The realisation that the industry has clearly identified its pain points, but not made loads of progress after multiple years, is a blow to the stomach, writes Applicaster Chief Product Officer Devra Prywes.

I recently read an article titled 7 Deadly Sins: Where Hollywood is Wrong about the Future of TV, and thought it was spot on. Then I noticed it was written in 2015. OUCH!

Devra Prywes

Devra Prywes

The realisation that the industry has clearly identified its pain points, but not made loads of progress after multiple years, was a blow to the stomach.

As your audiences are increasingly shifting to digital and the money that used to rain over ad sales teams has slowed to a drizzle, media companies need to adapt. Faster.

As CPO of Applicaster, my goal is to help you manage and monetise your holistic media strategy (video, audio, written word, etc.) in a way that increases your ability to respond to market changes, increase competitiveness, and decrease the costs of learning and experimentation.

Enter Zapp – our SaaS platform for building and managing media apps. Our team has built Zapp to include a pluggable integration layer wrapped around the top native mobile and OTT SDKs.

This means you can use your existing third party partners and proprietary tech as plugins, and swap in new tools in a scalable, modular, and iterative way. Of course, we also invite you to browse and shop our Marketplace which is always growing with new partners and tools.

Two things the industry can do now in order to do better:

First, use technologies that break down the silos that separate teams.

Why are most media companies still operating with a single digital team, sitting separately from everyone else in the organisation who work in tandem on the core media business?

The business of your primary screen is most effective when your teams and their tech work together … and the same applies to your mobile and OTT app business.

Using a platform like Zapp invites multiple teams in your company to do what they do best. This not only fosters higher productivity, it’s more effective for distributing your content into viewers’ hands and homes.

At the same time, it frees up your CTOs and digital teams to do what they do best: make vendor and partner decisions and put them into action across a suite of branded apps — nearly as easily as they can on a single app.

Second, move from FOMO to embracing a strategy of experiment, learn, iterate.

The velocity of change is increasing, and change is hard for established brands. Navigating this change is challenging and often scary. But the ‘wait and see’ approach referenced in the 2015 article above is hurting your business. Users will accept a finite number of apps onto their devices and into their lives, and you don’t want to be left behind.

Yes, a wrong choice can be costly, but it doesn’t have to be this way. My team is building a platform that de-risks experimentation. Zapp’s pluggable infrastructure and focus on remote configurability means that you can implement many changes remotely using our app management platform, without having to re-submit a new version to the app store.

You can experiment with different business models (freemium, SVOD, AVOD, etc.), different UI and UX strategies, and pick from a wide variety of plugins (or make your own).Your media company can act like a tech company – testing, learning, and iterating using the immediate feedback loop a consumer app offers.

 Devra Prywes is Chief Product Officer at Applicaster

IBC2018 Applicaster will be exhibiting at IBC2018 on Stand 14.B42.