Vijay Sajja:
Welcome to the Monetization Show podcast, where we talk to the greatest minds in media, tech, and telecommunications. This show explores strategies and lessons for driving profitable growth with the direct-to-consumer business models. I’m your host, Vijay Sajja, founder and CEO of Evergent. My goal is to bring you specific and proven strategies straight from industry leaders that will help you solve your greatest challenges at the intersection of
Direct-to-consumer business models, evolving user preferences, market, and competitive pressures. Welcome. Today, I’m excited to introduce you to Allen Broome, CEO of MediaKind. MediaKind is an important partner of ours. They’re doing some amazing work for the industry. Allen comes with 20 years of experience in the industry. So he leads MediaKind in delivering groundbreaking solutions. Some of them are Emmy award-winning, compilation, and advanced advertising platforms. So before Mediakind, he worked at Comcast, one of the leading video providers in the country. So he drove IP video engineering at Comcast and also cloud transformation at Comcast. Allen’s expertise in cloud engineering and content personalization puts him at the forefront of trends. It’s probably a handful of individuals in the country that has the expertise in this particular area and have been there, done that, and have battle scars to prove it. So welcome, Allen, to the show. And I’m really excited to have you. Your first question, tell me real quick why you agreed to do this podcast.
Allen Broome:
Well, Vijay, first, thanks for having me here. Why did I agree to do this podcast? Well, I consider you, Vijay, a great colleague of mine. I respect you in the industry. And I think you’ve got those same battle scars that I have. And I think our companies really work really well together. We’ve had some great successes, some really big projects that we’ve done together. And I really wanted an opportunity to come here, join you, and talk and share some more information around those projects, the big successes that we’ve had together.
Vijay Sajja:
Thank you. Thank you again. Before we explore monetization strategies, I’d love to hear our audience to hear a bit more about your journey. Some of the ULite teams at Comcast at MediaKind. You’ve been at the forefront.
I would love to hear, and have the opportunity for the audience to hear your background. What kind of sparked your interest in the media and streaming industry, right?
Allen Broome:
Yeah, so it’s kind of a funny story and I think I got a little bit got lucky. I started my career off as a software engineer. I worked on a lot of the early voice-over IP applications and standards like SIP, like Session Initiation Protocol, built some of the first voice-over IP networks, and soft switches for controlling those networks. And I actually had a friend of mine that went to work for Comcast. And he’s like, you should come up to Comcast and talk to them about doing voice-over IP at Comcast. They’re building this large nationwide network out.
They’re moving into voice. And so I did. I went up, and talked to the voice over IP team. And while I was up there, they were like, we’ve also got this role open for this new research and development position around looking at IP video. And they’re like, everything that we’ve done to date has been QAM delivered video, and we’re really interested in starting to explore IP. And so I’ve met with folks around that.
I won’t mention my name, but this is kind of a funny story. I met with a Comcast fellow, a really great guy. I consider him a personal friend of mine now, but he wrote a lot of the impact specs, and the guy in the video at Comcast. And so I’m sitting across the table from him. He’s got my resume. It’s printed in black and white. He’s got a red pen, and I swear there was more red ink on my resume than there was black ink on it. And we’re sitting there, and he’s like, so tell me why I should hire you for video when all you’ve ever done is voice. And I don’t remember what I said, but I was sure I failed the interview, and there was no chance I was getting offered the job in video. But it turns out they came back and offered me a job in video, and I’ve always loved learning new technology and am passionate about innovation. And this was something brand new for me. And it’s like, I’ve been doing this voice thing for like 10 years. I’m going to try video. And it was absolutely the right decision. I got in early, got to be a part of creating a lot of new standards for IP video around advertising, low latency, lots of stuff. And it was just an exciting time to be doing video.
Vijay Sajja:
Yeah, no, that’s a great story. Thanks for sharing. And I don’t know if you asked him why he hired you, but I can guess right. Even when I look at my team, the curiosity to learn and attitude, know, they don’t have to have all the answers, you know, when they come to the table. But if they have the ability to learn and they have the right attitude, they can go to places. He probably saw that right here.
Allen Broome:
Yeah, I agree. it’s definitely, I think it’s something that you do. It’s people that I gravitate towards. When I looked for talent and when I was building my team out at Comcast, I didn’t go hire video engineers because, honestly, there weren’t many IP video engineers back then. I hired people who were passionate about learning, who had good attitudes, and had the aptitude to go do the work. Because you want people who want to continuously learn, do new things, and work well within the team.
