Live Programming: High Stakes for High Quality

There’s no margin for error when it comes to streaming live events. In the age of instant media gratification and sky-high expectations, failure to deliver live programming has a very direct effect on the bottom line — that’s something a “technical difficulties” slate just won’t fix.

So, how should media professionals address the many challenges that come with live programming, especially in the face of significant investments in content, the looming threat of lost revenue, potential reputation damage reputations and the need to maintain strong business partnerships? Guesswork and high hopes aren’t enough. Streamers need comprehensive, actionable plans.

In Applause’s recent webinar, Delivering Value from High-Stakes Live Streaming Events, industry experts Ken Isaacson and Ross Curley explored the complexities and critical strategies for navigating the digital quality landscape in live-streaming programming.

The pivot from growth to profitability

With the live streaming market projected to reach over $3 billion USD by 2027, driven largely by the extreme popularity of live sports, media companies have equal opportunity for success and failure given the demand. It’s no longer a novelty to access live content via a streaming platform; flawless performance is the non-negotiable expectation.

“Back in the day, fans were just happy to have the content available,” said Ken Isaacson, a media industry veteran with decades of experience. “Now, though, folks expect it to work, and it has to work well.”

At the heart of the streaming media industry’s evolution are these high-pressure demands and expectations for high-quality streaming programming. And, today, audiences rarely compartmentalize live versus streaming programming — it all has to work. This underscores a critical shift from the media industry’s growth-at-all-costs mentality from recent years to a strategic focus on profitability. As the experts discussed, a quality-first approach is the key to retain viewers and ensure revenue growth.

One way to increase revenue is to make sure you can accept it in the first place. Isaacson stressed the importance of understanding the scope of diverse payment methods across global markets — just one of many nuances that comes with attracting and retaining international subscribers.

“It’s really critical to maintain the bulk of your subscribers after their purchase [and] keep them on the platform as long as possible,” Isaacson said.

Media brands must strike a delicate balance between acquisition and retention for sustainable growth, which includes ensuring that the sign-up and payment processes adhere to local preferences, enhancing the overall user experience.

The complex ecosystem of live streaming

To support high-quality live programming, organizations must navigate a multifaceted ecosystem. It all starts with securing costly streaming rights — no small feat — then involves managing the infrastructure and operations that ensure seamless delivery. On top of that, organizations then need to align with the expectations of all local markets where programming will air — not just conforming to regulations and business agreements, but also making content culturally relevant and accessible across different regions.

“You’re paying for servers, for your bandwidth, and you need people to do the monitoring… then one that is not necessarily thought about, but I’ve found to be significant, is content localization,” Isaacson said.

It’s of critical importance to anticipate and manage the technological and operational challenges that underpin a successful live stream. Testing and feedback are crucial mechanisms to preemptively address potential points of failure or friction before they degrade the viewer experience. Organizations must adopt a holistic approach that balances the high costs of content acquisition with the technological prowess and operational efficiency needed to deliver content reliably and at scale.

That’s where Applause plays a key role in ensuring digital quality for live-streaming programming. With a global community of more than one million digital experts, Applause offers fully managed solutions that integrate seamlessly with organizations’ development processes. Thus, streaming providers can take advantage of real-world, actionable insights to avoid the ramifications of poor quality streams.

“Applause makes it easy to have real world global testers available,” said Isaacson, underscoring the value of a robust testing and feedback system. “I’ve loved having Applause by my side both pre-event, during [the] event and after the event to really make sure that we as the operator can get that real-time feedback from folks — hopefully, before we hear from customers as well.”

View the on-demand webinar, Delivering Value from High-Stakes Live Streaming Events, or read the transcript below to learn more from these industry experts.

(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)

ROSS CURLEY: Hello, everyone. My name is Ross Curley. I’ve been with Applause for over eight years.

And along my journey, I’ve really been fortunate enough to work with probably dozens of media companies on their direct-to-consumer applications. My experience with these organizations really centers around strategizing and setting up holistic testing and feedback programs. We’ve been involved as early as the idea/concept stage, all the way through launching services in new markets. So I’ve seen firsthand what can go wrong and, luckily, for the majority of the time, what can go right with a really solid plan.

