EPAM Partners with One of the World’s Largest Media Conglomerates to Streamline Complex Content Distribution Workflow

The Customer

The Company is one of the world's largest media conglomerates with interests in cinema and cable television. They connect with audiences through television, motion pictures, mobile platforms and online properties in more than 160 countries and territories. The Company operates over 150 media networks reaching more than 600 million global subscribers with more than 500 branded digital media assets.

The Challenge

As one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, the Company offers a diverse portfolio of online products/properties with a wide array of consumer and business oriented partners. They operate in a dynamic environment, leveraging multiple applications/tools/websites both to support complex integrations with external systems, as well as to manage the cross-dependent asset sets they need to package and distribute across these multiple channels.

There are also some high-level challenges that needed to be considered:

• Given the rapidly changing digital media environment the Company operates in, time to market has a direct impact on their realized ROI
• The media properties managed by the Company need to capture user engagement and loyalty while embodying quality and high production values 
• Complex content distribution / re-distribution arrangements, along with having content in varied formats scattered across multiple platforms and applications can generate on-going costs concerns
• Multiple consumer facing applications can increase maintenance and deployment costs

The Solution

To help them overcome these challenges, the Company selected EPAM Systems as a technology partner and preferred outsourcing vendor. Over the past 4 years, our relationship with the Company has grown significantly. They are now fully utilizing EPAM’s technical capabilities along with our deep experience in the Information and Media industries. The dedicated ADM team EPAM has established for the Company has grown to over 110 people, and is currently involved in over 20 active projects utilizing a wide range of technologies in multiple areas:

• Application Development and Testing:
  • Media Content Management
  • Media Content Delivery and Distribution (feeds, syndication, etc)
  • Web properties for some of the best known network brands
  • Mobile Applications (cross-platform)
  • A Proprietary Social Media Framework
• Live Support and Maintenance (24x7)
  

A key aspect of the work that EPAM needed to focus on for the Company was content re-distribution: an important element of their balanced online strategy. Through the use of content feeds, the Company was looking to better leverage their digital assets by increasing their exposure through syndication, improving their SEO for better monetization, and reducing their production costs by standardizing on how content is packaged for delivery.

Given the more than 100 branded properties in the Company’s media portfolio, deploying the processes and systems required to support the creation and delivery of these feeds was technically demanding. EPAM’s team needed to:

• Re-engineer the process of content feed development to streamline operating procedures and create more standardization
• Consolidate the existing content feed generation systems into a single shared service
• Modularize feed deployments to increase reusability across brands
• Create graphical interfaces to give more non-technical users the ability to manage feeds
• Leverage a global delivery model to optimize outsourced feed production
  

To help in this process, EPAM developed a customized Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) implementation for the Company. This dramatically simplified the interaction required between their content production and delivery groups. This streamlining of processes and centralization of systems helped the Company’s to improve performance in their main operating efficiency metrics:

• Reduced system management and maintenance costs through consolidation of development and production functions
• Reduced time-to-market for online feed creation and modification requests
• Improved quality by enabling comprehensive feed production management
  

In delivering these technical capabilities, EPAM was guided by a focused set of business goals that are important to the Company:

• Maintain the right balance between market responsiveness and the benefits of centralized feed management
• Enhance the integration process for new assets that are acquired, to accelerate their deployment and monetization
• Realize economies of scale and other efficiencies through content management standardization
• Decrease costs by outsourcing non-value-added production activities
• Leverage open-source systems to improve solution effectiveness

The Results

Through their ongoing collaboration with EPAM, the Company has been able to realize the following key benefits:

• Improved monetization of existing assets
• Improved time-to-market for newly acquired assets
• Enhanced operational efficiency and stability
• Better scale and flexibility to help them adapt to marketplace changes
• Reduced overall costs of development, testing, and maintenance