Wizeline Helps Discovery Kids Media Reach a New Market

Discovery Kids didn’t have enough time to build a new application from scratch and needed to offer something to their cable operators quickly. They decided to build base their new application on a similar streaming application in the Discovery portfolio called Discovery Kids Global. 

The codebase of Discovery Kids Global could be modified to fit the LATAM market and seemed like an ideal solution.  Unfortunately, the Wizeline-Discovery team quickly realized that the operational costs of the Discovery Kids Global app were extremely high due to several dependencies, including Evergent, Brightcove, OoyalaFlex, and 20+ other applications. 

What type of content is normally localized for LATAM? Who is the end-user?

The end users are children between the ages of three and twelve years old, as well as their parents. This product has a high rate of co-viewing and is mostly videos (clips, episodes, movies, and interactive videos) as well as games and activities. We’re also beginning to incorporate e-books.

What were the factors that made you consider Wizeline as the best fit for this project? What are the most important characteristics?

The characteristics that we were looking for, and by we, I mean the Digital team for Discovery in the region.

• Great delivery. I’m referring to attitude and willingness to work.
• High-quality deliverables. We assess an overall high caliber of work.
• Agility. Not just in methodology but the style of work. This is a personal preference, and some of my team may disagree, but there is an Agile way and a “non-Agile” way. I value and appreciate process, documentation, methodology, work schemes because it helps to be organized and cover all the gaps, but I believe the non-Agile way results in teams and organizations that are bureaucratic. We look for teams that have a balance between the corporate way—good processes, methodologies—but are also agile and efficient.
• Location. The least important factor but still relevant – we prioritize people within the region, people within our digital environment. It’s not the same for a developer to tell me the application is super efficient in Los Angeles with a connection of 20 Mbs, versus someone who is sitting in Chile 3G, with a deficient connection, telling me that the application is fast. A team within regions helps with understanding content, subtitles in Spanish, letting us know if the language is rendering correctly, and has a sensibility of our culture.

How do you define the relationship between Wizeline and AWS? 

Fernando: We had a superficial understanding of AWS. Wizeline has helped us understand how AWS functions in a more optimized way for what we needed. Thanks to Wizeline, we have discovered alternative ways of working. We’ve learned best practices for AWS, what services we can take advantage of, and what services solve concrete requirements. Wizeline’s support in that aspect has been significant, thanks to the knowledge and expertise of its team. We’ve been chatting with AWS teams in Colombia to arrange more in-depth training sessions and other services.

What metrics did you establish? How are those reflected today, and what are the next steps?

Our initial goal was to become much more cost-effective for the region as a whole, and that has been a massive success for a few reasons.

The change in technology that we made with Wizeline helped us achieve substantial savings. We had been working with a product generating seven-digit-figure losses annually, and the goal was to turn it into a product that would produce a significant revenue stream.

Now that the product is live, the product ends up being measured by two types of indicators:

User Performance

Three main indicators:

• Authentication of users
• Video consumption  
• Games consumption

We were coming from a product where only 1% of users were authenticating. We need to turn it into a product where at least, on average, 5% of users complete authentication. This metric, while very relevant to us as a team, is not fully representative of our work. There are lots of factors that come into play. So our job is to provide a user experience that makes user authentication as easy and straightforward as possible.  

Technology Performance

This is a question we have yet to answer for ourselves. I don’t know if the primary indicator will be the velocity of response to the application, the weight of the app compared to the market benchmark, the technologies that it utilizes. We are in the middle of defining this. The new application is 3x faster than the old one, both on the web and in the mobile app. Application speed was one of our KPIs that we fulfilled and has been a very favorable outcome.

What were the highlights of working with Wizeline? What did you learn? What were the challenges?

1. The time and accessibility to the team. After a month, a month and a half, we were able to form better questions.

The first challenge since December 2018, we had a month-long interaction with the Los Angeles team. The time for the team to complete the onboarding was a challenge because it overlapped with the holidays. When we started asking more in-depth questions, there was no longer time. There were many points to connect in 28 integrations; the team needed to understand the application and be able to navigate that code in a short time. There were many technological decisions to make. So time and access to people was a challenge.

2. Not to underestimate codebase or legacy codebase, and the complexity of understanding it.

The previous application was very integrated with Evergent with the issue of authentication. Removing it was much more complicated than had been estimated against the planned dates. We had to review the feasibility as a team more than once. We could have better anticipated that challenge.

3. Another thing I think we underestimated was the operations with our team in the UK.
The overhead on communication was more significant than expected. And despite the best effort from all parties, we did not meet the baseline dates at first.