Really excited to be joined here by Ken today. So with that, Ken, I’ll send it over to you.

KEN ISAACSON: Thanks, Ross. I’m excited to be here with you. I’m fortunate to have 25 years of experience in digital sports, starting first at MLB Advanced Media, managing the first MLB TV project in 2002, and then seeing the evolution of digital sports until the current day, where you can watch just about any event on any device anywhere you want. And it’s amazing to have seen the transition in the digital sports space.

ROSS CURLEY: Thank you, Ken. We have an exciting agenda in store for you all today. We’ll start with what I’d call a current state of streaming, getting into some of the growth projections and some recent deals in this space. We’ll then chat about the shift from growth at all cost to profitability.

Then we’ll head into aligning expectations with various stakeholders along your streaming journey. We’ll discuss everything that can go wrong at a really high level when it comes to streaming applications. Ken’s going to take us a layer deeper, I’d say, in talking about top five blind spots in his 25-plus years of experience. So make sure you tune into that.

And then we’ll conclude with why we at Applause feel we’re really well suited to partner with organizations on their streaming initiatives. So we’ve all heard of this cord-cutting revolution. But there’s still a growing market that fuels demand for content, especially live content. 

The live streaming market is forecasted to grow to over $3 billion [USD] by 2027.That would be over 21% annual growth rate from now until then. And sports really continues to be a major driver for live programming. In 2023, 56 out of the top 100 most-watched prime telecasts were sporting events. And I know that’s not shocking to me, personally.

And hopefully it won’t be shocking to any of you either. So given this demand for the content, it’s certainly not cheap. Ken, if you’re like me, your news and social channels, especially over the last month, have probably just been overloaded with these articles. Content is still king.

It’s the lifeblood of these streaming applications. It’s definitely a hotly contested marketplace with billions and billions of dollars being invested into these partnerships in order to secure rights and, ultimately, content. So, Ken, you’ve been in this space for 25 plus years, as you mentioned. What’s something that you’ve noticed from maybe the beginning to current state today in terms of any changes you’ve seen?

KEN ISAACSON: Sure. Well, probably the biggest change is that at the start of streaming, fans were just happy to have the content available. It was cool. They can check it out, watch.

If it was great, they loved it. If it wasn’t great, they knew that it would get better. Now, though, after all that time has passed, folks now expect it to work. And it has to work.

And it has to work well, perform well. The quality needs to be good. The experience needs to be right. And it needs to be very easy to find content.

And folks are very keyed in on that. And if you want to retain your customers, you definitely want to make sure that you’re performant and that you have everything covered for them. The other thing is that with the change and addition of new devices and the expansion of mobile-connected devices, et cetera, folks want to watch the content they want to see where they want it, when they want it, and what they want. So they want to watch it on the device they have where they are located and when they want to watch.

And it also needs to work well too. And that’s important because, a lot of times, earlier on in the streaming world, it was owned and operated only. And that’s where we were focused at MLB. Nowadays, the content is, in many cases, spread across numerous providers.

You might have your content on your own operated channel. And you might have an Amazon MLB channel, for example. That’s because folks want to watch where they are, regardless of necessarily what the organization was looking to achieve. So again, folks want to watch where they want to watch when they want to watch it and on the device.

But most importantly, it needs to work extremely well for them.

ROSS CURLEY: Absolutely, Ken. I think just as a consumer, you want to be able to watch content wherever you are in your day, and especially if you’re paying for it. So totally see what you’re getting at there. We just covered some of the rights, Ken. What are some of the other things that come into the ecosystem of this streaming media landscape?

KEN ISAACSON: Yeah, Ross, you mentioned the high cost of licensing sports rights. And that’s an incredibly big portion of the costs. But that being said, operating a platform for live streaming requires a significant investment in a lot of other areas as well. As you’d expect, you have infrastructure and operations types of costs.

