Vijay Sajja:
Welcome to the Monetization Show podcast, where we talk to the greatest minds in media, tech, and telecommunications. This show explores strategies, investments for driving profitable growth with the direct-to-consumer business minds. 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 helping consumer business models, evolving user preferences, market and competitive pressures.
Welcome
Today, I’m delighted to welcome Euan Smith, Group CEO of Astro.
Astro has been on a journey of transformation over the last several years. Redefining what it means to be a game-changing communications and entertainment service provider.
It’s a great brand in Malaysia. A lot of brand recognition people love Astro, right? And to me and my entire team here at Evergent, we had the privilege of having court site seats to this journey as a trusted technology partner. For Astro, this is really a special episode for me in many ways. I met Euan back in 2017 when he was part of a team that was launching a Netflix competitor globally.
It’s been a pleasure getting to know and collaborating with such a visionary leader in the pay TV space. Before joining Astro, he held senior leadership positions at Sky, Fox, and Foxtel. This deep expertise with pay TV made him the perfect person to lead Astro at the critical juncture when it was facing headwinds.
That’s a unique context in the Malaysian market. In today’s episode, I hope to distill key learnings from Euan’s career, his vision for the future of the industry, and nuggets from his transformation journey working with Evergent, welcoming Euan
Euan Smith:
Morning, afternoon.
Vijay Sajja:
Afternoon for me. Morning for you. Thank you for taking the time.
Tell me quickly why you agreed to be on the podcast today.
Euan Smith:
Cause you told me to, easy, but as you say, we need eight years now in three different places. So it was a natural thing to do this. If I can say one thing that might help somebody else who’s in a similar journey, that it’s all worthwhile.
Vijay Sajja:
I really appreciate it.
So let’s get started. Feel free to ask me questions, too. The media and entertainment landscape, you’ve been in it for 20, 30 years now. It changed dramatically over the past decade. So, from your perspective, what are some of the biggest challenges traditional pay TV operators are facing today?
Euan Smith:
So, look, I guess if you are a normal pay TV operator in the good old days, you know obviously, the problem with pay TV fundamentally is it’s a very CapEx capital-heavy business.
Satellites are expensive, and billing systems are expensive, and content rights are very expensive, and studios are expensive. And in the days when the customer base was growing and everything was good around the world. You had this fixed cost base, but once you got to a certain number of customers paying a certain amount of money a month for the cost base, every customer thereafter was pretty much almost free.
I mean, there was obviously some variable cost, but pretty much, ’cause for example, you know the number of transponders you need, it’s not a function of the number of customers, it’s a function of the number of channels. You can have one customer or 100 million customers, and most of your base cost is fixed, which is great in a market where you are with other pay TV operators; you’re the only game in town.
The problem, I think, comes when the technology shifted to the IP model in the IP world. Is that what used to be traditional pay TV operators that were local market suddenly find themselves competing with IP based companies that aren’t carrying any of that heavy cost base and can scale globally because the technology allows them to do so that whether it’s Netflix in Western he Western world, or its view, or it’s TVB or people in my part of the world.
It’s easier for them to scale and they’re own completely new technology, which is fast and efficient and very effective. So their cost per customer is a fraction of the cost of a traditional pay TV operator. So the pay TV operators have all this great content and they have all this great distribution and platform, but we’re kinda stuck between two stools because we have all this pay TV legacy cost, which we need because.
Now in my market, still half of the country does not have a broadband connection. So satellite is the way they get their entertainment primarily. So you’ve got this old world, but you’re also recognizing that you’re having to bridge to the new world because you are having to take out costs and move to new models.
A, because that’s what the new generation of customers wants you to provide. B, because if you just stayed in the old model, you would collapse and die. So all pay the prices, and there’s no rocket science in this industry. Astros on the same trajectory as True Digital in Thailand or Sky New Zealand or Multi-Choice, or even the big guys like the Skies and the Comcast, we’re all on the same curve, which is how do we strengthen, defend our pay TV base and make sure that is still very important component of what we do, and yet at the same time, radically take the cost out of it.
And therefore, by doing those two things, you can achieve the two goals that my team spent the whole day thinking about. One is that we make more content and make better, higher-quality content because the storytelling that we do for Malaysia is what you know people pay for. And then secondly, how do you then reinvest some of that money in new revenue streams and find new ways to monetize the business?
I think that’s probably true, you go anywhere in the world and every pay TV operator is gonna tell you that same story. Second thing I think they’ll tell you about Vijay is about piracy because the rise of the internet and the ubiquity of IP and broadband and things, now piracy has become a global problem. So no longer are we protecting content that we make or that our partners make and that we buy in Malaysia, you know.
