AWS And Salesforce Team Up On Streaming Media For The Direct-To-Consumer Market

The Salesforce and AWS media industry groups have collaborated to simplify that process by offering a solution that combines an AWS infrastructure solution with marketing and customer management tools from Salesforce. Running a streaming media service necessitates a complex combination of technologies that even large corporations may struggle to manage on their own.

Recommended AI News: Dell Technologies and VMware Facilitate Improved IT Agility for Munich Re

What Is AWS?

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform is the world’s most comprehensive and widely used cloud platform, offering over 200 features from data centers around the globe. Millions of customers, including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies, use AWS to reduce costs, become more agile, and innovate more quickly.

According to Christopher Dean, VP and GM of media entertainment and media cloud at Salesforce, his group is part of the industry cloud that Salesforce formed after purchasing Vlocity for $1.3 billion in 2020. On top of Salesforce, Vlocity had built several industry-specific verticals, including media and entertainment.

As the company expanded its media vertical, it noticed an increasing market demand for a direct-to-consumer media streaming solution. While Salesforce had the tools to drive subscriptions, upsell, and market to streaming customers, it lacked the infrastructure to support them, which is when they decided to collaborate with longtime partner AWS.

Thoughts On Collaboration

“When we looked at it, we realized we had this end-to-end subscriber lifecycle capability, including audience attraction, acquisition, engagement, and retention using all of the Salesforce tools.” But we lacked the media ingest, distribution, and delivery capabilities required to make this happen. So, when you combine the two I call it the chocolate and peanut butter moment it works well together, and we have an end-to-end solution,” Dean explained.

Recommended AI News: Druid Software Partners with Polte to Enable Global Location for Enterprise 4G/5G Private Networks

According to Eric Iverson, director of product at Amazon Studios, when AWS and Salesforce discussed it, a combined solution made a lot of sense. “It seemed like we had these two stacks that did a lot of (related) things.” “Why don’t we just get together and, instead of having this custom-built over and over again,” she suggests. We proactively put (all of the required) pieces together (into a ready solution), and that was kind of the mission that we set for ourselves,” Iverson explained.

The collaboration resulted in a direct-to-consumer video delivery platform that, according to Salesforce, is easy to deploy, scale, and personalize for individual customers, with the added benefit of subscriber life cycle management.

Salesforce stated that “some of the world’s most recognized brands” have already used the combined technologies of Salesforce and AWS to increase retention and customer engagement while also lowering D2C streaming costs for content delivery companies.

Salesforce specifically mentioned NBC Universal as an existing customer who previously benefited from the combined technology of AWS and Salesforce. Salesforce said, “Together, these combined offerings will enable content distributors of all shapes and sizes to build innovative, scalable, and profitable offerings for audiences to help meet consumer demand for content.”

Key Benefits

Salesforce cited three specific benefits that content distributors can find in its combined offerings in its announcement.

• Customer Experiences That Are More Integrated And Improved

According to Salesforce, personalized experiences drive new subscriber acquisition, increase retention, and enable incremental revenue. It gives the example of a streaming service recommending pay-per-view content and lives streaming to customers who have been identified as being interested in certain topics.

• Additional Information About Viewer Behavior

Gaining a deeper understanding of subscriber engagement through clickstream actions or likes/dislikes of recommended content can be used to personalize which marketing offers customers receive, according to Salesforce, which is critical to improving retention. As an example, Salesforce cites a user whose engagement with fitness videos is decreasing, so the AWS/Salesforce service can recommend classes from a favorite instructor in the hope of increasing engagement.

• Customization

Content delivery networks that take advantage of the combined offering Salesforce stated that users “can easily customize the experience, such as introducing and scaling content-driven commerce experiences and targeted ad placements.” Salesforce stated that in-stream ad placement could be used to enable a customer to purchase without having to navigate away to an e-commerce page as an example in this third category.

Recommended AI News: AnonTech Announces ViziVault on Red Hat Marketplace

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]