So you’re paying for your servers, for your bandwidth. You need people to do the monitoring and tools and such as well to make sure that you actually can see what’s happening on your app in your environment before your fans do and react to that as well. You also have the full complement of any of the roles that you would see in any digital business, marketing, legal, finance, you name it, production folks, content folks, et cetera, the wide range of people. And that ends up being a significant expense as well.

And then one that is not necessarily thought about, but I’ve found to be a significant cost driver, is content localization. It might not be just about translating content, but it could be creating new content for specific markets in the right languages. And then you need to make sure that you have local, regional sports folks who actually know the language well and can build a relationship with the customers. Additionally, the localization needs to cover the terms and conditions and any kind of text within your environment as well.

It needs to be legally accurate and culturally appropriate as well. And also, that localization, since different regions prefer different kinds of flows, you might have different flows even for an Asian country versus a North American country and others because some might prefer to log in first, others might prefer to log in at the end. So it’s not just about the content. It’s not just about your legal side, which requires significant regulatory knowledge, but also making sure that the content is perfectly targeted and appropriate for customers.

ROSS CURLEY: Yeah, Ken, this is not for the faint of heart, getting into a streaming application. This is– investments especially table stakes of what consumers are expecting these days. It’s very costly. So yeah, a lot to keep in mind. And with that cost, Ken, these companies need to make money at the end of the day.

So there’s been, I think, especially as of late, in the past how [Wall Street] viewed streaming providers and networks, it’s, are you profitable? So if you could just touch on that for us, that’d be awesome.

KEN ISAACSON: Sure. So one of the big things that’s happening in North America right now is the consolidation of applications into a single uber mega app. And I guess it’s not just North America. But it’s around the world as well, especially when you’re talking about the big entertainment conglomerates.

But from my experience, you see niche based and immersive sports-based applications being retired and then the content is being moved onto these larger apps. And you see that at Warner Brothers Discovery, and Disney, and everywhere, and Universal as well. And a big driver of that is that, first, those uber applications already have a massive audience. The niche ones have a strong core audience who love the immersive content.

But the money is really available to be made in those larger apps, using the sports as a driver for your ongoing recurring Greenfield types of content. One of the upsides, of course, of merging your content into a larger app is that you need fewer staff. And you can optimize then your team on the larger app, build in some sports functionality in what perhaps was more of a VOD type experience previously, and really try to get the casual and hardcore fan into these uber apps and consuming there. So that’s been a big, big change for us.

Another thing along the way is ad spending. And in a lot of cases, early on, there was debate about serving ads in a premium or paid product. And subscribers definitely expressed their preference for no ads at all, especially no pre-rolls. They wanted to get right into the content.

But these days, with partnerships and sponsorships being a big part of the sports ecosystem, including branded content, it’s a big part of what you need to ensure is working well. And for advertisers to have trust in your brand, you need to ensure that the ads are reflecting on their brand correctly, meaning the ads need to play when they should play. They should be of the right quality, especially the volume should match the rest of the stream. And of course, the stream should continue right after your dynamic ad insertion.

From experience early on, we had seen issues with ads. And I think folks do see a lot of fluctuation in quality along the way. And definitely what I’ve found is testing new creative, new ad features significantly and around the world is a much better way to ensure your advertisers are going to be happy. That’s not a phone call I like to make when you say, I’m sorry, sponsor, your ad played, but it broke our stream.

And we’ll make it up to you next time when we have half the number of subscribers on there. So definitely, keeping your ad vendors, your ad partners, happy is key. Then also, as we said, keeping your subscribers happy is extremely important. One way to do that is to provide high-quality services to them, as we said, content they want anytime, anywhere, any device, and in the quality they want it to be in.

But also, it has to be easy to find. And the experience needs to be frictionless. And the customer should have trust in us that we’re there to serve them, that if they decide to cancel, that we’ll refund their money, if appropriate, or we won’t continue to bill them. And a key part of that then, of course, is retaining your subscribers.

So the most important thing in addition to continuing to add subscribers is to retain your subscribers at a very high rate. If you’re losing subscribers at a rate faster than you’re adding them, you’re never going to actually reach your profitability and you’ll be losing money all along the way. So it’s really critical to maintain the bulk of your subscribers after their purchase, keep them on the platform as long as possible, and have their annual or monthly recurring bills compound on an annual basis. And that’s how you really build up the profitability over time.