If somebody in Slovenia decides that they’re not gonna protect the English Premier League rights, the pirate just picks it up and then beams it straight into Malaysia. So there’s so much content that used to have value that’s now arriving on shore for free illegally, that the battle is quite existential.
It’s existential for, I think, all content creators, and I would include Netflix and Disney in this, which is, if the content’s all coming in market for free, why would people buy it? If nobody’s paying for it, why would people make it? And I think that’s an existential question for the entirety of the content-generating industry.
Vijay Sajja:
Yeah, yeah. At a higher level, really containing costs. At the same time, it provides better value to the customer and also battles piracy. So, the three big things, really.
Euan Smith:
Those are the things that keep me awake at night. I’m therefore my team awake at night as well.
Vijay Sajja:
So we have worked at different companies, on different continents.
Actually, we worked at Sky,
Euan Smith:
Yeah
Vijay Sajja:
Fox, US. Actually, Fox would be global. Foxtel Australia. And now at Astro, you’ve seen different approaches to digital transformation, different approaches to actual transformation. So what are some common misconceptions? Executive media executions have what it takes to successfully transform and navigate the challenges facing the payTV industry.
Euan Smith:
I think all pay TV companies have the problem primarily is inertia, right? And, that’s the inertia of the team that is inside the machine, but also customer inertia. Okay. If I were to, if I were to micro it down into kind of at the Astro world, yeah, we have built a fantastic digital sales process. And yet it is used by less than 10% of the prospects and the customers that we have.
Astro is this legacy brand and it’s got a fantastic heritage. We are 27 years old. Fantastic heritage. People are used to calling contact centers and people are used to ringing engineers and people are used to putting satellite dishes on the walls, and they are used to a certain way of interacting with the brand.
The things that you hear when you go and talk in the cafes here in Malaysia about what Astro is, that was what Astro was 10, 15 years ago. What Astra is today is it doesn’t need a satellite. You don’t ever need to talk to a contact center. You can simply buy the product. Exactly as you would buy Google or you would buy Netflix, et cetera.
And yet, despite having done all of the digitization work that we’ve done and we’ve done over the past, my team are amazing. We’ve done an extraordinary amount of digitization. We’ve aggregated everything onto the platform. We’ve made it as seamless as we possibly can. We still fight that inertia, which is that the general population, the public out there, are still waking up to the new way of working.
If you looked at Astro’s unaided awareness in the market when you go and do these brand tracker surveys, our awareness in the market for the Astro brand is about 80% and Netflix hovers around 70, 78. Yeah. And then Disney’s around there as well. We’ve launched Sooka, which is our OTT app, our equivalent of like, uh, kale and binge and Foxtel on now in the UK launched our equivalent of that four years ago.
After four years of spending a ton of money on marketing, we’re still only at 40% brand awareness. That’s the inertia that it takes when you’re building and trying to digitize something new and bring new things to the market, that there is this huge lag. That’s a double-edged sword for us because clearly the majority of our revenues, the majority of any payTV revenue, is still coming out of the old world.
It’s still the traditional satellite set-top box world, so you want to make sure that revenue continues, but equally, what you’re trying to do is move people across the world. And a lot of the problem that we have in cost is I’ve got all the cost of this old world, which I’m trying to take out as fast as I possibly can, but I’ve also completely separate tech stack for the new world and a completely separate digitization engine, digital engine for the new world.
So we’ve got a foot in both camps. If I’m right. View, or I’m Disney or an Amazon Prime and things, none of that’s relevant. This is where I am. Yeah.
Vijay Sajja:
Right.
Euan Smith:
So it’s just kind of hard, and I think too often I’ve seen it at other companies is that the C-suite inside the company treats this as a technology problem.
Vijay Sajja:
Mm-hmm
Euan Smith:
As you know, we’ve gotta get ourselves outta X and into Y, and it becomes a technology play and they don’t really think about does the customer actually care. And if I, a lot of the product roadmap initiatives and integrations of the things that I’ve seen around the world, they’re built from a, we can do this rather than the customer cares about this.
And I think over the last couple of years we’re seeing a, not almost a retreat, which is to, we just get, what are customers, what do you and I wanna watch? Great. Great. I wanna watch absolutely great content, and I wanna get to it really quickly and easily and seamlessly. And I want a product that fits into my life rather than me having to fit two weeks.
Right. That’s it. Yeah. I don’t need bells and whistles and I just wanna watch fantastic content. Yeah. And I wanna have, ’cause we run a broadband service as well, I just want a thousand percent reliable broadband connection. That’s kind of. That’s what I want from this. Yeah. That’s what I want from this industry.
