Saving money in the media supply chain

6 RULES TO LIVE BY

Arguably the top priority for media businesses in 2025 is to reduce operational costs. But that’s easier said than done when you’re faced with increasing content delivery demands for an ever-evolving consumer landscape. Based on our real-world experience working with international media organisations, we’ve put together six principles to help you save money across the content supply chain.

1. You can’t monetise what you can’t see.

There are vast libraries of unmanaged content running into the 10s of petabytes at a number of the big production labels – much of which isn’t even available as a browsable version. This media may as well not exist as you can’t monetise what you can’t see.  This is a common situation that’s increasing due to the significant M&A activity in the industry where multiple media catalogues have been combined from once separate production and distribution companies. But large volume content management is not an insurmountable problem. The first priority for any content owner or rights holder should be to bring everything under management so that you understand what content is in the library. Connect the MAM to the media, wherever it is, and have it register the material, generate a visible browse version, and hoover up as much metadata as you can find.  If there really is no data, a simple microservice program can automatically generate metadata based on the information contained in your filenames. You might be surprised by how far this will take you.

2. Nobody move anything, until you know what it is.

An end-to-end media supply chain is not synonymous with the cloud. Your media and the workflows involved in creating, managing and delivering content across various platforms and tools can be controlled and observable whether it’s in the cloud, on the ground (on-prem’) or any combination of the two. Bringing media under management doesn’t mean moving it to the cloud or anywhere else. Once you’ve registered the assets and made them visible  (see point 1 above) you can make an informed, value based, business decision as to where the most appropriate place is for them to be stored.  Too often we hear media execs talking about their cloud strategy rather than the business strategy and ‘the cloud’ as an outcome whereas it should be viewed as a component – albeit an extremely powerful component – of a business objective. 

3. Clean as you go.

Cloud services can deliver significant flexibility and efficiency. Equally, storing material in cloud storage has accessibility and security benefits.  But cloud storage is definitely not the least expensive option.  So, if you choose to migrate your content into the cloud, it’s worth getting your housekeeping done before you make the move.  First understand what you have, what condition it’s in, what the likely value is, and what rights you hold.  Other simple housekeeping tasks such as material deduplication or identifying minutes of colour black run out from a digitised tape, or camera pointing at ground rushes can also be carried out with the material in situ.  The 90’s broadcast engineers’ joke of operators inadvertently archiving hundreds of hours of colour bars isn’t quite so funny when you move from a $10/TB LTO to incrementally priced cloud storage.

For this reason, we tend to support a controlled migration of content and workflows to the cloud rather than the ‘forklift content and sort it out when it gets there’ approach.

4. You don’t need to shut down existing systems to modernise your operation.

Your ‘legacy’ systems can, and probably do, still deliver value. There’s no need to change your entire technology ecosystem just because you want to introduce new tools, streamline your workflows or take advantage of cloud scale. In a constantly developing technology landscape, the best approach is to integrate, not deprecate. Your MAM orchestration platform should integrate with both legacy and new technologies so that existing systems can continue to deliver value while new tools – such as AI applications – can be readily incorporated into workflows to support ever changing business needs.  At Blue Lucy we achieve this by using our BLAM microservice architecture to connect disparate systems and enable a controlled migration to modern workflows.

5. It doesn’t matter where the content is. No, really.

The actual location of your content should have no bearing on your ability to monetize it. Your MAM should provide easy and uniform access to all your assets, no matter where the ops’ team or the media is physically located.  On-prem and cloud storage should be viewed interchangeably rather than one being for operations, such as fulfilment, and the other for the “safety copy” because your MAM ‘knows’ where the material is and can be configured to use the most appropriate repository. And, if your operation is all cloud, then the need for a “safety copy” is moot as the cloud vendor can provide multi-copy resilient storage through simple configuration.  80% of Blue Lucy BLAM deployments are hybrid and use both cloud and ground storage.

6. Start small and work incrementally.                   

Big bang “Transformation” projects are dead, and good riddance.  Big projects cost big money, carry big risk and often end up in big disappointment (when they’re not quietly killed).  Even the successful ones take a long time to deliver value, and the true RoI rarely moves the needle on the CFO’s dashboard, certainly after the long-departed big consultancy company fees are included.

Instead, big projects can be delivered in small steps using modern service-based technology and open APIs.  That’s why we recommend focussing projects on end-to-end solutions for a thin, horizontal operational slice.  This approach proves the technology and the business case with minimal risk and delivers measurable value incrementally, building confidence with each slice and allowing a rapid change of direction if necessary. If your service provider or vendor can’t demonstrate value within 6 weeks of any project starting, you may want to reconsider working with them.

Interested in learning how Blue Lucy’s BLAM and BOLT platforms can help you save money in 2025?  Get in touch!