The Power of Digital Transformation in Media and Entertainment

Digital content has become today’s primary channel for media consumption. While a digital transformation strategy has been crucial to upgrading the end-user experience for media and entertainment companies, it also improves a company’s backend operations by enabling new efficiencies and capabilities. 

Digital transformation can help your company improve productivity and performance, create new value from your products and services, and scale your operations and customer base faster. With flexible, powerful technology supporting this infrastructure, your company can lay a foundation for efficient operations and frictionless growth. 

What Is a Digital Transformation Strategy? 

The pace of digital innovation continues to accelerate across all industries as companies seek new business models with more efficient, flexible operations that control costs, eliminate inefficiencies, and improve the experience delivered to their customers. 

Most businesses prioritize digital transformation with the goal of optimizing at least one of the following: 

Performance and Value Creation 

Manual tasks, inefficient workflows, unforced errors, and slower delivery all affect the performance of individual teams and your company as a whole.

Digital transformation uses digital processes, automation, flexible architecture, and system-wide security to elevate performance throughout your business. Streamlined workflows, better data availability, and higher overall productivity coming together to create new value for your customers and company. 

Products and Services

Even if your business has invested in a strong digital experience for end-users, an inflexible business infrastructure can affect the quality of these products and services. 

Poor integration of software solutions can undercut the performance of your company’s products. Inefficient business processes can slow down your ability to iterate new solutions and keep pace with your competition. And, as your customer base for various products and services grows, inflexible infrastructure will struggle to perform at scale. 

Operational Efficiency 

From data storage costs to inefficient energy consumption, poor-performing operations can lead to high costs that undercut your company’s revenue generation. A digital transformation strategy can guide investment into flexible data storage solutions that optimize data management and resource utilization while improving security for on-premise and hybrid environments.

What Are the Four Main Focal Points of a Digital Transformation Strategy?

Digital transformation is not an initiative restricted to your IT department. It is all-encompassing, reshaping how entire departments, business processes, and the overall company culture are designed and supported. 

For media and entertainment companies, digital transformation is an opportunity to reconsider the existing business model and its underlying business processes. New digital technologies can be implemented to build an infrastructure that enables new, improved ways of doing business.

As you develop a digital strategy for directing this transformation, make sure you address the following key areas. 

Adaptive Work Methodology 

New digital technologies give your business the digital tools it needs to optimize operations at the process level. The integration of innovative, flexible solutions also allows your business to reconsider its approach to work, steering operations away from past inefficiencies and enabling a more flexible, adaptive approach that improves performance and reduces waste.

Innovation Culture 

Technology alone does not spark a cultural change in any organization. But technology can be used to eliminate processes and other modes of work that may reinforce employee bad habits. 

In that sense, new technology can be used to jump-start a larger, company-wide culture shift by forcing business leaders to align digital transformation with new internal values. By implementing solutions that improve productivity and align individuals and teams with the same collective goals, your business can achieve a cultural change that further increases the value of your digital technologies. 

Agility at Scale 

New technology investments should meet your company’s present-day needs, but also support your long-term growth. For media and entertainment companies, one of the biggest concerns regarding long-term scalability is the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of its data storage systems. 

Modern data storage and management needs to allow for efficient scaling of initial storage investments, particularly in a multi-cloud environment. This scalability must also offer cost-efficiencies to help organizations protect their profit margins and incentivize growth.

Solutions such as edge computing improve data management by processing data closer to its point of creation. This brings enterprise applications closer to internet of things (IoT) devices and servers, reducing latency while enabling large volumes of data to be processed and turned around at scale.

Product Shift 

Through new digital technologies and a remaking of your business culture, digital transformation can help achieve a product shift that reconsiders how people and financial resources are used to create value within the organization.  

By automating certain data management processes, businesses can reallocate employee skills and capabilities to focus on other value-added projects. These new resource efficiencies allow organizations to innovate at market speed and achieve performance results that are sustainable and scalable. 