And I think sometimes when we’re talking about digitization, we get stuck in around rhetoric about the things that we need. Naturally. People aren’t thinking go, but what? Why would my son, he’s 25. Why would my son care about what we just did? Yeah. I think,
Vijay Sajja:
Yeah, so I think it sounds like you, when you joined, you looked at the different systems and assisted with that deeper transformation.
To actually provide customer value and does the customer care, right? So replacing the engine typically, right, is considered the highest risk decision. And what critical pain points that you saw ultimately led to Astro take the significant step? It’s a 20-year-old system you talked about, right? It’s been there for 20 years and then you said, “Okay, this is an area we need to really catch on.”
What was the thinking there?
Euan Smith:
First off, Malaysia is an epic country to be able to work in. There were many reasons that I came here, Vijay, and we’ve talked about what they are. Before I had arrived here, I was privileged. I used to sit in conversations with the great and the good of the Western content world, whether it’s Australia, the US, UK, et cetera.
And at no point in time in any of those conversations did anybody say Malaysia. People talked about Korea and people talked about stadium as the next up and coming place, and oh, the French, you’re doing some good art. How are things, and I know I mentioned Malaysia, when you come here. The creative industry here and the TV industry is absolutely amazing.
And then you allied that to Astro’s, such a part of the fabric of society here. So Australia is where 5.3 million households, which is two-thirds of the country, have incredible penetration. We have 13 radio brands that account for 80% of listenership in Malaysia. We have three vernaculars. We obviously produce in Bahasa, Malay, we produce in Mandarin.
We have Cantonese on the platform as well, and we have a bit on the platform. And then the third biggest vernacular pillar is that you produce in Tamil. And then we have all the international stuff, which comes in English. We have all these various vernacular scales we turn at half a thousand hours. We really are part of the fabric of society.
It’s so vibrant. It’s such an exciting place to be. It’s almost like five years behind where a Sky or a Comcast would’ve been; that broadband is still rolling out. Only half the country still has it. But the quality of storytelling is what really drew me to the place. And allied to that was that, unfortunately, our founder, Ananda Krishnan, passed away last year.
Ananda had this really great vision for what he wanted this to look like next. So I came here because of Ananda’s kind of vision and what I could see in the country, as I just knew there were a lot of levers that other places that I have worked had pulled that pulled here. For example, we didn’t have an OTT companion, an OTT product at all.
We had a companion app go out, but no companion product. We had a reseller deal, but we didn’t have our own. Fiber broadband network. There was no addressable advertising in market at all. It was all still old school, 1970s carpet bombing. So then, when you look inside the technology that the guys were running here, we were still living on past glory.
We were spreading on heavy set-top boxes with lots of tuners and it really wasn’t being modernized for the realities of a world where your competition is. You’re paying, like, historically, prices that used to be up to a hundred Ringit for these. Yeah. Which is a big number. It’s a very big number for your average Malaysian consumer.
And then in market, Netflix comes in, they’re currently at 28 Ringit and then you can buy a pickup. Eight to 10 pick up, view for 10, you can pick up Disney for 20-ish. It just, you were just so anachronistic in what we were trying to achieve. So I came here because I could see the opportunity and over the last five years we’ve done say we, I just say things and then my team actually executes everything.
We’ve done so many great pieces of work to complete what this company is and what the product set is and how it works, right? Well, the set-top box, that’s UI and it’s complete, we’re now aggregating 16 apps. It’s all seamless. There are a hundred thousand hours of content on demand that comes out the cloud for you, et cetera.
We now have an OTT app. Mm. And the way you can engage in OTT app is very different from the way that you would engage. A box is all about the hub of the home and everything in one place, and it’s for families. And then the app is really for what we call millennials, which is, yeah, funny, four years after somebody calling that term.
It’s more single-screen, it’s more individual viewing, and it’s much more flexible in terms of how you can engage, right. But for me, it’s all the same content, right? That’s right. So when you look at the backend, ’cause you asked me about the backend, we had like Sky Deutschland had when I first went there and like Foxtel had, when I first went there, we had one of these great big legacy systems in the business.
And I think the pay TV engines that were spawned going back sort of 15, 20 years, they were spawned out of the telco world. So. A lot of the telco mentality and thinking a lot of the telco cost. And of course, if you’re in that kinda legacy system for 20 years, over that 20 years, it just gets and bigger and bigger.