ROSS CURLEY: Ken, I’ll just add one thing that I’ve even seen as of late. The strategy to get some new subscribers that we haven’t seen previously is these exclusive events on the streaming application themselves versus maybe it was a historically linear available event. So like we’ve all seen, the Thursday Night Football games and even this year’s playoff game, exclusive to the streaming platform. We’ve even seen concerts like Elton John.

I think Billy Joel is upcoming. Taylor Swift will be exclusive to one of the streaming applications. So I think that’s just another way that we’ve seen companies focus on profitability, how to get some more subscribers and money through the door. I don’t think it would ever be a thought even three, four, or five years ago to go exclusive, just because of the potential risk of what would happen if the stream goes down, et cetera. So we’ve certainly come a long way. And I think when we think of who’s involved and who you have to take care of as you’re putting an application together, there’s a few stakeholders. And when it comes to subscribers, advertisers, and business partners, we’ve touched on pieces of this, Ken. But the main areas of focus that come to mind for subscribers. And if you wouldn’t mind just taking us through the advertisers and business partners as well.

KEN ISAACSON: Sure. So the key bit for these categories of stakeholder, and any stakeholder, really, is building a relationship between the, call it, platform, and sport, and the stakeholders. So whether they’re subscribers, advertisers, business partners, or internal stakeholders, investors, or otherwise, it really comes down to communication and trust. First way to build trust is to have an easy, frictionless experience for your subscriber to then acquire the subscription and then access their content on a regular basis.

They know you’re there for them. As we’ve talked about, it’s a trust relationship. They appreciate the content. They become reliant on it. They love it. They let you know what they don’t love. And letting them know that you’re on the ride with them along the way is really key.

So definitely, super serving your subscribers is really important to maintain that view and heading towards profitability. From the advertiser’s standpoint, same kind of thing. We need to make sure that the advertiser feels that their brand was effectively represented in our stream. And that means the quality was good, the experience was right.

And that also means that the creative played when it should have played. Examples come up in the past where we back in the day only had one creative. And this was back at Major League Baseball. And that same ad played four times in a row in a pod continuously through a game.

We heard very quickly from fans that they hated it. We, as folks who built the platform, were not happy about it. And then what we did is came up with slates and other ways to fill those pods without reusing the creative. One thing we did learn as well is that by adding all those slates is that then folks were saying they preferred an ad over a slate.

So it was an interesting transition where first people were saying, we don’t like the ad, it’s really annoying, to, we prefer an ad to your slates. And then really, where we landed is a branded content co-experience, where there’s content and branding on a slate type of thing and making it entertaining in itself if you don’t have ads. So definitely, that’s key. And keeping the subscribers happy through those ad breaks is really key to keeping them in the stream and continuing to watch.

I think we all find ourselves flipping away at times when a commercial comes on. If they run into an issue, or there’s any problems with the stream or otherwise, or the ads are loud and it’s blasting through their house, the likelihood is that your subscribers will stop watching either that game or all games. So definitely, you want to serve both your subscribers and advertisers. Business partners, I would consider similar to your internal stakeholders. Ultimately, your business folks are driving where the platform is going, how it needs to be secured. They’re licensing the content.

We need to make sure from a platform perspective that we’re protecting those folks’ interests. So we need to make sure that only subscribers are accessing the content from the locations where they should be able to only access the content. So in many cases, rights are on a country-by-country basis. If you’re not compliant, major issue.

You need to make sure that, country-by-country, folks can access what they should and, if they shouldn’t be able to access it, that they don’t. Also, you need to make sure that the streams are secure from a DRM perspective so pirating is kept to a minimum. And you need to make sure that just from a technical perspective, that your business partners are aware of, and stakeholders, what’s going on your platform, providing them with status and roadmap, issues that have come up, what we’ve done about it. And again, it’s building that trust, building those relationships.

You will have issues. But it’s important to be very transparent about them. It’s important to be deliberate about how you solve for them and also for your team to have the trust that you actually are on top of things. When you see a problem once, you’ve solved it.

