Is it a particle or is it a wave? Is your business operating in a ‘wagile’ way? These are just a couple of the big questions that Merapar’s own Simon McGrath, VP Strategy & Portfolio, and Alex Borland, VP Strategy & Business Development, discuss on the first episode of the Destination Cloud podcast series.
They are joined by Matt Duhig, co-founder and managing director at FX Digital, to talk about the insights they have gained from conversations on the international trade show circuit, and how they see the media and entertainment industry changing. They also share the challenges facing businesses in this space, and three key considerations for overcoming them.
Inside the episode
Recorded after the first IBC since the pandemic, the episode starts from what the three heard on the show floor: customers want more product, on more brands and more devices, faster, at lower build and running cost, and without losing quality. Meanwhile “big IT” and “big video” were converging. The engineers building streaming services now worked with the same cloud tooling as their peers in banking or retail.
From there the conversation takes three turns. The move to cloud, and why small cross-functional teams building cloud-native workloads let operators test a business case with minimal investment. Quality, and how to measure it when there is no longer a big test phase at the end of a programme. And agility: what happens when a fixed launch date meets a team that works in sprints.
Highlights
- 06:17 “A big thing that we really saw come through clear as day was cloud everything.” Alex Borland on IBC.
- 13:26 “Testing and building quality really starts at the base level. It starts at the team level.” Alex Borland
- 16:52 “In the world of OTT and media it’s super, super important to get the fundamentals right, and it’s so easy to get them wrong.” Matt Duhig
- 17:37 In an OTT app, the viewer spends 99% of their time watching video, yet clients often focus on everything but the player.
- 20:50 Engineering costs out of the business: why quality, sustainability and deliverability go together.
- 27:47 Matt Duhig on “wagile”: stakeholders who want the predictability of waterfall and the flexibility of agile at once.
Key questions answered
What changed at the first trade shows after COVID?
Cloud, everywhere. The major cloud providers’ stands were packed throughout IBC, and many traditional vendors were trying to pivot to cloud or SaaS. Alex Borland expects some of them to come through as cloud-native organisations and some to struggle. Serverless and advanced cloud services let operators build their own stacks, prove things in the market quickly and refine as they go.
How do you measure quality when there is no time for a big test phase?
Build it in from day one. Alex Borland describes testing that starts in the team, with test capability inside small cross-functional teams, CI/CD pipelines from the outset and smoke tests that carry on into the live service. Matt Duhig adds that quality comes down to what you measure: memory use, page load times and bugs by priority. For Alex, the ultimate test is whether viewers engage: a service that is reliable, fast and slick.
Why does video playback deserve most of the attention?
Because on a TV it is what the viewer spends nearly all their time doing, and it is the hardest part to get right. Manifests arrive in different formats, with or without DRM, with multiple audio tracks and subtitle files, across hundreds of devices that cannot all be tested. Matt Duhig’s advice is to measure quality in the video player first, with a tool such as Mux, and to think hard before building a player from scratch. Alex Borland sees the same at the back end: projects start with the video workflow.
Waterfall or agile?
Simon McGrath frames it as wave-particle duality: a fixed date for Thanksgiving or Valentine’s Day, delivered by a team working in sprints. Alex Borland compares waterfall to cramming for an exam, where testing is squeezed at the end, and agile to steady revision that surfaces problems early and gives management transparency. Matt Duhig sees many clients working “wagile”: sprints, but with every design signed off before development starts. With five or six third parties on a typical project, Matt argues, agile is the only way that really works.
Speakers
- Matt Duhig, co-founder and managing director, FX Digital
- Simon McGrath, VP Strategy & Portfolio, Merapar (host)
- Alex Borland, VP Strategy & Business Development, Merapar (host)