And you go through, maybe in 20 years you’ll go through five different marketing teams that all have got their own packaging and pricing view and all. They’ve got their own models, and then you’ve got all these campaigns that come in and yeah, I remember back in, I don’t know, maybe 2005, 2006, when we were having the same conversations at Sky.
Vijay Sajja:
Right.
Euan Smith:
I remember Jeremy Derek, who was the CEO. Yeah. That’s at the time, had got a data and that was the inside of the system. We had more different prices and packaging points than we had actual current customers because it would just build over such a huge amount of time. So we inherited that kind of situation with our customer relationship management systems and billing systems.
It just wasn’t. Really suitable for the purpose for what we need to do now. It’s this product. We are multi-product. Yeah. So what we have needs to work with our commercial product; it needs to work with our broadband product. It needs to work for our OTT product. It needs to work for our legacy free-to-air prepaid product.
And it also needs to work with our pay TV product as our pay TV product was getting more complicated, adding and taking apps out of systems and things, moving channels around, et cetera. So we were looking for something. Honestly, we’re looking for something that would massively reduce the cost back to my earlier point about legacy.
And that would enable us to do things much quicker in the future, in a multi-product, much faster pace of change environment than the traditional model that all pay TVs have grown up with over the last 25 years.
Vijay Sajja:
So that makes sense. You kind of outlined how things have changed. The market dynamic in Malaysia and the product and how you have different products now and given all that you’re taking on, changing the 20 system is fairly risky, but you still were compelled to do it right?
So was it that.
Euan Smith:
As I described to my team and through my book as we went through it, effectively what we’re doing here is open heart surgery.
Yeah.
Right. So it’s tricky and you can imagine after 20 years, the data warehouse is spaghetti. It’s just, it just is, even the most organized data machine in the entire world.
And I’m not saying that we had one. It was super organized that the depth and the complexity and the variables inside that model are just absolutely extraordinarily tough to break. Which is why when we, I mean we obviously had a relationship at Fox and we built things at Fox,
Vijay Sajja:
Right
Euan Smith:
It’s why when we got into this, we did it in bite-sized chunks until we could go big.
There’s a day when you have to go big bang. You wanna test to learn, do a little test to learn, do a little, because actually the important thing when you’re doing open heart surgery is not to try and do it all at once. Is the patient still alive? Yes. Okay. Is the patient still? Yes. Keep going. Keep going.
That’s the kind of approach. So for the audience, we did Sooka first. The easiest and obvious thing was to pick a system that would do, ’cause we couldn’t run on the old legacy platform for our new product. So we picked a completely new stack. Yeah, new video front-end and then a new billing. Billing and CRM backend as we picked an urgency for the backend.
And that was a pretty much a slam dunk exercise because I knew you from Fox. Anyway, we looked around the market, very competitively priced product. And then you had reference clients like the NBA and people like that, which just give comfort, not just to you and, but give comfort to people that are not as familiar with your tech board specifically to do sort of thing.
And then once you’ve vetted the sucker in, you then go, okay, you look around and then what? Where do we go from here, I guess?
Vijay Sajja:
Right. If you can add to that or take one or two other reasons why you chose Evergent. Obviously you saw us work and perform.
Euan Smith:
Yeah, so earlier, here’s the kind of roadmap. So we did Sooka first, and I think that’s what you do first, is you say, okay, this is the new product we can see, right?
The emergence is still the product elsewhere. And then we picked something else that was not necessarily the open heart part, but we picked our prepaid product, which is called NJOI, which has a few other various variables and the like. But it also meant that you guys had to start doing enablements in a different way.
That was the test where you guys hadn’t really done enablements. Can you do it for us? So once you, we got NJOI across the line as well and you go, okay, you took a deep breath and you go, we’re gonna go for the big bang approach now. But if, I dunno if you remember, but we had 21 use cases that we put you guys through and we put the guys through as well.
We had a beauty parade of about nine. We focused that down to three and we had three options that we ran really harder. And you guys had to do a POC for us. ’cause there was a couple of modules that you guys at the time you didn’t have. Yeah, right. And so here are our 21 use cases, prove. And if you call Eric or your Portee Mac partner and guys talking to Naresh about, I think, bundling was one of them.
One of the key things that we wanted something special that you hadn’t got. And you guys coming back: Do we really have to do it like this? And like we’ve got 20 years of deals like this. We’re not about to change that model. Now Malaysian consumers won’t stand it. So that POC gives it gave us the confidence.
Yeah, ’cause you’d invest the time to go, you know, we can do it off, out of the box and if we can’t do it out of the box, we’ll build it. The thing that really impressed us was when we were back in Foxtel and we looked at an Evergent and we ended up at that point, not going somewhere else. And then when we came to Evergent, two years later.
