business intelligence

1.      Executive Summary

Stan is a company based out of Australia. It is in the business of online streaming of selected movies and TV programs. It offers unlimited viewing of these kind of videos based on subscription at a minimal cost (Pash, 2014).

Stan is owned by StreamCo, which is a joint venture of Nine Entertainment Co. and Fairfax Media. These companies together invested $50 million Australian dollars each into Stan or StreamCo in the month of August 2014 (White, 2014).

The main competitors of Stan are Quickflix which is the Australian streaming company, Presto which is the joint venture of the Foxtel/Seven West Media, and the very popular and market leader in this space, the American based Netflix. As this industry is growing very fast in terms of market size, customer base or revenues, the competition is also growing. Every company is trying to capture the biggest market share and are implementing a lot of strategies and investing heavily in technology to become or sustain the market leader position.

The web interface or the GUI of Stan is very nice and user friendly, even though not as compact as Netflix, but makes the viewer easily see what was the last show they were watching or even what is trending. Viewers can create multiple profiles which, unlike Netflix, are protected with a PIN (Turner, 2015). The devices supported by Stan are computers, tablets & smartphones, television using an Apple TV or Google Chrome cast. Six devices can simultaneously be registered by a viewer and the streaming can be done to three simultaneous devices (Turner, 2015).

Most of the content is high definition (HD) including almost all the popular television shows and movies. The bandwidth and space used by HD while watching will be around 3GB per hour, with the option of locking in a specific streaming quality when needed. The recommendations by Stan for internet speed are a 2.5 Mbps broadband connection for SD streaming, and if watching HD 720p, a 3.5 Mbps is better. For even more better experience viewers should use a 6.5 Mbps for HD 1080p (Turner, 2015).

2.      Benefits of a dashboard to Stan

According to the data shared by communications regulator ACMA it shows that overall we spent on an average of eight hours a week watching one or another video on-demand (SVOD) services that are observed to be moving quickly to the top of the market. People within the age group of 18 to 34, called digital natives were spending more time upto 10 hours (Blair, 2015).

According to a lot of studies, the future of the industry of online viewing is a lot more than the subscription video services Stan. These companies will have a successful future but for every viewer with a niche interest as Peruvian basket-making or watching kite flying, there will definitely be online videos for these too. A viewer has to watch Garage Entertainment which is a sports video service with action, to show how can a relatively small part of the market can be so impactful and successful (Blair, 2015).

With all the available information of the subscribers, their online watching behaviour, their feedback, payment transactions etc. the company can take a competitive advantage over the competitors and run the business with better ROI. According to a report by UBM Tech in 2008, Business intelligence can be the difference between being an average-performing company and a superior-performing organization. Your company can gain a competitive advantage by using business intelligence to align your strategic objectives with line-of-business initiatives (Gallahar, 2014).

A dashboard as a part of business intelligence will give you, Stan the information you need to understand changes in the market, demand, competitors, regulatory and other issues. The better the information you have and understand, the more able you are to utilize your human and financial resources. The quality of your business intelligence is dependent upon your company’s ability to manage information.

A dashboard with good KPIs, both leading and lagging, with real time information will improve the important measure of ROI, IRR which is ‘Internal Rate or Return’ NPV the Net Present Value, and the payback period (Gallahar, 2014).

Thus implementing business intelligence and a dashboard is imperative for the success of Stan as this will help in better decision making, short term and long term business strategy and clearly will give an edge over competitors.

3.      Potential challenges in implementing the dashboard

There are numerous challenges when it comes to dashboard development and implementation. These challenges range from technical to business challenges. Here are some of the important challenges:

• Data gathering – As data is not available at one source, this is one of the biggest challenges of the project. Identifying the sources and then make the data from individual sources to talk to each other is a challenging and huge task.
• Converting technical information into business knowledge – While working on these type of projects, it is always possible to have a few gaps in the understanding between technical and business teams because there is a knowledge gap between these two. Sometimes, it creates issues in the implementation.