It won’t happen again. And that makes a big difference when you’re trying to satisfy your business partners and stakeholders. Especially when you’re trying to go for future investments for innovation and other things, having that trust is really key.

ROSS CURLEY: Yeah, absolutely, Ken. So we’ve covered the demands, some of the costs that go into this, all the rest of the ecosystem, trying to get profitable. Then you have to take care of your subscribers. It’s all adding up to a recipe of, a lot can go wrong.

So rather than taking folks through everything that you’ve run into in your 25 plus years of experience, we’re going to focus in today on a few blind spots. So the first one, Ken, that I’d like to get your thoughts on would be how you connect with in-market subscribers.

KEN ISAACSON: Yeah, this has been key and continues to be a key for digital sports platforms because, again, the rights are regional. They might be specific to a city. If it’s baseball, in that particular region in North America, you might have country blackouts. You might have continental types of blackouts.

So I’ve found that it’s very important to connect with in-market folks to ensure that your experience is what you expect it would be. In the early days at Major League Baseball, we first started with employees who were spread around 30 different cities. And we tapped into them and asked them to test for us. When that became a little bit onerous, we went to the teams and said, OK, you have larger staff in those cities.

Can you guys help us out? And definitely, they’re happy to help. But those folks have other jobs. And what we found was important was to get the feedback we needed when we needed it and in the format that we wanted it and needed it, meaning you need screenshots in some cases.

What were the error messages? Can you tell me what the logs show? These kinds of things. Your people doing a favor are happy to do you a favor, but only to a certain extent. And the certain extent we hit then with the next grouping, where we went to our passionate fans around the world and said, you guys are our power users.

We would love to utilize you as a crowdsourced testing, real world test, and testing and QA scenario. And they were happy again to help us out. But what we found with those folks and just regular subscribers who report issues is that they’ll typically run into fatigue very quickly. They’ll be back and forth once or twice.

They can give you some information. But generally, there are a lot of questions that need to be asked, a lot of detail. Can you send me screenshots? Can you do this or that?

Again, while the subscriber loves that they’re interacting with the company, and they appreciate it, that fatigue can lead to churn as well. So what we found most helpful was actually lining up professional folks through third parties like Applause, who can provide us with sports-minded folks with technical knowledge with the devices that we want to test on in the markets we want to test with, folks who can actually follow specific test cases or can do bug hunts as well. And really key for us with that is, what was the overall subscriber experience like for somebody who’s not only a non-English speaker using a non-US pay instrument?

And also, outside of the US as well, the experience is so different. So ultimately, if you want to mirror what your subscribers are going to see, you want to reduce the odds of there being an issue, you can’t really test 150 countries. And it might not necessarily be worth it. But testing the top 50 countries and having people subscribe, check your confirmation emails, for example, check to make sure that they received the product that they should have received and that they can play the content that they should receive before a big event has always been a huge thing for me.

And I’ve loved having Applause by my side both pre-event, during event, and after the event to really make sure that we as the operator can get that real-time feedback from folks, hopefully, before we hear from customers as well. And during that pre-period, we’re really testing to make sure that we feel like the experience is going to be successful. And definitely, my partnership with Applause has definitely improved our quality and gave us a level of trust both internally and externally that definitely paid off. There’s no doubt about it.

ROSS CURLEY: Yeah, I appreciate that, Ken. I think something you said on the friends and family and then super users topic…I can’t tell you how many folks we’ve talked to that that’s the strategy out of the gate. But quickly, they find out that their effort in cost savings is actually costing them more in overhead, and handholding, and in babysitting to some extent, especially if there’s a non-technical user, where it really just becomes a headache, especially as you start to scale for services, like you mentioned, that are global in nature.

KEN ISAACSON: Yep.

ROSS CURLEY: Good.

