Birlasoft’s media and broadcast services team attended the Asia Tech x event in Singapore in June 2022. We observed primary media and broadcast technology accelerations on the conference stage and in meetings with flagship vendors and enterprises.
Key Takeaways from Singapore's ATxAI Conference 2022
Multi-modal Digital User Engagement Hub Is a Core Differentiator in the Multi-screen Era
In today’s connected digital economy, media enterprises, especially digital service providers (telecommunication operators, cable TV, and satellite TV), are aggressively embarking on building both horizontal (TV, video, gaming, music, etc.) and vertical (e-learning, e-health, essentials, etc.) integrated digital services ecosystem. This has led to the creation of loosely coupled, multi-faceted digital user engagement touch points across these heterogeneous services portfolios on a long-term basis. A good example is a digital user A subscribing to music streaming, gaming, and pay-TV with a virtual chatbot, e-mail, and voice as a preferred mode as compared to digital user B having access to IPTV, OTT on STB, and gambling with a preference towards video, and messaging based engagement touch points. Traditionally, media enterprises have siloed engagement lifecycle management for each digital service, enhancing operational inefficiencies, churn, and revenue leakages. As engagement rates and TCO reduction become the primary KPIs for most digital service providers (DSPs), the convergence of single-user lifecycle management across multiple services is crucial for long-term sustainability. Therefore, the highly fragmented multi-screen TV & video services era is paving the way for creating a unified engagement hub.
- One of the fastest emerging contact center providers in India with tight pre-integrated plug-ins with Salesforce, Zendesk, Phonebridge, and Zoho offers a unified but modular software enabling enterprises to converge their customer engagement touchpoints, i.e., voice, e-mail, chatbot, video, messaging, and social media networks into a single hub. This can be further improvised to create a digital user persona to assist in predicting churn along with inefficiencies and sentiment analysis across multiple entertainment services. This eventually improves net promoter score (NPS) and loyalty rates across the digital user via streamlining the customer engagement workflow and easing service-based collaboration, i.e., remote, hybrid and decentralized workgroup support for agents, etc.
As the aggregation and launch of newer (local and regional) digital services continue to rise for DSPs, transforming customer service into a highly scalable, agile, and hybrid (supporting remote and decentralized workgroup collaboration) engagement hub will be necessary to meet changing business requirements on the long run.
Premium User Experience Anywhere Must Be in Today’s Connected App Economy
In 2022, on average, a virtual pay-TV user leverages 13.5 video services per month, almost double than 7.4 in 2021 (Source: Media, February 2022). Furthermore, the fragmentation of devices utilized for accessing these multiple video services within a single household also continue to rise, i.e., smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, connected TV, set-top boxes, etc., resulting in adding newer challenges for DSP, especially telecom operators, internet service providers, and cable TV operators on the long-run. Lowering digital service disruption on multiple platforms without offsetting premium quality of experience and engagement is fast becoming a primary complexity and KPI for most DSPs attributed to the need for protecting churn and profitability margins. Predictive analytics and recommendations to DSPs on building newer monetization avenues and enhancing operational productivity to meet changing digital user preferences are also pivotal in today's connected app economy. This paves the way for leveraging technology stacks that enable DSPs to build a premium UX ecosystem anywhere:
- Video services app segmentation by metadata via cognitive services (AI/ML)
- Connected devices ecosystem synthesis based on multi-faceted parameters such as type, model, versions, etc.
- QoE (quality of experience) centric data syndication, i.e., backhaul interfaces, Wi-Fi, home devices, and video services applications
- Continuous monitoring of anomalies across both internal and external workflows, including network configurations, etc.
- Real-time actionable recommendations and intelligence to lower revenue leakages and churn
One of the fast-growing Israeli SaaS-based modular (Care, Active, and Engage) software providers focus on internet service providers (ISPs) and telecommunication operators, providing analytics via syndication of real-time and non-real-time data across workflow devices, and platform through an agent pre-configuration on the router. This assists DSPs with unified actionable intelligence to not only prevent churn but also streamline subscriber lifecycle management on an ongoing basis.
As DSPs aggressively expand their digital services portfolio (includes both entertainment and non-entertainment) and embark on a multi-screen-based growth strategy, enabling them to deliver cost-effective premium user experience at scale will be vital for long-term revenue growth.
Managing Islands of Data at Scale Is Essential for the Competitive Edge
Gartner highlights that global public cloud services spending is estimated to reach US$494.7bn, with year-on-year growth of 20.4% in 2022. This spend will reach US$600bn in the next 12 months (2022-2023). As the adoption of cloud infrastructure, solutions, and workflows surge across all industries, including media & entertainment (M&E), this creates an impending long-run challenge is continuously managing the associated data (including both relational and non-relational databases). Also, as streamlining and unification of data management (including infrastructure) is critical for faster time to market, this will eventually pave the way for embracing technology stacks that reduce these back-bone complexities.
- An open-source data infrastructure vendor based out of Helsinki with an enterprise valuation of close to US$3bn offers converged cloud services (data ingestion, storage, analysis to visualization modules) portfolio enabling media companies to focus on enriching their enterprise application lifecycle rather than the back-end ecosystem. The company has an intense penetration across Europe and the United States (Comcast, ITV, and Match.com are tier-I referenceable customers) with an employee base of 400.
As cloud migration lies at the epicenter of the media transformation journey, this will eventually create enterprise-wide siloed data islands. This results in a push toward building a horizontally and vertically integrated data infrastructure framework and configuration to lower operational insufficiencies and accelerate time to market (TTM).
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