04 executive summary theibcdaily The power of big data B
Audience technology and insight Bob Harris
ob Harris introduces himself as, “an IT person with a footprint right across technology”. He
became Channel 4 (C4) CTO in 2010 after joining 11 years earlier as head of IT strategy and architecture.
His ‘big data’ keynote
presentation at IBC touched on how to become a data-centric company, something set in train at C4 by chief executive David Abraham.
“C4 has a mature business intelligence capability – analysing all sorts of aspects of our operational data for many years,” says Harris. “David formed a new department called Audience Technology and Insight, and that was our data centric beginning.” Harris asked the business intelligence team how they would cope with the massive growth in data volumes. Platform scaling was not practical.
“The main issue would be to scale in a linear way, but increasing it by a factor of 10 would push the costs up by a factor of 10,” he says. “The challenge was how do you cope with a much greater volume and diversity of data, both incessantly growing?” The decision was to adopt emerging ‘big data’ open source platforms. After experimenting internally with Hadoop, Hive and Pig, Harris turned to Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce).
He describes EMR as, “our
current ‘big data’ platform of choice”, because: “In reality this area is evolving so quickly, to make assumptions that you have any form of stability is probably short sighted.” Is C4 ahead of the game?
“Yes and no. There are data centric-industries ahead of us where data is their lifeblood,” says Harris. “Within the space C4 operates in we probably are ahead of rivals. “The thing to recognise is that the big data topic is moving so quickly; companies who haven’t
Chief Technology Officer, Channel 4 Region: UK
Interview by George Jarrett
been in this space are now recognising the value of large- scale data analysis,” he adds. The chasing pack is closing. At what point does big data become C4’s lifeblood? “In what is fundamentally a creative industry it is hard to say that our data differentiates what we do,” says Harris.
He mentions maximising income from content rights, and analysing usage data to target advertising. How will C4 differentiate crucial data and day-to-day stuff?
“The idea that you can now
reject any data at all is an interesting one, so if we break it down, there is the data we need to run the business. This is everyday operational data we have had and will continue to have for many years,” he says. “The differentiation comes in taking data that we disregarded up to now.” It was ignored because C4 was focused on more traditional operational analysis; the
volume of data was such that capturing and storing it was prohibitively costly; and, there was no particular driver to do anything with it. Two things happened, he says. “The cloud has made it feasible to capture and store huge amounts of data cost-effectively, and the arrival of open source technology has triggered analysis at attractive price points. Better still, speculative analysis, not viable a few years back, now is.”
“In what is fundamentally a creative industry it is hard to say that data
differentiates what we do”
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