Realizing Long-Term Success from Your Cost Optimization Program in Media & Entertainment

In our last blog, we talked about the foundational elements and quick wins businesses should focus on as they implement their cost optimization programs. In the final part of our series, we’ll discuss the long-term, large-scale and innovative improvements you can make to your cost optimization program.

Transform into an Accountable, Cost-Optimized Culture

Building on your newfound digital factory mindset, it’s crucial to emphasize engineering excellence (EngX) across your technology teams in order to continuously deliver business value. Your teams must leverage their expertise in architecture, development, continuous testing, DevOps, cloud, data and security to drive costs down.

Particularly when it comes to the often pricey expense of the cloud, teams need to build a mindset of not just leveraging the cloud, but leveraging the cloud efficiency and its native capabilities to truly recognize cost savings and avoidance opportunities.

Automate Processes

It's best practice to automate processes wherever possible, whether that’s a digital media supply chain or testing. A digital media supply chain enhances the lifeblood of many M&E content providers by simplifying and automating the progress from ideation to production through management and distribution (e.g., automate localization processes like dubbing and closed-captioned subtitles for short-form and long-form content).

Additionally, consider crowdsourcing global testing for simpler and faster testing to get specific over-the-top (OTT) platform or set-top-box testing in a particular region without having to pay for your own lab equipment.

Modernize Your Tooling

Since the dawn of digital, technology has constantly been evolving – and the rate of change only continues to intensify. With the rest of the foundational items in place, it brings the opportunity to revamp your tools and recognize even greater efficiencies, like:

• Virtual production: Leverage Unreal Engine and virtual set capabilities to create virtual studios rather than incurring costs for travel and shipping equipment from location to location.
• Generative AI: Similarly, you can use Unreal Engine to create metahumans that customers can interact with for help and support. You can pair it with AI chatbot technologies to reduce the need for in-person support staff at stores and concierges. Additionally, it can be used to improve customer experience by leveraging your experts within shared call centers to provide domain-specific expertise as needed in an experience that’s more relatable to your fans and customers. You can also use GenAI to model real-world audiences, products, systems or processes digitally to predict how they will behave and react in different situations and build mitigations. It can even help you accelerate the rough-cut editing or storyboarding.
• 5G edge networks: Use 5G edge technology to avoid last-minute scrambles to set up terrestrial internet connections or courier services to send back all those hard drives.

Don’t just start another cost reduction project with lofty theoretical cost savings that don’t actually deliver real-world improvements. You need a holistic, organizational-wide strategic approach that addresses the core challenges head-on. Effective cost optimization programs require a balanced approach factoring in organization, process and tooling with a realistic phased roadmap accounting for building your foundational quick wins that enables long-term success.