All the things that one of my besties, Jason Smith, had told you in Foxtel, he runs customer service, right? So he’s really what the, see all the things said, criticized about the agent ui, not the customer UI agent ui. He came back two years later. He pretty much built all of it, implemented everything he said.
So when we’re looking at it this time, it’s kind of like these guys actually listen. They listen to what the customer actually needs and they build it, which really gives confidence, honestly. Yeah, it really, yeah.
Vijay Sajja:
That’s, uh, I remember the 21 use cases and we hit them all and we definitely, looking back, that’s something our team does really well and listen to the customer.
Right?
Euan Smith:
The thing on that is, I don’t wanna be a drop in the ocean. You could go with one of the big more established players. The problem is that you are someone like Astro, maybe a point percent of their global revenue. So how much influence do you get, to do what we’ve just talked about? How much FaceTime would I get with the CEO?
Would I be able to WhatsApp the CEO if I wasn’t happy about something We, and we WhatsApp like what, once a couple of weeks sort of thing. Good and bad? Good and bad. But they’ll be speaking every couple of weeks and I think that’s just. That’s nice. It’s nice that I know people know all of your second line, right?
Yeah. And then you go down my team, my CTO and my architecture guy and my ops guy, they know the team and the team feels vested in Astro. Yeah. We’ve managed to build that Astro’s actually important to a bunch of people that live in Hyderabad, four and a half hours plane ride away. And I think that also helps because I think then you feel you are being listened to
Vijay Sajja:
You’re not just a partner, not just a vendor, somebody you can work with. Absolutely. So one of the things really critical in today’s environment is time to market and ability to change things on the fly based on market feedback. So if not working business right now, could you share how the transformation we have done together changed Astro’s ability to launch new product services at promotions.
Euan Smith:
Yeah, sure. So after we’d launched, do you remember? After we launched Sooka, we had some stuff to do. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but what I do was, is that I was looking down, I get my business case with all the various vendors and things I.
I think you’d asked for one and a half thousand dollars to get this piece of thing done. And I remember saying, I pushed it back to my tech team and said, nobody can do anything for one and a half thousand dollars. They got that’s more point in the wrong place and it came back. It’s just config. They’re just gonna config.
If that’s what it’s gonna be, that’s gonna a bit of an eye opener for it. You stick your bill with 15, think 15 line items on it, and then the bottom of 10% tension, Z on top, kind of an eye opener. And then if I was to compare. When I arrived in Malaysia and realized that we needed to reorganize our pricing and packaging, we did the exercise in the old world, and I think from spec close to delivery, we were something like 10 or 11 months.
Yeah. And man-hours, hundreds of man-hours because of it was, basically, you were rebuilding a lot of code. And as we finally launched right across March last year, February, February 16th, we launched week 16th last year. And then we, in April, May, we gave you a challenge, which was, I wanna do a repackaging and pricing.
And we got it done in four months. Four and a half months, if can be accurate. Four and a half months for, I don’t know exactly, but I think the cost was at four times lower than we managed to achieve. Yeah. So we’ve halved dev time and cost. Compared to the previous time, tried to do it and I think that that’s what we were looking for.
The cost. We’ve took out the machine as well. Opex numbers running out about a third of what we used to run out. Why is that important for me? Because in the world that I’ve just described, I don’t put on the P & L, I don’t put that on the profit line. All that money goes straight to Agnes, who’s my chief content officer, to make more and better and greater stuff.
We don’t, whenever we take out of the tech machine, it’s not to make the bottom line look better. The point is, look, there’s only, say it’s my team. There’s only three things that I ever wanna spend money on. There’s content, product, and marketing.
Yeah.
We just push all the money that we can, that we save from like the back end of when we, when we take money out of everything that we take out, money out.
We’ve done, the team has done an amazing job. Yeah. I mean, we’ve, my CTO, has halved the number of people in his part of the Astro sphere in the last three years. Halved. Yet we’re doing all the extra products and we’re doing so much more with half of the people because and all the money that we saved out of the CRM billing machine.
Promise you it’s all gone straight back to increase value and reduce the price of the product and increase what you get for that price, but all goes straight back in.
Vijay Sajja:
Yeah, really makes me really happy hearing all this, what I’m hearing, some of this is fresh for me as well. It’s really if you know, third to fourth of the cost for twice as fast, right?
It’s in terms of being able to react to the market and it’s pretty amazing a lot of the savings. What I’m hearing you say is, going towards improving your product and powering value to your customer?
