Q&A: Telestream CRO on what drives his business, from customer service to exploring new markets

With the accelerating shifts underway across the media and entertainment industry, companies are facing complex challenges and opportunities. In a recent interview, Alex Keighley, chief revenue officer at Telestream, provides insights on the company’s strategy, priorities and outlook.

Keighley outlines Telestream’s customer-focused approach, opportunities in cloud adoption and IP transition, and a positive long-term view amid current headwinds. As a 25-year industry veteran, Keighley brings deep experience across the media supply chain to his leadership role overseeing Telestream’s global human resources.

What are your main objectives and priorities for the broadcast market? What about the wider M&E market?

Telestream has been known as the “broadcast workflow” leader for more than 25 years because our mission-critical solutions are superior, trusted and reliable. And, as we have acquired other companies and developed additional solutions, we have also been careful to maintain and grow that trust. So, my main priority for the broadcast market is to lead the way as a dependable partner for our customers as they navigate unprecedented challenges to their business models and evolve their content production and distribution, whether in their home market or globally.

What is your overall strategy for scaling?

One of the reasons I believe we are well-positioned for the future is our flexibility in delivering media supply chain solutions.

For example, we can deploy on-prem, in the cloud, or in hybrid ecosystems; we’re also expanding our test and measurement solutions to UHD HDR workflows whether they are SDI or 2110. On scalability, when it comes to cloud in particular, our media (including cloud native QC) and monitoring solutions are effectively infinitely scalable.

We process tens of thousands of hours of media in the cloud for customers of all sizes. We’ve also started to deploy generative AI across our solutions to make them more end-user friendly; this includes answering usability questions in-app or helping users write API requests to Vantage Gateway (formally Encoding.com).

Can you give us an idea of what your short-term and long-term priorities look like? Any priority sectors or regions?

We help media companies across the globe and will target growth in specific geos. In addition to verticals like sports venues and trucks, I see opportunity across the houses of worship market, local and regional government and the wider corporate market as video production becomes ubiquitous. In fact, some of our largest customers are non-traditional media companies. Longer term, our goal is to grow the company as quickly as we have over the last four or five years.

How are you improving experiences for customers in the broadcast space today? What is your customer-first approach?

I have spent my entire career working either for media owners, content creators or for technology vendors in that market. I have spent countless hours in newsrooms and visited hundreds of broadcasters. The team knows how important our mission-critical solutions are too. If your ingest server goes down five minutes before air, you need to be back up in minutes.

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So as part of our customer-first approach, we’ve introduced “always on” Slack or Teams channels and have dedicated technical account managers looking out for our broadcast customers. Rich Andes, Telestream Director of Customer Success, knows our US broadcast customers’ workflows as well as they do, so we’re excited that he’s leading these customer experience efforts for us.

In the face of an ever-evolving global media landscape, what is your five-year outlook for the market? Are you seeing more cloud adoption?

Yes, now that more than half of media companies are utilizing the cloud, it is becoming as mainstream as on prem deployment for our solutions and that will grow. If organizations were jogging before, more of them are sprinting now.

Despite some current headwinds, I am extremely optimistic for the longer-term future for the media industry.

The biggest challenge facing media companies today stems from the stress on traditional business models. We’re seeing traditional distribution channels, such as cable or satellite, continue to shrink. Once-successful sports or entertainment channels are losing viewers that historically paid them $5 or $6 per month per household. Income streams need to be replaced. But let’s look at the emerging opportunities: we have new business models allowing anyone to start their own linear (FAST) or AVOD channels. The opportunity is huge, and the future is exciting…and Telestream is in great shape to help our customers take advantage of it.

What are the top trends that you believe folks should be paying attention to?

The continued move from SDI to 2110 and other IP protocols will continue to be important, and AI and cloud have already started producing new opportunities industry-wide and will continue to do so at an even greater pace. It’s a brave new world.