OTT transformation is no longer optional—it’s survival. Yet, many PayTV and media operators hesitate, even with billions of dollars at stake. Why? Because nearly 70% of digital transformations fail to deliver the expected value, often due to misaligned priorities, poor execution, and rigid legacy systems.
At Quickplay, we have 55+ large-scale transformations under our belt, proving that success requires a clear strategy, the right architecture, and a winning mindset.
Read on to learn more about our blueprint for success.
Start with Establishing the Goals of Transformation
Most PayTV/MVPDs want to increase acquisitions, drive engagement and monetization, and increase product retention.
But how to achieve this often differs across operators:
- Some explore strategies to bundle services across their different businesses (IPTV, broadband, in-home services, wireless).
- Increasingly some aspire to be “super aggregators” by bundling external OTT/apps, becoming a “destination platform” that enhances consumer discovery.
- Others explore strategies beyond OTT, as operators look to own habits well outside of video content with e-commerce, payments, gaming etc.
For many providers, these are connected paths that stack upon each other to further enhance their ability to achieve acquisition, engagement, monetization, and retention goals.
Understanding your end goal is critical to ensuring actions are aligned. From here, focusing on capturing value, and on time-to-value becomes critical to a successful transformation.
Keep Your Eye on the Prize: Delivering Value
The McKinsey Transformational Change Survey (Rewired, 2023) suggests that although 90% of companies have digital transformations underway, only ~30% of these efforts succeed in capturing value, and only 6% meet or exceed their targets. Most (80%) of the value is lost even before the transformation projects are finished.
This is due to legacy companies often measuring success of a project based on whether the “plan was fulfilled” instead of focusing on “end value” and “time-to-value” metrics, or simply failing to execute the transformation. This focus on value needs to be set at the beginning of a program and the team must remain committed to this new mindset.
This is not an easy exercise as there are often competing internal priorities. Is your organization aligned on what to prioritize based on time-to-value and scope of value?
Establish Transformation Principles
Upon aligning your organization on goals and time-to-value delivery, it is important to establish principles that guide the transformation process to ensure value capture. Successful transformations we’ve seen often include the following principles:
1. Architecture matters more than features
A focus on features only leads to short-term thinking. Transformation frameworks should be purpose-built to make room for pivots required to address new market developments. This is more meaningful than features and ensures you won’t compromise your long-term aspirations.
We’ve continually seen that architecture determines whether your OTT transformation will succeed or fail long-term. The wrong choice creates loss of control over your product roadmap, vendor lock-in, scalability issues, lack of agility, and high cost.
Specifically, there are five essential architectural traits that will determine your ability to be successful now and in the future:
- Dedicated Multi-Tenant Instance – Full control over your roadmap, uncompromised by a shared platform prioritization, ensures time-to-market advantages, and therein time-to-value capture.
- Hyper Modular & Open APIs – Your architecture should fit your journey, not force unnecessary lock-ins. A microservices-based, API-driven approach provides seamless integrations with legacy and best-in-class third-party services, and the ability to extend your platform to take advantage of new market innovations.
- Cloud and AI Native – Porting old tech to the cloud that isn’t optimized for scale and cost efficiency almost assuredly leads to value destruction. Similarly, reaping benefits of AI requires efficient data collection, processing, and storage, combined with an unified pipeline for training, deploying, and monitoring AI models.
- End-to-End Orchestration – As business models evolve, a high-performance orchestration layer delivers unified workflows for content processing, monetization, and audience engagement – ensuring a seamless consumer experience and efficient process delivery.
- Data Centric Approach – Scaling AI shouldn’t be an afterthought—it should be built into the architecture. A data-centric design ensures real-time personalization and insights, AI-driven content discovery, and monetization optimization.
2. Mindset and behaviour is everything
Even the best technology and processes will fail without the right culture and mindset. Technology transformations are people transformations first.
At Quickplay, we’ve learned that success comes down to four key cultural behaviors that needs to be cultivated and role-modelled in hiring, target setting, performance reviews, bonuses, and promotions:
Stay Curious
- Embrace continuous learning and improvement.
- Seek to understand interdependencies across the business.
- Shift the mindset from avoiding failure to recovering from it fast with minimal impact.
Focus on Impact
- Take ownership of positive outcomes, not just tasks.
- Make data-driven decisions and challenge assumptions.
- Avoid bureaucracy—drive real business value instead.
Be Supportive
- Encourage open collaboration and cross-functional teamwork.
- Help teammates succeed—transformation is a team effort.
Speak Up
- Raise risks early—transformation failures are preventable if flagged on time. You have an obligation to dissent.
- Foster a culture of transparency, accountability, and continuous feedback.
Organizations that prioritize these behaviors highly outperform those that rely solely on processes and governance. A small team with these traits will run circles around a top heavy bureaucracy.
3. Follow a proven playbook
Regular retrospectives are critical in a fast-changing landscape—learn, adapt, and don’t repeat past mistakes. Every transformation brings challenges, but the key is facing new ones, not old ones. At Quickplay, we capture these lessons in our Playbook, refining it with every transformation to stay ahead.:
Continuously ensure delivery of aspired value
Focus on what will bring the highest ROI in the shortest time, create value-based milestones (“value delivered” matters more than “plan fulfilled”), make data-driven decisions, and use Demand Management to manage scope as your operating principle.
Minimize risk and complexity
Front load the RAT (Riskiest Assumptions Testing) for the biggest dependencies, prioritize configuration over customization, and use a proven, shared backend and a common front-end.
Build the team and capabilities
Use the transformation to build the skills for ongoing success. Leverage a joint team of experts including customer stakeholders, partners and Quickplay team members, connected by shared objectives and targets. Work to ensure continuity by minimizing transitions of responsibilities and knowledge, and create a Build-Operate-Transfer structure for a quick platform launch and a controlled transition of skills and capabilities.
Excelling in project delivery and migration with rigor and professionalism
The scariest step in an OTT transformation is typically migrating users to a new platform. Even losing 1% of your subscribers or users in a migration can easily ruin the business case. This step in a transformation is not the time to experiment, gain first time experiences, or rely on unproven partners. Engage in an iterative development and evolving transformation approach, establish and respect tight deadlines to maintain momentum, use shared Agile principles and cadence, and maintain strong end-to-end integration management across video-, data-, and user paths.
Why Quickplay?
I’ve had the great pleasure of leading Quickplay through some of the largest transformations the industry has seen to date. We’ve walked the walk of our clients and know what it takes to manage such an undertaking.
Our hard earned learnings and deep experiences have informed our Playbook and our purpose-built, end-to-end technology platform. Combining these, along with our culture of accountability, agility and resilience, leads to successful transformations that ensure we maximize value creation.
That understanding comes from overcoming transformation challenges, building roadmaps and delivering wins (55+to be exact!).
We’re here to ensure that you don’t go about it alone. Read our Transformation White Paper for more insights into our approach and how we can help you on your journey. Download here.