Euan Smith:
It does. It does. So just examples, because of all the money that we’ve been able to improve on the backend and the ways in which we’ve been operating, the improved the agility, and we can do things that we could never have previously done.
So we’ve taken three pieces of what used to be premium content. A really strong tunnel content that we get from really strong Chinese Cantonese content that we get from TVB and really strong product that we’re building with the Malaysian Football League. And we’ve made that available to the entire base at the same time as reducing the price of all of our packs.
Yeah, so much more value that is very valuable to a large portion of our customer base in a world where. Malaysia’s no different from anywhere else in the world, right? Cost of living increases are big here, and pretty much every week you’ll about price of chicken, price of oil going up, price of eggs going up, et cetera, et cetera.
And at the same time, here we are in this, in the industry, being able to actually add value and reduce the cost. It’s great. It’s great. I wish that story were more visible in society, to be honest. It’s one of the things that we struggle with is. Reposition the Astro brand as what we now are versus what we used to be.
Vijay Sajja:
Yeah. No. So that’s, uh, that’s really important. The value you’re referring to for your subscriber has increased. And in terms of the subscriber experience, how has that changed because of this transformation?
Euan Smith:
So at the end of the day, as far as this section of the IT tech stack concern, right? What the customers’ most interested in is not having to use it. We have a manager in building best service is no service because the thing just works and you never need to pick up a phone and you never actually need to go on a website, really, right?
Because everything’s just so easy. So if you look at things like the NJOI product. The NJOI product used to be people buying cards in news equivalent and places around Asia, and now 80% of everything we do just gets transacted through a very simple app and the customers just buy it very simply and they can go about their lives and you can dial up, you can dial down.
It’s just so much easier and so much more convenient for customers. If you look at the Sooka app, a customer now can buy. We can buy a customer if they want to. Suppose you did ever want to buy one Man United game, you can buy that. It’s just pay-per-view. It’s one United game. You just pay for that.
Or you can buy a monthly pass or you can buy the weekend pass and you can buy this free pass. The flexibility inside the OTT product that we have is pretty much, I can’t imagine anything we’d want to do that we can’t do. Honestly, which means that it doesn’t matter what customers are in society, we’ve probably got a price point.
We’ve probably got a solution for you inside the engine. And I think those two things are probably what customers see most from the BSS refresh that we’ve talked about is that simplicity and that speed. My challenge now is to persuade more of Malaysia that they really do not need to call a contact center and they don’t need et cetera, because you can buy the box, we post it to you, you plug it into the IP, the broadband, it’s exactly the same service as you would get if you plugged it into the satellite.
It’s the same box, right? It gives you just the same marvelous experience. It’s super reliable and you never have to talk to anybody. It just works. Yeah, and that’s the journey that we are on. It’s more about awareness than it is actually having the capability these days. It’s more about making Malaysians more aware of that, because Astro’s got a great heritage, but it’s got a great heritage as a legacy satellite play that has some problems when it rains.
We’re close to the equator here, Vijay, unlike the rest of you. MR. Markets the dish kind of did that because the satellite was healed. We’re close to the equator so the dish has to go higher up. Which means catching water when it rains. The Astro had this, we used to get rain fade issues and things, but nowadays the box, yeah, box comes in the dish, it just immediately goes to the IP and uses that until the dish in the satellite is back.
It’s a few days of the year, but it was historically some of what Astro was known for.
Vijay Sajja:
Yeah, right. No, I think I would say kudos to both teams. It takes both teams working together as for and to. Really make these transformations successful. And if you were to summarize your experience working with Evergent and this transformation in a quick summary of it and also what are you most excited about?
Hey, look, this was, let’s not kid ourselves, right? Open heart surgery is hard. And so you need, at the end of the day, you need trust. And I think you also need a mechanism for addressing and resolving differences, right?
Euan Smith:
So a lot of what we had to do, I guess for the first year leading up to the big launch was building that kind of like relationship and that trust between the teams.
You can’t do that over Teams calls and the like. You have to actually be around each other, understand where each other’s coming from. So I think there was an awful lot of that, which was valuable because in the trenches, it’s really, you’re talking to a human being, not talking to a faceless company. It’s a lot.
Once you’ve got a human connection, it’s a lot harder to be an ass, let’s be honest. Yeah. It’s a lot harder on both sides, so I think there was a lot of that being built. I think we do the fact that we really do know the people that are writing the code. We’re not working through a bizarre presales or account manager type.
So we’re actually talking to the people that write the code and we’re talking to the people that put the fixes in. Rather than talking to some big organization where you never actually see the guy ’cause that means that you can impress on the guy. That’s why this matters. Let’s take a random incident that may or may not have happened.
