Streaming is here to stay. Consumers have embraced it.
According to
eMarketer.com, by year-end 2021 3.26 billion people will be “digital video viewers” - over 40% of the global population now watches streaming or downloaded video at least once per month in some capacity. Subscription OTT video service user growth exceeded 1.5 billion users in 2020 and it is expected to pass 2 billion in 2024. It’s safe to say that the media industry has changed – and the evolution is continuing at an unprecedented pace.
Digital Transformation in overdrive or else…
That said, for the past few years the Media industry has been trying to shift business models to be at the forefront of innovation. This rapid transformation has, at the same time, been challenged by the sheer scale of how things were done in the past; with platforms and technologies designed to support much simpler business models (and even then, they weren’t “that simple”!).
With “digital viewing” in overdrive, the pandemic solidified the shift towards streaming and a new business paradigm. According to
PWC this came with a drop in revenue of $81bn in 2020 (more than the value of 2020s’ entire music, radio and podcasts segment), a -3.8% decrease year on year. While some segments of the industry are expected to keep contracting, the direct-to-consumer trend is here to stay - and we are seeing it with the proliferation of streaming services and digital marketplaces. Monetizing content in a context of fragmentation across distribution channels and devices will require constant investment and innovation, not only in content development and audience engagement but also to enable new business models and to automate and modernize processes. Media companies must become intelligent, efficient, and automated - digital transformation in overdrive…or else.
Future proof your business
Typical pain points we hear from Media companies include a lack of a central integrated system that able to scale and support new business development ideas, an inability to enable complex hybrid revenue sourcing models, manual and labor-intensive processes, and an inability to make data driven decisions due to a lack of comprehensive visibility into the business with granularity. Put yourself in the shoes of these companies. It must be daunting. You wouldn’t want to have to weather the 80-foot typhoon in a makeshift dinghy. It is scary… and then, think again, and it is exciting! It’s exciting because SAP is in the forefront helping the industry’s biggest brands navigate the turbulent waters into safety. SAP is helping many companies, in many industries, transform their businesses, none of which are shifting at the speed that Media is experiencing its transformation. It is a once in a generation opportunity to reinvent an industry that touches us all on a deep level, daily.
SAP is known for providing the capabilities to manage changing businesses on a global scale. Now, with SAP’s Media Industry Cloud and the commitment to an open platform architecture to co-innovate with customers and partners, Media companies benefit from faster innovation cycles, a lower TCO, and industry specific capabilities that are fully integrated and can be added in a modular and flexible way. These out-of-the-box solutions and accelerators delivered in hybrid and / or diversified cloud environments, will greatly reduce the complexity and cost of adopting the industry’s best practices to future proof your business.
Transformation won’t be driven in the time frame needed by large rigid platforms. They simply cannot provide the flexibility, time to value and industry specific capabilities that worked in the past. Media companies are demanding that their technology partners power their transformations, bring to the table pre-integrated cloud-based solutions that can use common, fresh data. Data that is used to make insight led decisions, not stale data that provides a rear-view mirror view of the business. These applications are part of an Industry Cloud, a cloud built around an intelligent core. Extensions that build on the core and can be moved in and out with relative ease as the business changes. This is the SAP Media Industry Cloud.
SAP Media Industry Cloud, today and tomorrow
Disney is restructuring to accelerate its direct-to-consumer business as it becomes the company’s gr.... Are you getting ready for an existential evolution? Not only you will need SAP’s marquee enterprise solutions that are the backbone of almost 90% of the world’s commercial activity (S
AP customers generate 87% of total global commerce, $46 trillion) but also solutions encapsulating critical specialized industry expertise; for instance:
- Managing all processes and tools needed to monetize IP and manage the lifecycle of intellectual properties in one single enterprise class real time platform with SAP Rights and royalty management by Vistex; from planning, R&D, contracting, production, exploitation, sales & distribution to royalty settlement.
- Monetizing subscription and usage-based business models with agility with the revenue management and recurring billing capabilities in SAP Subscription Billing
- Capitalizing on your digital and direct-to-consumer offerings, converting usage and transactional data into revenue and supporting new business models alongside existing ones in your financial systems with SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute.
- Making faster and better financial decisions by creating a streamlined, automated process to increase financial efficiency throughout the content creation, acquisition and utilization process with Invenio’s Content Financials accelerator; a solution with a services package that extends SAP’s core to help content driven businesses be make data driven decisions.
These are only few examples of SAP’s industry cloud for media, but it doesn’t stop here. Industry lines are blurring and with SAP’s industry cloud, Media customers can also benefit from SAP’s and its ecosystem’s innovations solving the toughest challenges across 25 other industries.
So what do you need to do to bring this level of transformative potential to your business? We can assume that you have a clear business strategy in place. We can assume that you do not have the luxury of replacing all your business applications and technologies overnight. Exactly, why we at SAP have developed the Industry Cloud – to allow you to take a less radical approach to achieving radical business results. To learn more about the SAP Media Industry Cloud story
watch this session.
