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Digital ET, Etc.

The Technology Behind ESPN’S Digital Transformation

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ESPN is experimenting with ways to identify highlights without human intervention, but it’s not in a rush to cut its in-house experts out of the loop. “People come to ESPN for our authority and our style,” LaBerge says. “These people are picking [clips] with their own judgment. The key here is that they can do it instantly, as the game is happening. And then distribute it instantly.”

Pushing out highlights quickly makes sports fans happy, and happy sports fans have a more direct connection to ESPN’s business interests than you might guess. “What we’ve found is, when that happens, we see piracy of our content go way down, because most people just want a low-friction way to share something,” LaBerge explains. “We’re to the point where we’re 10 seconds faster than their ability to go back, rewind their DVR, and clip something.”

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ET, Etc., Movies, TV

How Netflix Exec Cindy Holland Spots A Hit Show

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As far as greenlighting, it really starts with the storytellers and somebody coming in with a really passionate vision for the series they want to create or the piece of content they want to create, and our belief that they have the ability to execute against that vision. It could be anything from anyone, from Jenji Kohan, who had proven success on Weeds, and came to us with a memoir about a woman in prison and told us how she wanted to expand that world and really focus on all of the characters in that world; to somebody like Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who was a well known TV writer but hadn’t run a series of his own. But he came in and he pitched Bojack Horseman, season one, all 12 episodes of that season in minute detail, and about halfway through the meeting, we said, “Wow. This is something we’ve never experienced before and never heard before.” It was such a different approach—an adult, half-hour animation series, that we were really—we kind of knew it in the room. So many times, that kind of magic happens. And you know pretty quickly that it’s there, and really that comes from the spirit and the enthusiasm of the creators themselves.

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Directing Business, Management

Embracing Agile

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Spotify, the music-streaming company, exemplifies an experienced adapter. Founded in 2006, the company was agile from birth, and its entire business model, from product development to marketing and general management, is geared to deliver better customer experiences through agile innovation. But senior leaders no longer dictate specific practices; on the contrary, they encourage experimentation and flexibility as long as changes are consistent with agile principles and can be shown to improve outcomes. As a result, practices vary across the company’s 70 “squads” (Spotify’s name for agile innovation teams) and its “chapters” (the company term for functional competencies such as user interface development and quality testing). Although nearly every squad consists of a small cross-functional team and uses some form of visual progress tracking, ranked priorities, adaptive planning, and brainstorming sessions on how to improve the work process, many teams omit the “burndown” charts (which show work performed and work remaining) that are a common feature of agile teams. Nor do they always measure velocity, keep progress reports, or employ the same techniques for estimating the time required for a given task. These squads have tested their modifications and found that they improve results.

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