3. Discovery Communications, LLC
Media Technology, Production & Operations
3
Global Content Supply Chain
What Receive, process, and distribute content for
broadcast and streaming
>800 employees in Silver Spring, Sterling, New York,
Los Angeles, London, Miami, Munich and Singapore
Operate 187 TV networks
Edit 23k hours of programming, customize 83k hours
of content in 45 languages, process 254k promos &
commercials, and create 32k digital media assets
annually
Who
How
much
4. Discovery Communications, LLC
Production Center North
4
Silver Spring, MD
Post Production
52 Edit suites
6 Audio suites
New York City
Media Operations Center
Duplication
Authoring
Digital Media
Technical Evaluation
Post Production
5 Edit suites
5. Discovery Communications, LLC
Reporting & Planning
5
Facility and
operational
metrics reporting
Expense
planning for cost
recovery areas
Chargeback
operations
Corporate
Tableau Server
Administrators
Key
Functions
Leverage 58 unique data sources for reporting,
analysis, and planning responsibilities
6. MGMT struggled to measure Duplication Success Rate
Challenge
Discovery Communications, LLC
Media Operations Center (MOC)
6
Old Method
Disparate data sources
Drill down capability
Tedious, multiple manual excel calculations
Not visual
New Method
Departmental and individual technician level
Differing success rate for differing denominators
Alteryx & Tableau to the rescue!
12. Discovery Communications, LLC
MOC Manager
12
“Connecting our disparate volume and error log data sources
enables us to drill down in each individual operator's success rate
while maintaining a meaningful overview of our entire team's
performance.
This data set provides a clear visual picture of our success to the
business while allowing our line-level Supervisors to better
identify and quickly manage error trends.”
Hello, my name is Bernardo Roschke and I work for the Reporting & Planning department at Discovery Communications.
You can contact me at Bernardo underscore Roschke at discovery dot com. Also feel free to follow me on twitter at bernardo underscore twelve
Earlier this winter, Tableau declared January to be data blogging month. So I started my own data blog, data knight rises dot com. Please check it out and interact on all things data related.
In going to talk a little about our organization, drilling down the hierarchy to my department and then discuss our use case.
Many of you have likely heard of Discovery Channel and other brands under the Discovery umbrella. These include TLC, Animal Planet, Science Channel and Investigation Discovery to name a few. But unless you have spent time overseas, you may not be aware of just far our presence reaches.
We have 2.5 billion subscribers across 224 countries and territories. Our programming is viewed in 45 languages, either spoken or subtitled.
My division is called, Media Technology, Production and Operations or (MTP&O). The simplest explanation that I like to use is we are a global content supply chain.
We receive the content from our suppliers, process it for final usage and uplink for broadcast distribution. We also create the streaming assets our customers watch on platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and many more.
We are a team of more than 800 employees in a variety of locations. Our regional hubs are Silver Spring and Sterling for US and Canada, Miami for Latin America, London serves the EMEA region and Singapore for our Asian markets.
Our division operates 187 television networks and on an annual global scale, we edit 23k hours of programming, customize 83k hours of content in 45 languages, process quarter-million promos & commercials, and create over 30k digital media assets
Drilling down further in the division, we have a group called Production Center North that encompasses the post production activities in Silver Spring and New York City.
Our Silver Spring facility has 52 edit suites and 6 audio suites. We also have our Media Operations Center. That team performs such functions as asset duplication and authoring for the business, the creation of US digital media assets and Technical Evaluation, more commonly referred to as Quality Control. They ensure deliverables meet our global specifications.
As part of Production Center North, we have my department, Reporting and Planning. We perform 4 key functions.
Facility and operational metrics reporting – These include Resource utilization, US and Global broadcast reliability, Content and service volumes, and Ad hoc reporting and analysis
Expense planning for cost recovery areas – This includes brand and regional budgeting and forecasting, temp labor planning, and variance to plan and variance to forecast analysis
Chargeback operations – We process transaction level rate card services.
And finally, we are currently the corporate Tableau server admins. Our division purchased the core licenses, but usage has grown to other divisions such Finance, Discovery Education and Latin America Research.
One of my favorite capabilities of Tableau server is the ability to upload data sources. This allows our regional teams to collaborate on projects and ensures a single version of the truth. We currently have 58 unique data sources published to tableau server.
Now we reach our use case. As I mentioned earlier, the media operations team duplicate assets for the business. For a long time, media ops management struggled to measure a success rate for this function.
The data required was scattered in various excel documents, and MOC wanted to also include billing data, which is stored in a SQL Server. The old method was not easily repeatable and could only target one attribute at a time.
Discovery purchased Alteryx this past fall so this became the first project I would utilize both tools.
Here is the Alteryx module I built. I can’t stress enough how easy this was to create with little to no training. I watched a few of the getting started videos on Alteryx’s site and had a demo session with our data and an Alteryx technician during their courtship of Discovery.
The drag and drop interface makes it very user friendly. This has 6 excel sources and 1 sql server table as inputs. All are brought together with the union tool and output to a tableau data extract file.
The select tool allows a user to only pull the necessary fields. I used a formula tool on all inputs to create a data source identifier field called “source”.
The filter tool helped to greatly reduce the size of the data being brought in from the SQL data source. This data source contains transaction level details so I only wanted to capture what was a necessary for this task.
Again, you can see how easy it is to configure the union tool. Highlight cells and use the arrows to align the columns as needed. Much better than writing a SELECT UNION query.
Once in Tableau, 3 calculated fields are required to create the success metric. I isolated the volume from the redo list and the total volume of output.
Then it is just a 1 minus redo divided by total.
You could nest both volume IF statements into the tech error calculation but I prefer to keep them separate for easier debugging needs.
Format to iPad landscape
Allows supervisors to review performance with technicians
The following is a quote from our media operations manager.
If I may paraphrase, MOC management now have aggregated or individual success rates and can react to trends that were otherwise buried data points.
