Unlocking Efficiency: The Role of Predictive Analytics in Media Supply Chains

The only tools we had for effective business planning in the pre-digital, pre-cloud era were historical data (usually unstructured, or in many cases, on paper) and gut instinct.

But now that so much business activity is digitized and structured, we have far more information at hand to make better-informed predictions about market conditions and arm ourselves for the best response.

It's no secret that the art and science of data analytics is being widely applied to customer preferences – it's what businesses like Amazon and Netflix were built on, after all. Today, streaming services and broadcasters are using it to make extremely precise decisions about what content to make or buy.

But it might surprise you how far back in the content supply chain media industry analytics can be applied. Data analytics can enable you to measure content supply chain volume and performance on a minute-by-minute basis, aggregating processing events from acquisition to distribution through a single data store. These insight presented in an easy-to-follow dashboard that gives you a precise view of your content operations.

Data analytics and you

When you figure out how many people are likely to watch or buy versus the cost of storing, actioning and delivering the asset, you get very clear metrics around your ROI.

Ateliere's data analytics tools give you an at-a-glance view of the data processed through your content operations based on very particular and industry-relevant KPIs.

Beginning with the production or acquisition of an asset, the platform will watch each processing event, providing you with detailed information about the asset’s journey through your media supply chain. The result is a contextualized window into your workflow, helping you isolate inefficiencies.

For example, the system might reveal a higher than usual number of defects or failed events with a certain partner. It could also help save on storage by identifying assets you can archive because they're not processed as often as you thought.

Data analytics and Ateliere

Our tools watch every event in your content workflow, collecting and synthesising them all in a central data warehouse where they are packaged into easy-to-understand results in Amazon Quicksight. Your dashboard gives you visibility into titles processed, delivered, rejected and more. For a more advanced AI-driven approach, consider our Connect AI platform.

The platform includes a host of KPIs to complete the picture including;

How many titles you've processed.
How many hours (tracked to the content minute) of media have been ingested, packaged, transcoded and quality checked, in total or across a specified period and with partner video quality (SD, UHD, etc) and the delivery status included.
Total data delivered, in total or across a specified period and further broken down by provider and delivery status.

The system can then generate the necessary reports that list every event per type, status, quality, technical spec and provider to a very granular level.

You can set email alerts to notify you of specific events or thresholds reached, a critical resource when you've preset operational parameters you need to stay within, results are fully exportable in formats like PDF or CSV to share further or import into other business platforms for an even broader view, and dashboards are fully customizable and shareable as well.

Data analytics and the future

Usage tracking and performance/defect tracking are all part of our flagship product, Ateliere Connect. Data analytics will pick up on trends and put a spotlight on the potential efficiencies to be found in correcting them.

For example, you will be able to track granular transcode failures with a particular broadcast or streaming partner. Without these capabilities you might not notice a spike in rejections unless you know what you're looking for – and where to look. If viewing patterns then tell you there's an uptick in deliveries to that partner on the horizon, specification problems are something you want to get ironed out before they become an expensive problem.

But this is just the beginning.

Ateliere will introduce a new Usage Forecasting feature as part of its data analytics suite, predicting trends in content acquisition, processing and deliveries based on your past usage. You'll have quantitative information that synthesizes both what's happened in the past and what's happening right now to give you the clearest possible picture of what's to come, to help you answer and make better informed decisions on how your business should react and adapt.

Might costs increase in the near term? Do you have enough defects and failures to justify the investment in actioning them? Would your figures justify a provider giving you a better rate? Should you request more budget for later-generation transcoding technology?

They're just some of the questions predictive analytics in Ateliere Connect will answer, and there's no better transparency and accountability you can offer your CFO or Board if you're asking for a budget increase.

Tomorrow's technology, available now

Operations in media are becoming more automated, and media targeting strategy software means human controllers are increasingly managing the overall technology stack rather than doing the work.

That's a good thing because it reduces the sheer drudgery of asset processing work, but it also removes direct human expertise from being required to inspect how that processing is performing.

Data analytics is plugging that gap across many industries; media and entertainment is no different. Failures and defects, storage and bandwidth issues, partner specifications and more create a nebulous environment that's hard to penetrate and interrogate in real time.

You need a system that watches all that as it happens, reports on it in the clearest possible manner and gives you what you need to make operational decisions that will affect you in the next week or the next ten years.

And it's already here. Welcome to Ateliere Connect. To find out more visit us anytime at ateliere.com/ateliere-connect/