Seven West Media's 2021 AWARD FINALIST CASE STUDY: Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver an outstanding Customer Experience Excellence

Read this article about Seven West Media, Finalist in the Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver an outstanding Customer Experience Excellence, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2021 Digital Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program.

Australia’s Largest Ever Digital Streaming Event

Seven is one of Australia’s most prominent media companies with a strategic focus to accelerate the digital transformation of the company from a linear broadcast business to a multi-platform media business. Seven’s streaming service 7plus, is the primary vehicle for this transformation.

The Olympics was used to reposition both Seven as an organization and 7plus as a streaming service with new branding, a best-in-class user experience, more diverse content types, strong return visitation and service reliability. All of this was underpinned by technology innovation that allowed new content experiences and cost-effective operations.

Broadcast media companies are easily dismissed by many as legacy businesses, but at the heart of Seven as a media business is our love for producing great content that engages and excites our viewers and new digital experiences for our viewers. Digital delivery of the Olympics enabled Seven to directly engage with our audiences and inspire them with more exciting and relevant content and when it comes to the Olympics Seven Audiences wanted to see Australians win gold.

The Olympics on 7plus was Australia’s largest ever streaming event. The event streamed in July 2021 presented a number of challenges, including coordinating over 40 channels in real-time and a system that could rapidly respond to changing viewer behaviour and interest as the fortunes of Australian athletes changed. However, the unforeseen lockdown of millions of Australians just weeks before the Games required ensuring the system could manage what was to be an inevitable increase in load combined with the new remote working requirements for the production team. Even with all these challenges Seven delivered a Gold Medal performance!

Seven outperformed all metrics through:

• Project management deployed a hybrid of agile and waterfall-based end-date scheduling that provided the flexibility and customer focus inherent in agile with the necessity to hit an immutable deadline inherent in live events.

User centric Innovation

• Realtime viewing on 7plus streaming used to decide programming on Seven’s broadcast channel

• VOD-to-Live solution to create sport specific 24/7 replay channels at <5% the cost of traditional playout – Seven was 1st in APAC and 3rd Globally to deploy AWS’s “Channel Assembly” Technology

• Custom built solution to real-time translate closed captions into 12 languages leveraging AWS

• Bespoke integration with live video encoder technology to control ad-breaks, graphics overlays and standby slides eliminating expensive traditional playout technology

Operational Excellence

• Well Architected Reviews covering Performance, Reliability, Security and Operations (Seven pioneered usage of the draft AWS Streaming Media Lens)

• Internal and external security penetration testing as well as numerous load tests

• Business wide Ransomware simulations

• Playbooks for handling emergency in each operations area

• Development of an entirely separate Production environment to cater for catastrophic system failure

Commercially focused KPIs to deliver long-term sustainability for the platform:

• User base grew by 44% to 9.127M customers

• Streaming Minutes: Target 1 billion, Actual 4.74 billion

• 7plus revenue +205% YoY, Content Consumption +189% YoY, EBIT +436% YoY

• #1 in Australian App Stores

• Market share of 75.24%

• Paralympics coverage primetime figures ever, 146 million minutes on 7plus

Digital Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards 2021

About the Awards

The Digital Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards have been established to showcase globally the most outstanding achievements through the application of Business Transformation, Digital Transformation, Operational Excellence & Innovation Excellence programs. Click here to view the Press Release.

The winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony at The Digital Transformation & Operational Excellence World Awards (DTOES) on Wednesday, December 15th, 2021, from 6:30 PM at Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld®.

The Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards are open to all organizations, both private and public sector, across the globe, which have implemented Business Transformation, Digital Transformation, Operational Excellence & Innovation Excellence programs to deliver outstanding business results.

The Awards will be held in conjunction with the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence World Summit, BTOES 2021 on December 15, 2021, at the Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld®. Click to access the agenda, view the current speakers, and watch the highlights video from last year.

Speakers

Agenda

Highlight Video

BTOES.com

The issues in this article are just one of topic areas that are going to be discussed at the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence World Summit & Industry

BTOES is the industry’s biggest and best, senior-level, cross-industry gathering of Business Transformation & Operational Excellence industry leaders and senior executives.

With over 150 speakers, over 100 sessions, 12 Keynotes, 9 Track Themes, 5 parallel tracks, 60+ track sessions, 50 roundtable discussions, 20 Interactive Workshops, 6 Thought Leader Panels, 5 Leaders Boardrooms, 5 co-located events, the Industry Awards Program, Site Visits, 20+ hours of social networking including 2 gala cocktail parties, dinners, numerous group activities, this is the ultimate event to benchmark, network and drive Operational Excellence to the next level.

Quick Links

Speakers

Agenda

BTOES Awards

There is a strong focus on Cultural Transformation, Customer Delight, Sustaining an Operational Excellence program, Need for end-to-end Business Transformation, Keeping up with new technologies/impact of digitalization and Leadership Buy-in & Understanding. We dedicated two tracks to advanced technologies, such as AI, Machine Learning, RPA, Predictive Analytics, Blockchain, Cloud infrastructure etc.

The agenda is designed to encourage active meaningful conversations through all day enhanced networking and interaction opportunities

For more information please email info@proqis.com