Vijay Sajja:
Absolutely. That’s the last point that is also very important, right? So let’s explore live sports streaming. And so we both work together to help the likes of the NBA. And it’s a different ball game. And if you look recently, Netflix tried to get live sports. And they realized, now, it’s quiet. I know, live sports is quite different from subscription VOD, right? It’s a different problem to solve and I’m sure they’ll figure it out. mean, if any company can figure it out, they’ll figure it out. You know, why is it more challenging than, you know, regular content delivery, right? So, maybe you can throw some color on, you know, for the audience, what are the differences in live sports streaming, and really the importance of latency and et cetera.
Allen Broome:
Yeah, I mean, there’s a number of things that make it different. first, just from a video compression perspective, live sports is a very complicated form of media. So there’s a lot of movement, a lot of fast movement. And if you think about even like basketball, we talk about basketball a lot. The players are moving, it’s passing the ball. You’ve got the fans in the stadium that there’s a lot of, you know, there’s not a lot of consistency in the content. You things that are easy to encode are like a talking head like me and you right now. You there’s no background movement for us. We shift around a little bit, but this is super easy to encode. Sports content is the most complicated content to encode and to do it well so that you can still see the ball and you don’t get ghosting, you don’t get artifacts in it and then layered on top of that, and that’s just if you were encoding a sports asset for VOD, you can take an entire day to encode that to get it perfect. But in the sports live, you’ve got roughly about 180 milliseconds to encode that asset and do it really well, compress it well so that it can be streamed out to all sorts of different devices over all sorts of networks, whether it’s wired or wireless. And so that makes it very difficult to do right. And then once you move past the encoding, keeping that quality, doing it very quickly, you’ve also got the delivery. You want to deliver it with really low latency because you don’t want people hearing what’s happening. You sort of had the apartment or MDU sort of issue where, you know, if somebody’s watching three seconds behind, you know, maybe their neighbor and you’re coming up on a goal and they hear their neighbor cheering, it kind of ruins the moment and so it’s really important to be able to deliver this and stream it in a very low latency model that’s as close to real time as possible. You know, so all of these things sort of layer on top of the complexity. And then, finally, it’s some of the most valuable assets out there. losing even seconds of content where an error happens, an outage happens, you’re costing sometimes millions of dollars.
Vijay Sajja:
Right, right. Now, that’s good perspective. And also, the audience is largely, they’re used to seeing these games on broadcast video.
Right, so it’s one to many, all the air, all the cable. They’re used to certain type of experience. And then, really, I know IPS come a long way, and the expectation is pretty high, right? So, how is AI being talked about a lot, and how is AI being used to optimize some of the steps, and maybe some of the work you guys are doing? Leveraging AI to create customer value and basically delivering a reliable stream?
Allen Broome:
Yeah, there’s a lot of areas that we use it. And solving some of those problems that I just talked about, we leverage the latest and greatest technology from a video codec perspective that we use to encode the assets. And anyone close to this knows that every generation of codec gets more more complicated.And simplifying that down, that complication comes in a decision tree that you’re evaluating each frame and trying to make a decision on what’s the best tools to use to encode that frame for the most efficiency. And walking through that decision tree takes more and more compute, more and more energy, more and more time. And so one of the ways that we leverage AI is we train simplified AI engines on different types of video. Like we might train it on basketball, or golf, or football. And we leverage that AI to help us reduce those number of decisions that we have to evaluate to get the best possible in code for that type of content. And that allows us to run a very efficient, fast encode delivering the best quality in the industry. And honestly, being the greenest, where we’re using the lowest amount of energy to sort of do that.
Vijay Sajja:
Right. Right. Now, that’s important, right? I mean, I think, you know, what can we do with the least amount of power? You know, optimizing that is also important. So moving on to some of the monetization aspects of it, right? So even some of the streaming providers, they’re jumping into getting licenses for live sports and figuring out ways to monetize, and of course they’re figuring out how to deliver as well. When they think about going into live sports and monetizing that live sport, and what are some considerations they should be thinking about? And what are different monetization models they should be thinking about? Combining advertising plus paying, paying, etc. Subscription,those, yeah.
Allen Broome:
Yeah, think you’ve kind of got to look at all the different options. I think you look at everybody out there, there used to be lots of subscription-only models. There used to be ad-only models. And pretty much today, everybody’s doing all of it. It’s some even hybrid models where it’s partial subscription, partial ads. And I think to create a product that sort of fits for everyone or the widest audience, you’ve got to sort of approach it from that perspective. And even getting creative with, we talked about AI, but there’s technology out there now that we support where you can use AI to identify backboards, like take hockey for instance, the backboards on the arena.You know, identify those and do a real time dynamic replacement of those on a user by user basis. And, you know, and that stuff to me is really compelling because it doesn’t, doesn’t interrupt, you know, the video. doesn’t interrupt the experience, but introduces new forms of advertisement, new ways to monetize, you know, leveraging technology. Yeah.