This group of bar owners isn’t getting the service that they need off the platform, and I’m personally hurting because of this, because it’s me having to walk in and apologize ’cause the bill’s not right again. Yeah. And, every day that this goes on, you are hurting me. So you get fixed quicker, right?
Yeah. And that happens at that level. I think that’s what’s the great thing. I mean, where we need to go next, clearly.
Vijay Sajja:
Yeah, that’s great feedback. And it’s a validation also the way we structure our teams. We execute. Yeah. These really stay close to the customer.
Euan Smith:
If you remember, I came over. I was in India with you in February.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Before we launched and we talked, you know what was great is when we went back and we did that whole thing in November and they did the whole congratulations and celebration with this thing across the wall, because everyone worked crazy hours. The number of people that could repeat back to me in November, the things that I had said in February about Astro and the Malaysian business, things that I’ve forgotten, said that’s really powerful when they care about as much as they care about what’s happening in Astro Malaysia as we do.
Vijay Sajja:
Yeah.
Amazing. What would be your advice to media executives on transformations? I think I meet people across the globe. Things have changed dramatically. It’s also opportunity for a lot of those companies. What are three pieces of advice based on your experience you would give?
Euan Smith:
Well, I’ve got probably more than three pieces of advice.
I think my single best piece of advice, Vijay, would be hire Mauro. Our CTO Mauro will tell you that Mauro’s got Stockholm Syndrome ’cause he was with me for five years at Sky Germany. And then foolishly chose to be with me at Foxtel for two years. And so he’s been with me four years at Astro. Now the guy, the guy for whatever reason, can’t get away.
You do need somebody like Mauro ’cause it’s, look what’s the classic line? Nobody ever, no IT guy ever got fired for picking IBM. It would’ve been really easy for Mauro and his team to say, ah, the Evergent thing’s gonna be too risky.
Yeah.
They haven’t got absolutely every single percentage of Astro understanding and that they can’t produce a reference client where they’ve done it all exactly as we’ve done it all.
And so we’ll just go with one of the other guys. It’s easy to say that, right? So the first thing is something around bravery. Yeah. Around the bravery of saying, but if we actually wanna leapfrog. You can’t follow, you have to actually get the next stage right. And the second piece of advice that I would say is do not underestimate the worst thing that we had.
If you remember, the worst thing that we had was the data migration. 20 years of data in a machine. It is really difficult. Nobody actually knows. Right. There’s almost nobody in the company, in the incumbent or in Astro at the time. Yeah. That really understands everything because you’d have had to have been here for 20 years working at a fairly detailed level inside the machine.
So you, yeah. Surprises and you and I both, we have surprise upon surprise with how that data load and data operation went across. That is the. Single biggest problem that anybody trying to do this is gonna have, but that’s hopefully, I’ve kind of explained the benefit for getting through it is so worth it.
Right, because we’ve actually now tied it up a lot of the base. ’cause it’s like, well, we’ve got so many caveats and so many little things that are here and so many effects that affects 250 customers. And this effect, the process of going through the data migration exercise actually helps you clean up your own house.
Vijay Sajja:
That piece, what changed in the last 10, 15 years is that cloud is giving, mitigating a lot of the risks. Previously, if you remember, to do data migration and deploy a new system, you needed to get another five-stoey building full of servers. Now you can bring these up, demand process, odd amounts of data, clean it up, and so this, and you can do a lot of that very quickly.
And so it’s, that is something that changed because I tried to do this large migration 15 years ago and I lost all my hair
Euan Smith:
I, why release in my career?
Vijay Sajja:
So data navigation is I think it’s key. I think it’s really key.
Euan Smith:
And then my other piece of advice, one would be fix the date and do not let the date slip.
Yeah, make, if it’s, it doesn’t matter if it’s artificial or real date, like if a contract’s ending or something. ’cause I see so many of these programs and I have been involved in a couple where the date to get it all done is movable. And unfortunately that means that it always moves. If you say, this is the date and we are in regardless.
Yeah, we are all in. Because you know, if we’re not in on that date, the world ends in our terms. If you do that and you hold to it, and every time somebody comes back to you and says, we’ve had a problem with this piece of dev code, or we’ve had a problem with this test, you go, that’s fascinating, but the date is the date.
Are we gonna still, yeah. Yeah, and that really focuses the mind. That prevents ’cause I see so many of these programs. You other places in particular where the overrun is incredible and people are spending X and three X and four X additional business case and still not getting across the line. So as long as the, and the business teams bless them, whether it was my sales guys or it was my service guys, or it was my finance guys, my CMO, my, my customer director and my CFO all were also saying, it doesn’t matter what the problems are, we gotta fix ’em.
