Simplify Simplify Simplify.

Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) has a legendary global film and television presence that spans across continents in numerous languages through multiple networks. Like the rest of Hollywood, SPE was actively working on bringing their content library into the streaming age. I worked with Sony’s Digital Product Group (DPG) to internationalize their streaming platform and discovered opportunities to make it more scalable with a ground-up approach to a new product stack.

In the rush to expand internationally, Sony leveraged a legacy streaming platform architecture, Crackle, by cloning it and launching an instance in each international territory such as Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Australia New Zealand, etc. As Product Manager I worked with Sony Networks in each international territory, standing up a front-end and back-end as well as regional customizations for each. Eventually the overhead of maintaining unique feature sets, integrations, services, and support became overwhelming. This was the impetus for exploring a fresh approach.

Dubbed the ONE SONY Initiative, the new product vision was a departure from a legacy streaming platform infrastructure. Whereas the previous strategy involved standing up a unique front- and back-end product instance for each global territory, the ONE SONY Initiative was a scalable architecture built around the concept of a single instance with multiple tenants. As the International Product Manager I was involved in leading the effort to define the problem, create a business case, launch a functional prototype, build consensus across the organization and secure the project green-light needed to begin work toward product launch.