11 Steps to Building a Successful Global Content Business Utilizing Streaming
Hopefully you brought marketing into the product development cycle early, in the concept step. If not, you need to get them involved as soon as possible. Ideally you were able to create the user interface in a way that marketing elements appear throughout the interface. Examples are saved searches, community profiles, the ability to share content with friends, creative product placement in content, and sticky features: always on, alerts, customization, and more.
Step 10: Build Again
At this point in the process you should have a product your consumers love. You know this from the many reports you create. You also have a product that your customers love. You know this from the revenue your company makes. Finally, you have a product that your management loves. You know this from the size of your office, the size of your staff, and the size of your budget.
Now that your product is a success, you have the opportunity to build things right. You have learned throughout the process and have determined the best workflow for your organization. You also know which steps are specific to your product and which can be generalized to handle future expansion and scaling.
Your first step is to start thinking of your infrastructure and product suite as a platform. This platform needs to scale to multiple products, on multiple devices, in multiple locations. This is no easy task. You are trying to go from one product to many overnight. You need your systems to scale.
Start with your production and publishing systems. These are the systems that create content and make it live on your product. Production and publishing often bring broadband and digital streaming back to the linear world. You may have a killer infrastructure with the best editing suites and storage area network but you will be bottlenecked by the fact that a single computer with a single editor can only produce 24 hours worth of work per day. This won’t scale if you want to launch a dozen new products.
The goal is to find ways to centralize as many operational functions as possible without affecting the end user experience. Many times this results in centralized engineering and technical production. What this means is that anything under the hood and non-specific to a product will be centralized somewhere, while parts of the product that touch the consumer will be managed separately. To enable this, you must develop tools and services that allow product groups to launch new business using the centralized components of your infrastructure. This will put you on the path to economies of scale and scope.
The next step is to streamline your workflow. Audit your system and find the breakdown points. Identify bottlenecks and eliminate them. Remember, you are trying to be scalable.
Finally, streamline the user interface. You should have enough feedback from consumers and customers, as well as a large amount of reporting information. Find out what users really want. Make popular features accessible and keep power-user features in an area that power users will find.
The goal of this step is to allow your organization to build multiple incremental businesses off your initial investments.
Step 11: Franchise
You’ve built a product, a fan base, and maybe even a brand. You’ve created a flexible infrastructure and platform. Your management team is pleased with the return on their investment and is looking for more. They see broadband video as a part of the future of the business and need to see you generate revenues that will sustain returns they have seen on other traditional businesses. What do you do?
There are three ways to look at growth: by genre, by device, and by location. Since you built your platform and infrastructure right, you have the ability to grow your company’s revenue significantly without having to make major investments in infrastructure or product development. This internal sale should be a lot easier than the initial pitch.
One area of growth is across genres. You need to be aware of your brand before diving into this growth area. If you are an auto-racing content company, you probably want to avoid jumping into do-it-yourself shows for making ballet shoes. However, if your company is a large media business, you might be able to leverage your platform by offering other divisions of your company the opportunity to develop broadband networks of their own using your infrastructure. Most media companies have already done this to some extent. For smaller companies, you can find partners that may want to piggyback on your technology or that may want to pay you to lease space on your infrastructure.
One of the biggest advantages of broadband and streaming technology is that you can grow virtually. A lot of the work you have put in to your broadband product can be leveraged to other devices such as wireless and interactive television. Your infrastructure, production workflow, and metadata systems should all be reused for these other platforms. A single video products unit in your company should be able to support multiple devices, multiple products, and multiple revenue streams.
Finally, the biggest franchise opportunity for your product is to grow globally. Like most content programmers, you probably started by building out a quality product for your local market (most likely the U.S.). That means you can currently reach, at maximum, 300 million people. There are about six billion more out there for you to go after.
Growing internationally and becoming a global business is no easy task. Entire business school textbooks have been written about the topic and you can find new articles weekly in business journals about global strategy. Given the nature of the technology and the way you constructed your systems, you have an opportunity to leverage your platform to enable multiple products overseas. One approach is to identify markets that offer potential for your content and your business. You can use broadband video as a driving force for entering those markets. Broadband is much cheaper and easier to implement than more traditional media platforms and offers you the freedom to leverage existing assets.
After identifying your markets, you can categorize your opportunities by global, regional, and local products. Global products refer to products that are available anywhere to anyone. Some companies might refer to these products as English-language global products. Others refer to them as global platforms with local extensions. Regional products refer to platforms that serve large regions like Latin America or Europe. With regional products, the hope is that you can create successful businesses that one day can branch out into local businesses. Local products are created specifically for certain markets.
Creating local products on your new platform is not without costs. Costs can be quite high if you take into account manpower, marketing, rights acquisition, and production. The value however is that, because of your platform, local product development is no longer impossible. With your platform, you give your company the ability to enter strategic markets with comparative ease.
When starting your own broadband streaming network, use these steps as guiding principles. This article is not a manual for building a broadband network and each step could easily be expanded into its own article. This should, however, provide bigger picture ideas about what to think about when starting development so that you can create opportunities for future growth.
The author can be reached at bhatia@tejmedia.com.