Vijay Sajja:
Now that’s, you know, paying attention to the user experience, being least disruptive and finding ways to monitor that’s very creative using the real estate that’s on the screen, doing something about it, right? So, you know, in our experience, you know, in terms of sports monetization, what we have seen is, you know, sports is currently seasonal, right? Meaning that, you know, there’s an NBA season, NFL season.How do they deal with it? You touched on hybrid monetization. How do you deal with onboarding users? And we’ve been fortunate that we’ve been in live sports for the last 10 years with cricket in India, where we started. And of course, we both worked together with NBA. And what we have seen is that driving sports can be used to drive the top of the funnel.
Right? And I’m boarding a lot of users, right? So once they come to your funnel, you know, these are where you can register them. So they watch some content for free and, you know, and then they monitor advertising. And then, you know, having them, you know, pay the rest the pay per view. And we have done this with boxing matches with Fox, right? And you could have a subscription of your these service but now and then you’re doing live sports events, live boxing events to really drive the top of the funnel, creating that cross promotion and giving them discounts for if they want to watch a pay-per-view boxing match, if you’re a subscriber, you get a discount and vice versa. So we’ve seen a lot of creative ways to use these live events for their benefit. So that we have seen.
Really well. The other thing we have noticed, you can also comment on this, it’s really the peaky nature of the traffic, right? So in a place like India, you have a cricket match with Australia and India, we have seen upwards of 10 million people coming to watch the game because it’s a digital stadium. There’s no limit, right? In five minutes, right? So how do you deal with that kind of bursty nature of traffic and do that well. So often in most of the cases, your work platform is the one that checks their identity, checks to make sure they have the empattelment. They actually have the ticket to enter the stadium. So it’s an exciting area and it’s a new area. We feel like, I know we’re working on several major projects, but there’s a lot of opportunities to monetize the content different ways, right? So maybe we can touch on the importance of this scaling, scaling on demand, right? So.
Allen Broome:
Yeah, I think there’s a, I think a lot of it is, it’s definitely hard. A lot of people that haven’t done this before are like, oh, well, clouds offer auto scaling. You just create auto scaling groups and everything’s solved for you. And the reality is that
it doesn’t solve really, really bursty traffic like this because getting additional resources in the cloud sometimes can take minutes, upwards of 15 to 20 minutes to spin up new resources. And in a lot of these cases, the cloud isn’t infinite. You can run out of capacity, especially in a region. And so there’s a lot of, I think, expertise domain knowledge that goes into building a robust platform that can manage the cloud infrastructure, that can look at trends and sort of preemptively start scaling. And it’s something that I think our companies have done really well and something that I’m always really proud of. I brag about the fact that, you know, the NBA has been comfortable enough with our platforms to offer free weekends where, you know, we don’t know how many people are going to come and tune in, and you’ve got to be ready to handle that. you know, knock on wood, we’ve, I think we’ve done a tremendous job there together.
Vijay Sajja:
Yeah, absolutely. Free weekends and also some nights they have 14 games, right? Yeah. You know, boxing is just one match, maybe the most once a week, but it’s like 14 games. You have to deal with 14 different events going on, sometimes in parallel. It’s really great. And the other thing we both noticed is the seasonality.
Allen Broome:
Yeah.
Before we go to seasonality, I wanted to make one more comment on another really interesting thing that I think we do where we’re able to, during a live game, to of bring all the audience, take clips or highlights, push those out through social media with a link that allows a free look in. And I think this is really unique where you can push this out to X or Twitter, and maybe it’s a really close game, you promote it, and people can dynamically, without a subscription, click on that link, watch a few seconds, minutes, and then be offered the option to buy that game, buy a full subscription, buy a game pack of, let me buy the next, the rest of the games through the season. But that flexibility to be able to offer all sorts of ways to promote and monetize is really key in growing that audience. And I think it’s something that’s fairly unique and not a lot of people are doing today.
Vijay Sajja:
It’s a great point. So, how do you get more people to come to the door? Which is what you’re talking about. It’s super important. Once they come to the door, how do you entice them with the right offer, right? Right promotion. So this is where we work with our
customers and really well, really coming up with the creative ways to convert them to your paying user. And sometimes even using AI there to predict based on what we know about the user, what he might buy, right? And so that’s important. moving on, so just on seasonality, and I brought up the seasonality subject.For off season, what should they be thinking about some strategies to make it interesting for the users for the off season? And so what are some thoughts there on that one?