KEN ISAACSON: And we’ve even experienced similar kinds of things with content. So in addition to the technical bits, we localized at GolfTV for 50 different countries, 15 different languages, content produced for those specific countries. And what we found was that our translating companies were not really the sports fans that they told us they were. So we would have fans or employees in different locations come back to us and say, this is accurate from a translation standpoint, but it’s not accurate from a cultural and context standpoint. And then what we needed to really do was beg, borrow, and steal translation types of folks. When I was at Warner Bros. Discovery, fortunately, we had folks in offices around the world who could do some of that. But we were begging for time for translators because we could only trust that these folks were able to translate in a way that would actually accurately reflect our brand. And Applause helped us out significantly on that as we rolled out our localization functionality, ensuring that every piece of content was reviewed, all our terms and conditions, our flows, that the language actually was culturally accurate and appropriate and has made a huge difference for us going forward.

ROSS CURLEY: I appreciate that, Ken. That’s really good insight. I think it’s beyond the friends and family and super users, even if you are able to tap into folks that work at the company, it’s not the day job that they signed up to be necessarily, potentially. So even at that stage, you’re still maybe experiencing some pushback or priority challenges. So really good insight there, Ken.

Let’s go to the next blind spot. And that’s going to take us through how we align with the expectations for the partners and advertisers. So any thoughts on that?

KEN ISAACSON: I think this comes really down to communications. It’s important for the operating organization to understand their stakeholders’ priorities, partner priorities, advertisers, and what they’re doing in the ecosystem, not just on our platform, but elsewhere as well. Understanding then how we can help them achieve those goals is key. And working together is very important.

So first, making sure that we find the right placements, the right products, branded content types of pieces that actually make sense for that right sponsor, all of that is really key. And what I’ve found is that putting together a nice package of different types of content, different types of experiences for a sponsor generally is a high value kind of thing because, as a fan, that way, you might be able to expose them to the brand in the stream, in your fantasy game, maybe in your shop. And things like that are really key. And as we mentioned earlier, validating the ads and making sure that your technology and the creative are all integrated correctly, and playing smoothly, and such are really the key bits. And aligning requires that feedback to come from the operator to the partners and advertisers as well.

Even when it’s not good news, it’s important to share the news, be transparent. That builds both trust and helps to align expectations between the business side folks, whether they’re internal or external, and the folks running the platform.

ROSS CURLEY: Ken, that’s great. I think, hopefully, people want proof of what they’re paying for. Your partners and advertisers, I imagine, it’s a key thing for them?

KEN ISAACSON: For sure. In addition to the overall engagement type of data, impressions, clicks, all that kind of stuff, what we found to be really important is to actually record the ads in the stream, meaning on a device, not burn it within the stream, and then provide those back to the partner so they can actually see what the ad experience really was. One of the big challenges when you run a global platform is that you’ll have partners and sponsors in countries that they’re actually paying you to be present on. But they won’t be able to see it because they’re in a different country.

So some of the things I’ve done in the past, in addition to recording ads for the sponsor or advertiser, is providing them with VPN software, instructions, access to applications, simulating a location, and really trying to jump through a lot of hoops to make sure that they’re able to actually experience their ads in the real world example. Some folks can. Many appreciate it and don’t find it intrusive enough to actually install VPN software on their device. But also, there are restrictions on some corporate devices on installing VPNs as well.

And we ran into that with a big partner of ours and said, OK, we understand that. We built in a little bit of functionality so they can simulate being in a country by changing a parameter. But ultimately, the most reliable way to really test your streams, test your ads, is to have somebody in that location where it’s targeted watching and experiencing it. In my experience, there’s nothing that can beat that.

ROSS CURLEY: Absolutely. All right, Ken, we’re going to jump into the third blind spot, which is chatting a little bit about coverage, whether it’s devices, et cetera. Any thoughts on how, over the past 25 plus years of experience doing this, how you think about coverage in general and maybe the matrixes that you’ve thought through as well?

KEN ISAACSON: Yeah, so definitely, when you look at coverage, whether you’re talking devices or regional coverage, things like that, both are really infinite in terms of the number of combinations. And as you matrix it out, it’s an impossible task to actually be able to fully cover 100% of what you’re looking for. So what I’ve looked to do is really hedge your bets, make sure that you’re being deliberate and smart, that you have a strong plan and reason why you’re doing what you do. Generally, then it means picking out specific regions, countries, maybe cities within a country even if it’s that important, and then also coming up with and understanding the use of certain devices on your platform, who’s using what devices, understanding what that data looks like, but also understanding where the world is as well device-wise and working your way towards a manageable set of devices.

