In recent years, the media and entertainment industry has undergone a significant transformation, moving away from legacy monolithic platforms towards more agile, cloud-native systems. This shift is driven by the need to avoid vendor lock-ins, reduce operational costs, and leverage the latest advancements in cloud technology. However, the transition to in-house, cloud-based builds has introduced new challenges, including the potential for creating costly and complex monolithic engineering teams.

From Monolithic Platforms to In-House Cloud: The Hidden Costs of Control

Merapar has observed a profound change in how some of our clients approach the commissioning, delivery, and operation of their mission-critical business systems. Product and engineering groups have moved away from proprietary integrated platforms and legacy on-premise technologies, embracing a purist, in-house build strategy oriented around the cloud. This move has been motivated by the desire to avoid vendor lock-ins, disappointing roadmaps, and uncontrollable project plans, while capitalizing on the availability of modern cloud-native technologies, talent, and new delivery methodologies.

This strategic shift also aligned with a broader goal of allowing organizations to control their destiny, prioritize rapid development, and own the core intellectual property (IP) of their value-critical systems. However, this wholesale transition from proprietary end-to-end software to in-house builds has led to a new set of challenges. While avoiding one type of lock-in, many companies have inadvertently created another by developing monolithic engineering teams responsible for building and operating their systems. This has resulted in significant costs, particularly in full-stack engineering talent, sometimes to create systems and components that are available off the shelf. As the initial excitement of this transition gives way to the realities of sustaining such an approach, companies are increasingly confronted with the economic implications. As financial markets and entertainment company boards shift their focus to the core economics of new services, engineering resources are increasingly scrutinized, leading to rationalization, consolidation, and ultimately, cost-cutting measures.

The Third Way: Strategic Innovation Through Hybrid & value-based Cloud Solutions

In response to this unsustainable polarization—coupled with inflationary pressures on engineering salaries and recessionary pressures on TV subscriptions and advertising rates—the industry is beginning to adopt a third way. This emerging approach takes a holistic view of business strategy, competitive differentiation, time to market, total costs, and return on investment (ROI) timelines. At Merapar, we believe that key performance indicators (KPIs) for quality, time to market, total cost of ownership, and product differentiation can be met by combining modern API-based off-the-shelf "point" products with custom development, all tightly integrated through great design and agile engineering practices. Transformation is essential, but it must be guided by architectural planning that accommodates time and risk, employing hybrid models that blend custom and off-the-shelf solutions.

Accelerate Development with off-the-shelf application frameworks

However, there are core components of any system that may not be met by available products in the market, whether for reasons of low functional match, legacy technology concerns, delivery complexity, support risks or cost. To address these gaps, we've developed a solution at Merapar: the Merapar Development Kits. Leveraging our extensive experience from client engineering projects, where we’ve identified repeatable patterns in requirements and deliverables, we’ve developed a set of off-the-shelf application frameworks designed to accelerate project delivery and reduce cost and risk. When you engage a Merapar project team, we bring with us a growing toolbox of off-the-shelf development kits to accelerate architecture design, development, and deployment. These kits provide core components that meet common architectural and functional requirements. 

For example, our Personalized Discovery Kit provides all the tooling and integration framework necessary to introduce AWS Personalize as a recommendation engine, as well as introduce Semantic Search functionality across first and third party data sets. From numerous successful client engagements, we’ve learned that to capitalize on the power of Personalize, it’s crucial to build event pipelines, normalize and aggregate data, and provide sensible filtering capabilities. This kit delivers these tools and integrations, dramatically reducing the time, risk, and cost of implementing Personalize. As Personalize evolves and as Merapar delivers more recommendation engine projects, this kit will continue to grow in sophistication for the benefit of our clients.

Other MDKs in the suite include our Unified Mediadata Platform that tackles the challenge of new, large and diverse data sets becoming available to product owners and marketeers in a video business. With Volume, Velocity and Variety this data represents a challenge and an opportunity. The UMP acts as both a high-volume ingest platform as well as a modern data store that can surface data to downstream services, including large language models for AIs. It also acts as the foundational data manager for the Personalized Discovery Kit as well as the Metadata Enhancement Framework and the other MDKs in the suite.

Maximizing the Impact of Hybrid Cloud Solutions with Business Agility and DevOps

Business Agility and DevOps methodologies are integral to the implementation of this "Third Way" strategy, particularly in addressing the complexities of modern software development and deployment. Agile practices, among other benefits, enable development teams to decompose large, complex projects into smaller, iterative cycles. This approach facilitates rapid prototyping, continuous integration of feedback, and the ability to adjust to changing requirements in real-time, which is essential in environments where time to market is critical.

DevOps complements Agile by ensuring that the transition from code development to production deployment is smooth and automated. Through practices such as continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), DevOps creates a pipeline that allows for the frequent and reliable release of software updates. This reduces deployment risks and minimizes the time between feature development and availability in production. By bridging the gap between development and operations, DevOps enables a more resilient and scalable infrastructure, which is crucial when integrating custom and off-the-shelf point solutions within a hybrid architecture. Together, Agile and DevOps provide the technical foundation necessary to realize the strategic goals of faster delivery, improved quality, and efficient resource utilization in today’s competitive landscape.

Our Conclusion: Transform or Fall Behind

The media and entertainment industry is in a continuous state of change, demanding agile, cost-effective, and innovative solutions. In this rapidly changing landscape, it's crucial for organizations to adopt strategies that enable quick adaptation, streamline processes, and minimize risks. Transformation through migration and product development is essential, especially as scrutiny on project ROI intensifies. By focusing on hybrid approaches that blend custom development with proven technologies, businesses can accelerate their time to market while maintaining flexibility and control over their operations.

Leveraging off-the-shelf application frameworks allows organizations to significantly reduce development time, avoid the pitfalls of vendor lock-in, and concentrate on creating value and differentiating their offerings. Integrating high-fit point products and addressing functional gaps with strong architectural design and rapid engineering is key to keeping costs in line. Ultimately, the true value lies in leveraging these strategies holistically, ensuring organizations stay ahead of the curve, achieve sustained competitive advantage, and efficiently manage costs and resources.