At RealNetworks’ I was the product manager for the Helix Media Delivery Platform. During my tenure I bootstrapped a new product line in an effort to revitalize a global streaming video business. By leveraging existing technology and global sales channels I led a team in developing a new revenue stream within 18 months.
Business Challenge
RealNetworks’ Helix Media Delivery Platform was a pioneering video streaming solution. The platform was universally adopted during the early days of streaming. However, as RealNetworks’ strategy evolved, the Helix product line suffered from diminishing investment. As a result, the customer base and associated revenue steadily declined.
In order to revive the business Helix needed a new revenue stream with strong growth potential. Helix had an established customer base and a global reseller network; however, the product lacked a competitive feature set and failed to develop new lines of business. The challenge was to identify a growth opportunity that could be bootstrapped with minimum investment.
By leveraging relationships with global channel partners, collecting customer feedback and studying broader market trends an opportunity emerged with small content providers. Video encoding was costly and required large budgets. As a result, this left smaller content providers with few options to meet their video encoding needs.
Goals and Objectives
RealNetworks was in the process of a major restructuring and was taking a hard look at its existing businesses. All business units were under evaluation and decisions were being made about what to cut and where to invest.
In order to procure investment from RealNetworks’ Helix needed to prove it’s future viability. The primary goal for the business was to establish a new revenue stream with strong growth potential.
In order to meet this goal I set the following two high-level, product objectives targeted at addressing opportunities with smaller, niche content providers:
- Develop a cost effective live encoding solution by leveraging existing technology and established partnerships within 3 months.
- Develop an integrated video cloud solution to support and enhance the new video encoding offering within 6 months.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
The following KPIs were used to track overall success and evaluate the viability of the business opportunity:
- New product revenue was targeted to be 10% of total business revenue within 18-24 months. New revenue would include new unit sales plus associated recurring support contracts.
- Measure product quality by tracking support issues and product defects.
Solution: Helix Broadcaster
The Helix video technology suite was extensive. It included video playback and compression, networking and delivery, and content management capabilities. However, the technology was not packaged in a way that addressed current market requirements.
The solution was to repackage the existing video encoding and delivery capabilities into an appliance that seamlessly integrated into the AWS cloud. This would become the Helix Broadcaster.
Product Strategy
The Helix Broadcaster product strategy could be summarized with the following statement:
FOR niche content providers WHO need to distribute live streaming content, the Helix Broadcaster is an encoding appliance THAT offers an affordable cost-per-channel live encoding solution. UNLIKE Envivio or Wowza, Helix offers high-touch customer support.
Execution Plan
In order to deliver on the promise of the Helix Broadcaster I put the following plan in place. The plan focused on accelerating time to market while minimizing product development costs.
- Deepen the relationship with an existing hardware vendor in order to streamline the logistics of building and delivering an appliance solution.
- Merge Helix technology with the hardware solution for an enhanced feature set.
- Leverage existing Helix global sales channels to sell Helix Broadcaster units.
- Re-engage channel partners with a product training program to mitigate customer churn related to legacy product strategy.
- Release Helix Server to the AWS Marketplace.
- EOL legacy product lines.
- Integrate the Helix Media Library into the AWS cloud.
Results and Learnings
What Went Right
By integrating the Helix technology with an appliance supplied by a strategic hardware vendor we were able to bring the Helix Broadcaster to market within three months of conception. We quickly addressed product gaps and leveraged well established channel partners in Europe and Asia to move units. Additionally, we sold support contracts to maximize customer success while revitalizing a recurring revenue stream. At 18 months Helix Broadcaster revenue accounted for the targeted 10% of annual revenue.
What Went Wrong
With the accelerated timeline, however, came a huge cost to product quality. Supporting the product at scale, in a global market, was extremely challenging. Additionally, gaining consensus with our partner on how to support the product line was a huge challenge. Our support approach did not scale and it became clear that adjustments needed to be made in order to sustain and accelerate the growth we had achieved.