So that way, you have a certain set of devices that you support for a certain model and operating system, et cetera. And then as you see the popularity of that device go up, it becomes supported. As you see that device become old and out of date, it can generally become unsupported. I like to use between 1% and 2% as a benchmark for what might be considered unsupported.

But knowing that 1% to 2% of a multi-million subscriber ecosystem is still a significant number, it’s not an easy decision to make something unsupported. And really, there are lots of definitions of what that means as well. So definitely, having not only a lab internally to do some testing and knowing which devices we want to test on there is key, but also having Applause as a partner, giving us access to any device anywhere in the world anytime and testing anything we wanted them to test, has been the key as well. And it really does give you the ability to come as close as possible to covering that infinite matrix, whether you choose to do it.

You still might not go with the infinite number of combinations. But Applause has access to thousands and thousands of testers. And that number can give you the coverage you need.

ROSS CURLEY: There’s definitely, I think, a point of diminishing returns, Ken, where, like you said, that matrix, when you think about the devices, the regions of support, the payment tests or payment instruments that somebody can try to subscribe with, I don’t know if it’s an infinite, but it’s definitely a number in the millions. So just being able to, like you said, come up with a strategy and really a percentage of what you’re comfortable level is through the organization is certainly key. All right, that’s going to take us to our blind spot, our fourth blind spot, which is, how do you avoid the unexpected?

What a loaded question, Ken. What are your thoughts here?

KEN ISAACSON: While you definitely can’t avoid the unexpected, the goal is to plan for everything possible, meaning plan for the unexpected that you can’t think about and haven’t thought about and have plans for everything else that you’ve seen previously. So I’m a big fan of developing playbooks. You solve an issue once, you publish the resolution, you don’t introduce that problem again. If it’s in the ecosystem, so outside of your app then, you manage partners in a little bit of a different way.

But if you have bugs, you solve them that way. Don’t bring them in again. Then otherwise, with your partners, you make sure that you’re buttoning up your processes, your procedures, your playbooks, and that you have the support you need as well 24/7 because live sports requires that. And you need to have the right folks online at the right time.

And what I’ve found is for especially high-profile events, whether it’s a World Cup or Super Bowl, opening day for baseball, a massive golf tournament, whatever else it is, the best way to avoid the unexpected is plan and test, monitor, test, and solve. So basically, you’re doing everything you can before the event to make sure that everything is ready to go, including load testing and subjective testing of performance by folks around the world while you’re running those load tests. I like that in addition to this, the data that you get from load testing. And then ultimately, having your playbook cover everything that you can think of plus the unexpected.

That unexpected leads you through a decision tree that will help you deal then with the unexpected and then move forward solving as well. So definitely, avoiding the unexpected is not possible. But avoiding the unexpected a second time is definitely possible. And keeping your issue time to a minimum is definitely possible by doing all the pre-planning testing and monitoring and having folks online when you need them during your big event.

ROSS CURLEY: Ken, I love what you said about the documentation part of the playbook. Something goes wrong, write it down in your postmortem. Make sure you’re taking that into account for next time because we all know the world we live in. People move jobs.

Information is lost in that transition sometimes. Or people move roles. So being able to have that documented for your organization is really key.

KEN ISAACSON: Yep. And I think with that, that’s a great point. And really, it stresses the fact that you don’t want to be doing your deepest thinking when you’re down and in the middle of the Super Bowl, for example. So that’s where having the planning in place prior to it and you can get into your decision tree will take you down, hopefully, the right path during that red alert time versus folks running around like crazy trying to figure things out.

And that never really works. So definitely, you want to be very deliberate when you’re in those circumstances as well.

ROSS CURLEY: Absolutely. All right, we reached our fifth blind spot. This is our last one, so probably maybe one of the more important ones, Ken. When you think of securing revenue, what are your thoughts there?

And how is that really a blind spot?

