Optimize direct-to-consumer workloads through AWS Marketplace

Challenges in direct-to-consumer (D2C) streaming models have media and entertainment (M&E) business leaders seeking innovative solutions to remain competitive. These challenges include tough profitability margins, pipeline integration complexities, and technology skillset limitations.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace hosted a webinar to examine how M&E organizations use cloud solutions to cut costs and deliver engaging experiences. Urban Edge Network (UEN) participated in the webinar to share how they brought content from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) to the world.

This post highlights key webinar takeaways, including an overview of Urban Edge Network’s story, today’s D2C trends and challenges, and Q&A excerpts. View the Optimize direct-to-consumer workloads through AWS Marketplace webinar for the entire discussion.

The M&E D2C industry landscape

M&E leaders are encountering challenges as they seek innovative and efficient solutions for content personalization, streaming, and D2C experiences:

• D2C profitability is difficult to achieve – According to the Wall Street Journal, profits for some of the largest global streamers are down year over year.
• Technology skillset limitations – According to a Forrester commissioned report, 45 percent of D2C M&E organizations lack key technology skillsets.
• Pipeline integration complications – The same Forrester report found that 34 percent of respondents faced pipeline integration challenges.

Industry trends, which have arisen in response to current challenges, will shape the future of the M&E industry:

• Increased investment in cloud-based technology – According to a Forrester commissioned report, one in three cloud users will increase their cloud investment by more than 10 percent next year.
• Vertical and horizontal scaling – Partners will scale vertically to handle resource-intensive tasks and scale horizontally to manage growing traffic and workloads.
• Expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) – AI and ML will play prominent roles in developing, operating, and personalizing D2C services.

Amagi brings Urban Edge Network’s audacious goal to life

Urban Edge Network is a media company that publishes and distributes content dedicated to the HBCU community. The network offers HBCU+, an app with 28 live linear free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels featuring HBCU news, sports, and programs. HBCU+ streams in 48 countries.

“UEN had an audacious goal to bring the HBCU world out of obscurity and into the mainstream,” said Kujanga Jackson, chief technology officer for UEN. “When we started our journey, we knew that AWS had a treasure trove of resources to help us achieve our goals. But that’s only part of the battle. The other part is finding a partner to help us navigate those tools.”

For UEN, this partner is Amagi. UEN discovered Amagi in AWS Marketplace while researching M&E cloud solutions. Amagi provides end-to-end cloud-managed live and on-demand video infrastructure for TV and over-the-top (OTT) streaming.

Amagi’s cloud technology enables UEN to create, manage, distribute, and monetize content within an end-to-end unified workflow. Solution features include:

• Content and creation tools for managing metadata, subtitles, program and ad scheduling, dynamic graphics, electronic programming guides, and live orchestration.
• A centralized marketplace that allows content owners to distribute content to thousands of participating cable, D2C apps, CTV, and FAST platforms.
• Monetization capabilities via contextual ads, dynamic ad insertion and a real-time marketplace that connects content owners to advertisers.

UEN and Amagi’s partnership will have an opportunity to shine later this year at the first-ever HBCU post-season bowl game. “HBCU football fans have been longing for post-season play,” said Kujanga. “We’re proud to be sponsoring the 2023 Florida Beach Bowl. All the day’s events will stream live on HBCU+, and we’re ready to execute at the highest level.” 

 “We want to be the ESPN of the HBCU world for sports”

After sharing his network’s success story, Kujanga answered several follow-up questions. Read on for excerpts from the insightful Q&A discussion.

Q: You essentially have two sets of customers: the schools and the content consumers. What experiences do you need to deliver for each of these?   

A: “With the schools, one of the things we discovered is that not all are created equal in terms of infrastructure. Budgets, size, technical prowess—they’re all different. We had to build a system that all schools could work with, whether they had a full media team or just a couple of student volunteers. It needed to be easy to use to efficiently get the stream from the ground to the cloud to the devices.

“For the content consumers, the key thing we had to consider was a smooth viewing experience. In the beginning, we could get away with a little bit of buffering [because of the novelty of our content]. But we needed to get into an environment with access to better content delivery networks. We needed better systems from encoding to transcoding to adaptive bitrate streaming to ensure streamlined processes for the customer.”

Q: What are your ambitions for next steps?   

A: “The vision I adopted early in life is that you start where you are, you use what you have, and you do what you can. Then you progress. You have to have a continual improvement process in place. That’s what we’ve been doing since we began. Now that we’ve reached this place where we have the quality of service needed to take us to the next level, we’re beginning to dream. We’re looking at how we can become innovators in this space. And I can tell you that some of the things we are working on with Amagi will be ground-shaking. We want to be the ESPN of the HBCU world for sports.”

About AWS Marketplace and next steps

How can you begin addressing D2C challenges like the ones discussed in the webinar?

AWS Marketplace has a wide variety of solutions to help M&E organizations modernize their infrastructures. AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog that makes it easy for customers to find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software, services, and data. It offers quick, easy, and secure deployment, flexible consumption and contract models, and streamlined procurement and billing operations. More than 330,000 organizations large and small use AWS Marketplace monthly to accelerate digital transformation and improve efficiencies across their enterprises.

Independent research from Forrester estimates it takes half the time to find, buy, and deploy a solution through AWS Marketplace compared to other sales channels.

Visit Media & Entertainment Solutions in AWS Marketplace to learn more about the financial services industry (FSI) cloud solutions available in AWS Marketplace.

View Optimize direct-to-consumer workloads through AWS Marketplace to learn more about the topics discussed in this post.

Author bio

Christopher Bell is the global strategy leader for Direct to Consumer, Music & Radio for AWS. He has two decades of experience at the intersection of media, marketing, and technology. Before joining AWS, Christopher held leadership roles at global M&E companies, including AT&T, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group.