bypassed these issues because it’s had the right system architecture from day one. It works so well, that the platform can make 200 software releases per day. No one is saying that designing an OTT platform isn’t incredibly complex. There will be anywhere between 30 to 80 or more functional components – ranging from DRM to processing, transcoding and asset management – that all have to work seamlessly together in order to deliver a great user experience. If any one of these components doesn’t function as it should, then you can kiss goodbye to that great experience and add operating expenses to the bottom line. BEST PRACTICE FROM BANKING At Qvest, teams working across a number of vertical industries are often liaised with. One of those groups, focused on the finance industry, inspired Qvest to have a closer look at how IT in banking had solved many of the foundational issues around media e-commerce.
Finance is an industry several orders of magnitude greater than M&E, with the resources to optimise a whole range of CRM processes – from user onboarding to check out and retention management. Analyst Gartner even wrote a white paper describing the backbone architecture of the banking industry. They called it composable commerce, emphasising its potential to become a new paradigm in building tech systems. That resonated with the Qvest team. The concept may not be new, but it has been proven. Could it apply the same holistic software architecture to media? FLEXIBLE AND MODULAR The result is composable OTT, which answers the question: ‘How can a company build a robust platform that will continue to amaze its user base for years to come’? The approach harnesses the flexibility of composable commerce, the power of microservices and the scalability of cloud-native infrastructure. Composable OTT is a modular, cloud-native architectural approach that allows users to build a highly customisable and scalable streaming platform.
By integrating best-of-breed SaaS components (such as video players, recommendation systems and search engines), businesses can swiftly adapt to new trends, launch features faster and deliver personalised UXs – without vendor lock-in. Users don’t want to be dependent on any single vendor. The vendor with the best subscription or contract management system today may well be surpassed tomorrow. Media providers need to have the agility to quickly swap out and exchange components without impacting other parts of the system – and without it costing the earth. This forward-thinking model is a key differentiator that should resonate with any media company focused on long-term sustainability. COMPOSABLE COMMERCE VERSUS MACH ARCHITECTURE While composable commerce and MACH architecture (microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless) are often discussed together, they are not identical concepts. Focusing more on the technical foundation of a system, MACH helps facilitate flexible, scalable systems by decoupling the front end (UX) from the back end (business logic).
MEDIA PROVIDERS NEED TO BE ABLE TO QUICKLY SWAP OUT AND EXCHANGE COMPONENTS
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