KEN ISAACSON: So securing revenue first is key for bringing on new subscribers. And this is really a blind spot because there are different pay methods in different regions, different countries, like credit cards. In other cases, they might not use a debit card or a credit card and it’s checking accounts and different things like that. And what we found very quickly at MLB was that we could not effectively test our commerce paths in the US with our US credit cards and get the effective results of that.

First off, we didn’t have the pay methods that were popular necessarily in those other countries. But also, we needed a billing address in a specific country. We didn’t have that. We needed other things that just are not possible because of fraud detection.

And you get blacklisted by the credit card and payment processor when you use your same card 100 times. But probably most importantly, that the actual new customer testing is really key, where compared to continuously testing with the same people, test credit cards and using test email addresses, I love a new customer, somebody coming in from the right country on the right device. They have the credit card or pay method. That’s the kind of feedback I want to know about, make sure that person can not only buy, but that the confirmation emails are good, accurate.

And what we’ve done with Applause is kept those subscribers on as recurring subscribers. And that way, we can find out on a monthly basis, are they still successfully being billed? Are the confirmation emails on the recurring billings still good? And are they accurate?

And then as we’ve sent out service emails as well to specific countries, those folks will then look at those and make sure that they’re good, at high quality, represent us accurately as well. So definitely important to be able to put yourself in the shoes of your potential subscriber. And then once they become subscribers, follow them along all the way through, continue to build that relationship. And by knowing what’s going on with folks in that region, not just from customer service data, not just from analytics data, but for me, most importantly from real world folks in those regions doing those tests for you and giving you the feedback, that’s the best way to make sure that you’re going to secure revenue, get it done, make sure your stakeholders are happy, and that you have a product that you can be proud of around the world.

ROSS CURLEY: It’s even in the past couple of years in terms of how many different ways have come up for people to pay, whether that’s at a physical location is one thing. But then you get into a digital world, where you’re maybe supporting global audiences. And there are payment instruments, obviously, we don’t have here that are in other markets. So it’s, again, complicates that matrix we had talked about not too long ago.

KEN ISAACSON: It’s a big world. And definitely, you guys make it much easier to manage. And it reminds me of a time at MLB when we were first rolling out something on Apple devices. And it was outside the US.

We actually sent a team to a number of countries in Europe. They went to each airport and tested from the airport just to make sure. And that was before a service like Applause was available. So this makes the world a much smaller place and really gives you the ability to run the platform in the way that you really should be able to run it.

ROSS CURLEY: Interesting. I like that, Ken. It makes the world a smaller place. [CHUCKLES]

So if this presentation has you feeling overwhelmed or uneasy about your current testing or feedback program, have no fear. You’re in luck. At Applause, we’re uniquely positioned to support, really, any streaming initiative that you may have, no matter how mature you may be. With the global community that we have, it’s over a million testers.

And we’re able to rapidly deploy these resources, really, to match any device or payment, persona, location, or any other kind of key variable that comes to mind with your customer base. Our community is really run by our Applause team that you’re seeing on that top layer there, led by our solution delivery managers. So that design, it’s really a fully managed service to keep overhead low on your side, while receiving the critical feedback you need to be successful. So whether it’s ensuring customers can sign up in their local markets, validating content is appearing as it should.

Or if it’s covering live events with real-time feedback or even localizing your experience for a market, Applause really has you covered. And so with that, Ken, any final words that you’d like to part with our audience?

KEN ISAACSON: I think that you did a great job of talking about the comprehensive approach here. And I just want to stress the value of the Applause team and how easy it is to actually utilize these services. So when you hear maybe there are a million testers available to you, and then you can imagine all these bugs coming in and what are you going to do with all of them, well, the great thing is that the Applause team actually reviews and vets all the feedback they get from the testers before that’s made available to a partner.

And it makes life so much easier. And they add the intelligence. They provide a lot of the back and forth with the testers as well, knowing what we’re looking for in terms of screenshots, feedback, other things like that. So I’d just love to share that the Applause team makes this really easy, even though it might not seem it would be easy to utilize.

And overall, running these platforms is not easy to do. Applause makes it easy to have real world global testers available.