Julian Wright

We’ve been mulling over our experiences at IBC last week and digesting some of the excellent reports and engaging sessions from the likes of Caretta Research, the IABM, and the IBC conference. It’s not Halloween yet, but they certainly made for chilling reading. There were 3 rather depressing major standouts for us, but it’s never all doom and gloom at Blue Lucy Towers…

• Tech needs to either make money or save money.
  This is of course a universal truth, but it was a big theme at the show. Large scale multi-year broadcast infrastructure projects are as good as dead. Broadcasters’ profits are down, and job cuts are widespread. In this climate every £ and $ spent needs to be justified by rapid, tangible ROI, and projects need to be delivering value as they unfold, not at some point in the distant future. Our recent blog post outlines the Blue Lucy approach to rapidly delivering business value through iterative implementation. This project approach gives feedback at every stage and gives you opportunity to refocus when things change – you can read more here
  
• Planned investment in 2025 is 14% lower than in 2024
  In such an uncertain business climate it’s no surprise that spending plans for next year are down. Projects that involve a wholesale replacement of tech will be fewer and further between. That’s why technologies that can integrate with existing, proven workflows and deliver further efficiencies will succeed. Integrate, don’t deprecate! Check out Blue Lucy’s integrations and get in touch to learn more.
  
• It’s content that drives business KPIs for media companies, so tech spend is being squeezed.
  This is, frankly, as it should be but against this backdrop it’s little wonder that business confidence levels within the technology supply community are below 2022 levels. Many of the traditionally buoyant tech speciality areas are in decline, so why are we so bullish? Because our business continues to grow.  And because Blue Lucy has a toolset that allows media organisations to take a rapid, cost effective and genuinely low risk approach to operational transformation – be it in driving efficiency or exploiting new market opportunities with solutions such as BOLT, our new easy to use content portal.

Want to explore how Blue Lucy can give you reasons to be cheerful in an uncertain business climate? Get in touch to find out more.

How easy is it for large, broad scope projects to deliver actual business value?

It’s a fact that our industry is littered with quietly, and not so quietly, abandoned big technology projects. Trade shows and networking events are frequently awash with talk of delays, cancellations and scope contractions for contracts that once grabbed the headlines. This begs the question: Has the industry lost sight of the importance of value? And how long is too long to wait for your technology initiatives to deliver tangible value to your organisation?  

Here at Blue Lucy we are used to implementing integration projects at scale, and although we have some battle scars to prove it, we’ve learned a thing or two about delivering value along the way. We’ve put together 6 key strategies to mitigate the risks associated with large projects, and the first one is all about scope:

• Don’t boil, slice:
  No, it’s not a cooking tip. It’s a technology and delivery approach that combines to allow projects to be implemented on the basis of the horizonal or vertical operational slice model. Here the supplier and management team work together to prove an end-to-end, or top-to-bottom operational capability that delivers value quickly. The project then continues on this operational slicing model with the next capability . The hackneyed phase “don’t boil the ocean” is overused, but it fits here. We believe it’s incremental slicing that delivers.

When it comes to technology fundamentals, there is a stand-out model which has proven to be revolutionary in terms of faster development times, ease of deployment and ongoing business agility:

• No-Code / Low-Code Development:
  You want to trial and test new operational pipelines and workflows, but you don’t want to wrestle with scripts or build a software development operation (Dev’ Op’).  You know there’s risk in developing and maintaining any software, even apparently simple scripts. You need to keep an eye on what’s right for the business and that includes reducing future liability. Working with no-code technology, your business analysts can build complex operational pipelines from a range of  microservices without requiring any software development knowledge. It’s simple, it’s fast, its adaptable, and proven.

We’re in the midst of a media consumption revolution, and it’s key for media companies to exploit this effectively and quickly. Hoping that significant technology decisions will pay dividends when a major project completes two years hence is not a strategy, it’s a gamble. The project needs to be seen to be delivering as it unfolds:

• Iterative Implementation:
  Iterative Implementations demonstrate earned value, and this approach delivers feedback at every stage of the project, including visibility of the effects of modifications, and the opportunity to refocus when things change, or go wrong. Your operational business needs are many, complex and evolving.  So choose a technology and vendor that enables a collaborative step-by-step approach. This in turn realises business value for you incrementally and at speed.

When you have to manage business requirements from multiple stakeholders your technology choices become crucial:

• Future-Ready Tech:
  Dig into the design philosophy of your technology candidates. Do they enable your vendors to deliver, evolve and support a solution that will keep delivering value to your business over the long term? Making the right choices at this stage of your project will empower you to tackle new business challenges and integrate with emerging technologies, ensuring long-term success for your business and a technical solution that stays relevant.

To be far reaching and impactful, your project doesn’t have to incur pointless expense deploying all new solutions or to start from a ‘clean slate’. Why eradicate successful workflows, or replace fully operational solutions that are still delivering great value?:

• Integrate, don’t deprecate:
  A modern, flexible platform will allow a media technology operation to be updated like Trigger’s Broom or, for the well-read, The Ship of Theseus. If you select a solution with hundreds of integration connectors for modern and legacy media platforms, you can keep the cost and disruption of implementations and iterations to a minimum.  The overall operation can be continuously updated with minimal impact and cost risk.

