Insights from the IBC Floor

Blue Lucy’s key takeaways from this year’s show: Attendance at this year’s IBC was apparently flat, and the numbers suggest market confidence is still a little fragile. But the show offered some fascinating opportunities for the Blue Team. It was a great to meet new industry professionals, take part in straight-talking panels, and feel the pulse of the industry.  Here’s what stood out:

YouTube, YouTube, YouTube

The phenomenal growth in YouTube viewing stats on Smart TVs has been well publicised and was the subject of much conversation on panels and on the show floor. If you don’t have a commercial strategy for YouTube you are missing a proven revenue stream and risk “slipping into irrelevance”.  Blue Lucy’s approach to YouTube, which allows operators to directly manage their inventories on the platform in the context of rights assertion and ensure take-down requests are adhered to, is nicely covered in our recent case study with Banijay Rights

FinOps is Fashionable

Well, not quite, but media companies are finding out that “cloud” in itself is not a strategy. CFOs are rightly paying closer attention to cloud costs, the operational benefits and tangible RoI – and are challenging some fashionable orthodoxies. FinOps has become a key function to ensure commercially sustainable operations, and it is becoming clear that hybrid models have a vital role to play in balancing flexibility and cost. For many media operations the most business-savvy strategy may be to sweat the assets that they have, and mitigate cost risk by migrating services to the cloud iteratively and validating the RoI as you go.  Blue Lucy’s project approach supports this model and delivers measurable value fast. Find out more about our iterative approach as point 6 in our earlier blog post.

Content Liquidity

We love this new term – well new to us anyway – as it embodies how we think about media supply operations. Our BLAM Content Factory helps unlock the commercial value of your inventory by providing highly configurable workflows to distribute your content on a huge range of consumer and intermediary platforms.  With hundreds of integrations, truly scalable automation, and fast to deploy capability the Content Factory delivers rapid time to value. Together with our BOLT Content Hub – a super simple to use content discovery platform – Blue Lucy delivers powerful business enablers.

Now to carry on with the follow up trails and business-focused ‘proof of concept’ implementations.  Thanks again to Team Blue for a brilliant show, the insightful conversations, and the great shirts!