Allen Broome:
One of the things that we talk about a lot, and I don’t see it being done that often, but I still think it’s a big opportunity of sort of remonetizing back catalogs. You’ve got these historic games that have happened where records has been broken or really strong competition between teams that are sort of famous. And being able to take those and some of them are in SD and SD content today on a big screen doesn’t look that good. But you can use AI now to upscale and not like your TV upscales content, but doing it at a very high level, high degree of quality, where it actually looks really, really good. Upscale that content and run promotions of rebroadcasting that game and bringing people together and reliving that history of the sport, I think, is a great way to keep fans engaged and drive monetization and value in these packages and subscriptions.
Vijay Sajja:
You know, that’s a very good, you know, I think, I know some of them are exploring these various ideas and, you know, what we have also seen is that, you know, half season, you got to make sure that, you know, you’re aligned with the users, right? So this is something we have done with NBAs that, you know, if they do want to leave, can you give them options? So the thing is that, once they leave, it’s hard to get them back. Then you have to go back and acquire. Acquiring a user is expensive. So we have done some creative ideas. NBA is a fantastic team, and they’re always thinking towards the value for their users, etc. And so one thing we’ve done together with them is, and we’ve worked out really well, is giving them the ability to pause the subscription. Giving them the ability to go on a less expensive plan, right? So that, you know, so we have seen upwards of, you know, really retaining 20 % of the people that are looking to leave, right? So that’s also something we have seen, what people should consider, right? So, and then, you know, really moving on to, know, fan engagement and personalization, right? So, and again, you know, moving away from broadcast video to high-p video one benefit is you know who is on the other end, right? So so and I know you guys are looking into this area. I actually do some creative things in this area so the importance of fan engagement and personalization Yeah, and it really with the view of driving monetization for our customers.
Allen Broome:
Yeah, and in driving broader audiences, I mean there’s so many things that you can do when the video is being delivered over IP and you know who that user is, you’ve got a two-way channel. Simple things like watch parties. It’s all virtual, but you can bring your friends in. You can chat. You can watch the game together. You can talk just like you’re sitting in the same room. There’s gamification, whether that’s a lightweight version of betting or whether it’s full-blown betting on games,you know, more engagement. There’s just, you know, lots of things. Like even, you know, I’ve seen where you had these niche followings of people that are really into the sport. And so you do an alternate broadcast with different people that are different announcers that are, you know, commenting and sort of doing their own version of the broadcast from a niche audience perspective. And these draw really big fan bases. It’s all about attracting a broader audience and finding all the niches that are out there to bring everyone to the sport.
Vijay Sajja:
Right. Well, that’s good. And what we have seen is in the area of personalization of fan engagement. And again, it’s about knowing and understanding this person is a Denver Nuggets fan. So, how can you use that to personalize his experience? And when it goes to the app, what does he see? Can you offer something relates to that? We feel that’s really an area that teams can explore. If not one team, maybe a bunch of teams. And can you offer just the games for that team, for that team, et cetera. So it’s lots of possibilities in this area. I think it’s just the beginning, I feel. So finally, really, one word on future of sports streaming in terms of technology and experience. How do you see it evolving next few years?
Allen Broome:
Yeah, I mean, we’ve touched on some of it. I think we’ll see you know, better and better technology being delivered to get you closer and closer to live or real-time. I think, you know, we’re just starting to leverage AI to help us reach broader audiences by doing auto closed captioning and, you know, every language out there and even newer things where, you today we can we can dub the audio track.
And you can even do it in the original voice of the announcer, but in any language. And so I think these things are going to be used more and more so that you can take these sports and just take them out to a much broader audience and reach them in their native language.
Vijay Sajja:
Yeah. I think that’s a great point again.
Again, I know we both share this perspective is that from our vantage point, we think that it’s just the beginning of a new era. Of course, streaming is one thing, but really bringing live sports across the globe. And so, really that across the globe is really mind-boggling to me.
Two-thirds of NBA users are outside the US. I never imagined that before we started working with them. It’s 180 countries and different ways to monetize in each country. Again, we are globally, I don’t know if it’s good or bad, culturally, we’re becoming a bit more uniform across the globe.
And so even cricket is coming to the US, believe it or not. So it’s an exciting time for both of us and really appreciate you taking the time, I enjoyed speaking with you and I’m sure our audience would get a lot out of this session. Thanks again.
Allen Broome:
Thank you, Vijay. I enjoyed being here.
Vijay Sajja:
Thank you for tuning into the Monetization Show. I hope you found today’s episode insightful and that it inspired you with ideas that could power your next big move. If you would like to share your thoughts or questions about the ideas we discussed today, do drop a comment on LinkedIn or wherever you found us on social media. Until next time, this is Vijay Sajja wishing you continued success in your monetization journey.