The days are over when the executive would sponsor a big-bang multi-year project for which the ROI was years in the future. So, how do you effect change? Prioritise value, focus on relieving operational pains or making business gains, and work with a team that is as focussed on the value outcomes as you are. For our final point, it’s all about focussing on what counts:

• Focus on the Value:
  In complex integration projects, it’s the project team that makes the difference between ‘good enough’ and ‘exceptional’. Great technology choices turn into outstanding deployments when the engineers are focused on getting you results, right from the start of the implementation. Work with a vendor who is focused on the difference their software can make to your operation. With joint focus, a shared vision, and a proactive approach, you’ll be able to derive value right from the outset. 

In summary, here at Blue Lucy Towers we firmly believe that it should not be necessary to have to write any software to get value from a content management / supply platform, and that any such platform absolutely should be able to deliver end-to-end business value in less than six weeks. Try iterative strategies, move away from a waterfall approach, and focus on value. If you don’t, the outcome might be a solution that simply fixes yesterday’s problems, but not until tomorrow.

I was quite pleased to be asked recently by a Canadian colleague what our “theme” would be for the upcoming IBC. For me, theme reflects the ethos of the Blue Lucy approach to trade shows, we don’t tend to talk about product features or the specific capabilities in our roadmap.

Development of features and connectors is just something we do in pursuit of delivering customer value. If an operator needs a connector to a system or service, we will build it into a microservice BLidget – which we’ve been producing at a rate of two a week for five-years.  Listing 450+ BLidgets or detailing our CORE or UI functions in a tradeshow press-release doesn’t convey the value of our BLAM platform or approach.  We prefer to showcase business-focused solutions, which tend to follow a theme that relates to industry business needs at that time.

Forecasting Cloud

Some will remember our cloud stand at IBC 2018 – it was very popular with the crowd, particularly after the show closed.  At that time, we were about 18-months into the development of BLAM-3 and around a year out from the completion of the first customer implementations with PLAZA Media and Off the Fence.  Our 2018 IBC cloud stand was a little tongue-in-cheek, highlighting the paradox of demonstrating a cloud-based platform from a dark hall in the Rai. Then (three years on from AWS’s acquisition of Elemental) the media and broadcast industry was finally beginning to appreciate the functional power and flexibility of cloud services.  The trend – and our IBC 2018 theme – was very much about “cloud migration” which we thought was inexorable, hence the stand design – the cloud is now, and Blue Lucy is there, ready.

But the BLAM platform was actually designed to be completely infrastructure agnostic – so it can be deployed in any cloud, or on-prem, infrastructure.  This is a core tenet of the architecture, although we forecast that the vast majority of deployments would run in cloud infrastructure.  Five years on, we are surprised as to how deployments have manifested.

A Mixed Reality

Eighty percent of our customer base is operating cloud-ground “hybrid” BLAMs.  These systems tend to have the core services of the databases and the application interface together with one or more workflow runners (the microservice orchestrators) running in cloud infrastructure, typically provisioned by Blue Lucy as a managed service.  In addition, workflow runners are deployed on-prem’ at the operator facility.  These manage on-prem storage, LTO libraries and other resources such as rights management systems, transcoders, file-based QC tools, edit systems (Avid and Adobe) as well as baseband recording and playout systems.

In hindsight, it was unwise for the industry to assume that the entire production and distribution capability would move to the cloud over a few short years. In many cases, it just doesn’t make sense: operators do not wish to move away from on-prem tools that are providing business value, and that are still being amortised.  For distributors, the concept of forklifting their inventory, which may extend to many petabytes, to cloud storage doesn’t make economic sense. Using the cloud for distribution, particularly to FAST or OTT platforms is very common and workflows that utilise cloud services are extremely efficient. BLAM operators are using these pipelines for content distribution to fulfil content sales – this model of ‘leaving material where it is until it’s needed or can be monetised’ – is common.  Equally, we have a number of customers who operate with all browse material in cloud storage, but delivery is fulfilled from cloud or ground – based on which is the most cost-effective overall. Naturally that logic is built into the BLAM workflows.

IBC Theme

There are many and varied reasons why media operators cannot, or do not want to go all in for the cloud or why they wish to control the migration. So, it is ground-cloud, hybrid workflows which will form the basis of our theme for IBC2023 where we’ll showcase how Blue Lucy customers are harmonising on-prem systems and cloud services and applications to create highly efficient and cost-effective media workflows with BLAM. In short, we’ll be bringing the cloud to earth at IBC2023.

I plan to revisit this topic in more detail in the run up to the event but in the meantime do make an appointment to meet with us at the show. We are keen to talk on the basis of operational outcomes, we can work out the most cost-effective place to run the workload later, and even change our mind.  We are at stand 6.C29.