The Benefits of Digital Transformation in Media 

Digital transformation can help media and entertainment companies achieve a wide range of efficiencies that reduce operating costs, increase revenue generation, and improve the end-user experience.  

As digital media ecosystems continue to grow in volume and complexity, the efficiencies will become an even greater difference-maker in determining how quickly and effectively businesses can scale their operations. Here are some of the most impactful changes digital transformation can bring to media and entertainment businesses. 

Real-Time Booking 

The exponential growth of digital ad spaces has increased the challenges of managing these digital bookings—especially when attempting to maximize ad revenue while identifying high-value ad placements for advertisers. 

Real-time booking uses automation tools to fill these ad spots while avoiding double-bookings that can cost the media agency money while frustrating its advertisers. Real-time data and automated booking streamline the process for advertisers while reducing the manual labor required to manage inventories. This improves the customer experience, making it easy to manage ad bookings at scale. 

Automation of Manual Tasks 

Ad inventory management is only one way automation is reallocating resources to create new efficiencies. Data collection, data management, and storage configuration are just a few of the ways automation can be used to control costs, optimize resource utilization, and free up your employees to focus on customer service, customer satisfaction, and other processes requiring a human touch.

Access to Real-Time Data and Analytics 

Better information leads to better decision-making. Real-time data and intelligent data analytics can uncover a wealth of new insights to improve how your business runs. Data storage, energy management, and real-time security monitoring can all make your business more proactive in making timely changes that reduce costs and mitigate risk. 

Over time, these insights can guide process efficiencies that streamline operations and accelerate performance.

Best Practices for Designing a Scalable Data Center 

Successful digital transformation requires a flexible data center to fully support ongoing innovation and technology investments. While your company’s data center should be designed with present and future business needs in mind, certain best practices should be followed to ensure the best short-term fit and long-term value. 

Always-On Data Resiliency 

Always-on data availability improves your data management processes by ensuring high data availability while reducing the risk of a data loss. Always-on availability plays a critical role in any disaster recovery and business continuity program, improving the resiliency of your data by making sure it can be accessed even in an emergency. 

Self-Healing Technology 

Imagine being able to remediate IT issues without any human intervention. Solutions like Seagate ExosⓇ CORVAULT™ offer autonomous drive regeneration (ADR) capabilities that minimize e-waste, data center downtime, and other system issues without assistance from an IT professional. 

This technology can also deliver self-encryption capabilities to improve data security to support more proactive and predictive data management across your organization.

Storage, Security, and Temperature Control 

Support your multi-cloud environment with physical data storage optimized for enterprise performance and highly scalable capabilities. High-performance hard drives give your business the ability to build a versatile architecture with multi-unit expansion capabilities, best-in-class reliability, and serviceability. 

Simple hardware administration makes it easy to monitor temperature and other systems’ vitals with ease, while security diagnostics and other security software integrations provide additional protection to on-premise and multi-cloud environments.

Versatile architecture lets you easily scale your storage and simplify operations while optimizing costs. Enjoy leading density enclosures, multi-unit expansion, superior reliability, simple administration, and exceptional serviceability to take your data center to the next level. 

Using Seagate Exos​​ to Enable Your Digital Transformation 

Looking for digital transformation strategy examples that enhance your business infrastructure? Seagate Exos hard drives deliver intelligent storage capabilities, enabling new efficiencies and performance that extend into your multi-cloud environment. 

Exos​ ​​high-density data storage solutions provide physical data storage with economics comparable to cutting-edge cloud services. For even more robust storage performance, Exos CORVAULT™ offers the next generation of intelligent data storage, including self-healing capabilities and self-encrypting technology—all while offering fast and easy deployment and user-friendly device management.​ 

From storage cost controls to data security, successful digital transformation is key to creating new business models for media and entertainment that are both profitable and sustainable. Connect with our team at Seagate to dive into digital transformation strategy and learn more about how data management solutions and other innovative technologies can help position your company for a brighter future.