not get everything right though.

A recent article by Fast Company highlighted the shortcomings in the user interface design of streaming platforms.

While modern consumer-facing applications in the fitness industry seek to streamline user experience, cutting away much of the nonsense, increasingly these platforms are making their customers jump through hoops to find what they are looking for, so perhaps there is something Netflix and Amazon can learn from us too.