Speaking at Oktane16 in Las Vegas Bill Walker, vice-president of IT, architecture, engineering and media technology at 20th Century Fox, shone a light on how the firm connects a global distribution network.
Walker explained that Fox, which has been bringing movies to audiences all around the world for years, has around 3950 employees across 44 countries before giving a whistle-stop tour of the company’s media distribution and vast ecosystem of partners.
“It’s been less than ten years since we as consumers made the jump from physical media (Blockbuster, DVDs) to consuming things electronically, whether its iTunes, Netflix, the Fox Now app etc. When you think about the industry, the underpinnings underneath largely have been physical and tape based until very recently,” he said.
“So, inside our industry there’s been this big push for what is called a ‘physical to digital transformation’, and we’re no different, we’ve been going through it.”
A lot of the challenges with that, Walker continued, is that Fox had built a very robust supply chain around a physical distribution of media, and was then hit with the big task of very quickly retro-fitting it to make it digital.
“With that we had a very short window to change the infrastructure and scale it how we needed to. We’re no different to anyone else, as we tried to do that we had challenges delivering servers, standardization issues etc. We knew we had to make a huge change and do it really fast to compete in the space we were in.”
The firm’s reaction was to take the physical supply chain and turn it into a digital supply chain, and whilst some of the pieces already existed, a lot of them didn’t
Moving on to discuss identity at Fox, Walker explained the various techniques and approaches it used throughout the years to try and implement this change in its digital platform, each having their own successes and failures. Fast forward to 2015, it found the answer it was looking for with Okta.
“We quickly became very interested in Okta as we felt they were innovative. We wanted somebody else to innovate for us, so we could spend more time focusing on the media-related stuff and less time on the internal things like identity management – we much prefer somebody like Okta to do that for us.”
One of the first things Fox did in its journey to digital distribution was introducing its application Fox Media Cloud, which Okta was perfectly positioned to help get off the ground quickly.
“The minute we mentioned it Okta had already started working on it, so we didn’t have to do the work we thought we would have to do, the timing couldn’t have been better.”