Earlier this month, I marked my first anniversary as MediaKind CEO. And just a day later, we celebrated the third anniversary of the MediaKind brand with a huge thank you to everyone throughout the MediaKind family and wishes of good health to all our families and friends throughout the world.

It’s been a whirlwind first year, and the milestone seems to have arrived very quickly! From a challenging start of getting to know an organization through the remote lens of Covid, to building and becoming part of an incredible team that shares my passion for creating a truly great place for employees and customers. I have thoroughly enjoyed every day, and look forward to everything that’s in front of us. It has truly been a rewarding and enriching experience.

These past 12 months have also been an incredibly challenging time for us all.  However, we’re moving forward at speed, and it’s fantastic that we are starting to see real progress in the vaccination programs in many regions. I believe MediaKind has emerged much stronger, despite – and because of – this experience. Whether it’s driving diversity and inclusion initiatives, creating virtual cycling clubs, or inspiring employee education and wellbeing programs, I’m proud of our teams. The desire now is to reconnect in person, both with one another and with as many of you as possible, as soon as it’s safe to do so.

Readdressing the media landscape

While the challenges of the pandemic have enabled us to adapt our ways of working and find new ways to connect, they have also made us take a more outward-looking perspective to the media landscape. It’s clear broadcasters, service providers, and content creators are changing the way they operate. As their businesses evolve, we have devised strategies and developed additional resources that we believe will best support this market transformation.

That’s why over the past six months, we have revised our structural model at MediaKind. Our sales teams used to be deployed by region – APAC, EMEA, and the Americas. But the micro and macro trends worldwide have given us an even clearer focus and vision around how we must invest the time and energy into our people. That’s why we have decided to take a global sales focus and align our efforts by customer segment.

The main ‘personas’ in the media ecosystem

The media ecosystem is a complex one, with many different players and content delivery paths. To help identify the best pathways and routes to support our customers and partners in delivering high-quality content, we have identified three core players driving today’s workflows and shaping the future of the media ecosystem. Each has a unique persona:

• Content Owners create or own live or on-demand content, which they distribute for consumer enjoyment. They also build direct-to-consumer experiences for increased fan engagement with their brand.
• Channel Originators produce and create live channels and on-demand content for onward distribution to consumer channels
• Multi-Channel Distributors aggregate and distribute procured content and sometimes their own content for final delivery to the consumer.

So why have we mapped out these personas? It’s simple. We need to tailor our media solutions to meet the demands of each of these market players – there’s no longer a one-size-fits-all pathway. Our contribution and distribution portfolio, our consumer delivery portfolio, and our consumer experience portfolio must therefore respond to the varying trends and challenges that these media players face, wherever they are on their content journey.

Mapping out media personas

Over the past year, we have ramped up our streaming initiatives, embraced the transformation towards IP, evolved our portfolio towards becoming fully cloud-native, and enhanced the potential of our TV platforms offering. We have robust foundations, and the organization is well-placed to begin its next phase of growth.

As we move forward, Steve Payne, Chief Revenue Officer, will be leading our go-to-market functions, with his role spanning sales, pre-sales, marketing, business development, and our channel partner program. On the other side of our organization, Allen Broome, Chief Technology Officer, will lead our combined product and R&D functions. And with the addition earlier this year of Amy Marmolejo, our Chief Financial Officer, we are better positioned now for even faster growth, both organic and inorganic, leveraging her deep experience in corporate transformation. Steve, Allen and Amy will be blogging on their ambitions and objectives over the next few weeks, so stay tuned for that!

With this model, we can further scale the MediaKind business, adapt our solutions to the demands of a much broader media landscape and continue to commit investment in the latest technology innovations. A global outlook will achieve a more tangible and significant footprint in all the regions we work in and better support the needs of our customers and partners worldwide.

MediaKind: Looking to an exciting future

MediaKind is very well positioned on many levels. We have a very strong balance sheet, and an outstanding leadership team that augments the wonderful people and collaborations we have throughout our global organization. We also have a solid investor base and the support of both One Equity Partners and Ericsson in our current trajectory.

I have supreme confidence that the structure we are building will deliver clarity and discipline throughout our business. Our product folk, sales teams, and operations teams are all highly aligned with what we’re trying to achieve as an organization.

For our customers, partners, and industry friends, it’s business as usual. There will be no noticeable change in the way we operate, communicate or support you on a day-to-day basis, except for the better. But through a collaborative, integrated approach across our 19 offices around the world, we believe we can optimize the impact of our support to enable you to realize your potential in this industry.

We have the right people, the right products, and the right business model to propel us into H2 2021 and beyond. We are ready to invest in our future, and I’m super excited about the opportunities that lie ahead.