Broadcast Television’s Digital Transformation with FOX Corporation West Coast CIO, Garrett Boss

Have you ever tried to upload a video and been frustrated by the time it takes to land on the server? Now imagine you’re a broadcast crew, working the Super Bowl, with hundreds of cameras that all have to upload video simultaneously. Transferring millions of data points, and moving massive files with no latency puts your video upload woes to shame. It’s no easy task, yet it gets done relatively seamlessly every year. For that, you can send your thank you notes to Garrett Boss, CIO West Coast at FOX, where he is responsible for providing the infrastructure and technology to the broadcast crews that bring you your favorite sporting events and television shows.

“Our mandate is to reduce friction everywhere we can to enable creatives and production to spend all of their energy and time focused on those things. I want to remove every barrier, every hiccup, every challenge that they have that's not related to their talent of putting inspiring content on the air for our viewers.”  

It’s no small feat, and the challenges are vast, especially when you consider that the media landscape is undergoing a renaissance. There is more need to push content to over-the-top platforms, and customer expectations are getting higher and higher every day. 

On this episode of IT Visionaries, Garrett gives up the goods on how his team rises to the occasion. And he provides a unique look at how FOX went through a massive digital transformation in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Plus, he discusses the shift from a hardware mentality to a software mindset, and how FOX is building scalable technologies with reliable partners. Enjoy this episode.

Main Takeaways

• Build vs Buy: Software as a service, and digital platforms have allowed IT teams to rethink what products and services they should build themselves and which products they can buy from vendors. When you are going through this process, it’s important to have a clear understanding of where some of your previous technology was over-indexed and where you can streamline some things.
• Digital Video Revolution: OTT platforms are providing broadcast partners with the ability to not only compile a better understanding of their viewers’ habits, but also the ability to push more targeted advertising to their audience. But the infrastructure required to compile the data, digest it, and then use that information means rethinking what your tech stack looks like.
• Team Building: When you’re undergoing a digital transformation in a virtual environment, it’s not a great idea to have a hierarchical structure with technologies that are forced down the ladder. Instead, employing more of a linear decision making process allows everyone on the team to have a hand in the decision making process, and still allows for quick and thoughtful decisions under tight deadlines.

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