’cause the date is the date. So no one was back and saying, we’re well behind on this particular thing, this particular module we’re gonna have to date three months now. No one said that to me once. So that advice, don’t let the date move. Fix the date artificially. For real. And then last, my last piece of advice is you need to buy an awful lot of cake.
It gets tough and it gets testing and I dunno if you remember, we were having. We had the test teams fly. They went all the way through Christmas, which is not a great big thing in Malaysia. Yeah. But they went all the way to Chinese New Year, if you remember as well. They, um, basically had people that I don’t think went home for because they were test, test, test, test, test.
And so pretty much every Saturday for about three months, Mauro and I would go to the local patisserie. Buy all the cake and then bring all the cake in. And we’d sit with the guys on Saturday afternoons and we’d crack through problems. Yeah. Great. Your guys and my guys ’cause think at peak of 30, your people on site from memory.
Vijay Sajja:
Yep. Yeah, we did something similar in Hyderabad as well, right? Yes. Yeah. I think anything worthwhile doing takes commitment and dedication from the team. Clear reaction, and you’re right. Putting a line in the sand, Hey, we’re going to get it done by this time. Right. Yeah. Makes sense.
Euan Smith:
That’s what I say. But there, now I think the other interesting thing is you go through this euphoria of getting it done. Mm-hmm. You and your team have a big moment where they get it done, but then there’s always a tale of things that need clearing up, need to be fixed. And so the next thing is how do you build that momentum and keep that momentum going, because of the date we went live with some workarounds.
And then it’s all about how do you keep the team focused, keep the IT team focused to make sure that the BU is gonna get what it needs. Right. And that’s just, honestly, that’s just attrition. Just every week just being at it and being at it and just never letting, so getting the reports in, we were doing an awful lot of, in the early days, we were doing an awful lot.
You and me doing bug list management. It needs somebody right at the top going, I need a plan to get ’em down. So that’s that. But it, again, it just takes, it’s just, that’s a process, just attrition to get you to where you wanna be, right.
Vijay Sajja:
So basically, we’re saying it’s basically you get the thing done, but you know, be prepared to mop up and stay focused.
Euan Smith:
There’s a lot. There’s always mop up in the end of these things.
Yeah. Right. So we did the end-of-year audit with PwC. They’re our auditors. It’s their job to find the things that weren’t quite right, but at the end of the day. Our audit partner said, End of the day, I’m talking about something with less than 1% of a 99% hugely successful project. Let’s not beat ourselves up too much.
And if you’d have asked me at the start of the project, would you take 99%? Absolutely. I’d have taken 90%. Yeah.
Yeah. ‘
cause it’s such a big heart surgery thing,
Vijay Sajja:
really. I can speak on behalf of my team. Really grateful for the opportunity and the journey working with you and your team and to do some people think still.
Not believe it, what we have done together, it’s pretty amazing. You’re super grateful for you and the Astro and Astro board, et cetera. Right. Do you have a message you would like to share with our team
Euan Smith:
with the Evergent team? I would like to, it’s the same message be that I shared on stage when it was when we’d been separation thing back in November, which is that you don’t do anything on your own and we are more than grateful.
The entire team A understood us, and B was prepared to work with us. Yeah, that’s quite unique. Yeah. That you have, as I say, you usually have your local dedicated account team that want to do that, but it’s right the way through your structure, everyone understood what needs to get done, and I think you’re right.
A lot of people say you shouldn’t and can’t ever do these things. It’s too big, it’s too difficult, it’s too hard, and I love. Being told I can’t do something ’cause it just puts my hackles up and I’m go, can’t I? Well, let me show you. And I think that goes through my team, but I think it goes through your team as well.
I think that I can’t do this; I’m gonna prove that I can mentally think is which is what got us through that.
Vijay Sajja:
What we’ve done together is phenomenal, and I appreciate you taking the time.
Euan Smith:
And I genuinely think this is great. There is a podcast, but more importantly than the podcast, you personally being involved in this journey has helped massively.
I don’t think we’d be well if you hadn’t taken personal interest, and I know you’ve got a million things to do to get on with that are not looking after Astro, but you’ve always been available and it’s been really appreciated.
Vijay Sajja:
Thank you. Thanks a lot and see you soon. Thank you for tuning into The Monetization Show.
I hope you found today’s episode insightful and that it inspired you with ideas that would power your next big moment.
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.