NBCUniversal SVP Monica Williams Talks Streaming the Olympics, Cross-Platform CX, and the Power of Metadata
In this wide-ranging interview with Monica Williams, NBCUniversal’s SVP of digital products and operations for the company’s content distribution business, we discuss how the proliferation of digital platforms across the OTT, CTV, and online ecosystems has brought new content distribution challenges, the boon of metadata for improving customer experiences, and the 17-day everything-must-go-perfectly marathon of distributing the Olympics.
Nadine Krefetz: What is your role at NBCUniversal?
Monica Williams: I head digital product and operations for the content distribution business for NBCUniversal. The team I lead manages the way people experience viewing across the digital platform. If you’re watching NBCU content on any of the digital platforms—and not even just digital anymore—our team has something to do with it.
As a business unit, we’re responsible for licensing and securing distribution for our network portfolio and Peacock—whether it’s news, sports, entertainment, or kids’ programming—across traditional distributors such as Comcast or Charter and digital virtual distributors such as YouTube TV and Hulu. We also have expanded into the FAST space, securing distribution and launching FAST channels on our connected platform.
We manage the end-to-end to ensure the content packager—whether it’s linear or video on demand—is equipped not only to enable the consumer experience, but also to make sure that all of the business requirements are met. This includes ensuring the ads are working and that any sort of measurement is in place. We connect with all of the different teams to make that happen.
We also build product solutions and co-develop experiences with our distribution partners. There are a lot of people that we work with both directly and indirectly, depending on the swim lane of the tier of work. For linear content, we work closely with our broadcast operations team to deliver and distribute the content. There are days when we’re working with the scheduling, research, or ads team. We span so many different groups and organizations because, ultimately, the crux of what we do is determine how to get our content into the hands of the consumer through our different distribution platforms in the most efficient manner.
Krefetz: How did you get started in media?
Williams: I have an industrial operations/ engineering background. Everything’s about widgets and the process of getting from A through Z in the most efficient, effective way possible. I came from operations, creating physical parts for making aircraft engines for GE. At the start of my career in media, I focused on all the processes of what we do in support of studio operations and getting to know all of the different processes around postproduction, color correction, and editorial, all the way through sound services. This was also the early days of new media. In the beginning, it was learning the process of how we create new media to work for the studio.
Because of my operations background, I was asked to run this new media operations business. I began looking at the industry through a business development lens, and I fell in love with it. I decided to stay, and that’s where I’ve been ever since. My career has gone from building physical products into creating digital products and distributing content digitally as the technology has evolved through the years.
Platform Evolution: Set-top Box to Streaming
Krefetz: Transitioning from the set-top box to streaming, have operations changes significantly, or are things more or less the same?
Williams: Some things are different. Some things are very much the same. Ultimately, it’s still about getting the widget into distribution, but in streaming, the content is really our primary product in its various formats.
With cable, it was very challenging to learn all of the different specs and the different variations and really understand the limitations, especially of some of the cable systems. Everybody has their own closed system that’s customized to the distributor, so that’s different. Actually, you have more standards to manage in the cable world than in streaming.
In streaming, the technology is different in terms of the formatting and the specs. What’s gotten easier is that a lot of this is open source, and it’s less of a closed system. You’re able to work more interoperably across the board.
Krefetz: How have consumers' expectations about how they get their content changed?
Williams: We’ve always been very focused on the viewer. Ultimately, the viewer’s main job is to consume content. They don’t want to spend time searching for it. The expectation of the viewers is that whatever, wherever, however they’re watching content, we should know them and serve them what they like.
If I look at the last 10 years, especially in distribution, everything we’ve done and are doing has really been anchored around following where the consumers are going. For viewers who want to watch content on demand, as an industry, we create on-demand viewing. If viewers want to watch content wherever you go, as an industry, we work to create TV Every- where to make that possible.
In the past 5–7 years, the viewer experience has gotten a thousand times better. Everything that supports the viewer experience is now critical to our content delivery. It’s gotten easier for consumers to view content, even though they complain that it’s sometimes hard to find it.
Challenges of Multiplatform Premium Content Delivery
Krefetz: Has it become simpler or more complicated to deliver content?
Williams: It’s gotten easier and harder almost at the same time. The pace is what’s hard, where everything is moving so fast. The expectation is we’re able to move a lot faster with technology. But when it comes to onboarding the content, the process hasn’t really changed that much, even though it’s a closed versus an open system. I think every platform still has their own variance to some extent because everybody’s trying to find ways to make their experience stand out. The larger shift we’ve seen really is the proliferation of these platforms, which then require us to have so many different specs around art-work. When I first started, the legacy experience was the blue screen. There wasn’t much artwork. In terms of just the images that are required to onboard, with all of the different devices for mobile and the different versions you have to create, that is the biggest shift that we are dealing with.
We want to support the most customized, personalized viewing experience possible, but at the same time, we’re all dealing with so many different platforms and partners. It’s important to have some degree of standardization, which gives us the ability to scale and move quickly.
Krefetz: How do you keep all of the platforms straight in terms of supporting and delivering to all of the different platforms?
Williams: To be as organized as possible, we have to be very rigorous in making sure that we have the right process and the documen- tation to support everything that we’re doing. I have an amazing team that works on ensuring that we have the right process.
Now the question is, “How do we start to bring together some form of standardization so we’re able to scale, so it’s not like every sin- gle partner, every single platform has something super-unique?” If we can stop creating hundreds of formats and consolidate to 10, that’s a win. Then we ask, “How do we get from 10 to five?” Those are the things that we try to do from the outset when we’re having these on-boarding conversations.
Krefetz: Is there a downside to creating too much standardization?
Williams: The next conversation I need to have after we’ve achieved enough standardization to scale is, “How do we keep some of the cus- tomization capabilities that folks may need for their own platforms?”
Krefetz: Which digital properties are you working with?
Williams: There are traditional MVPDs like Comcast, Charter, DIRECTV, DISH, or Verizon. We have our virtual MVPD, plus YouTube TV, Hulu Live, and Fubo. Because we are in the FAST channel space, we’re working with a lot of the platform partners: The Roku Channel, Amazon, Pluto, Samsung TV. Then we have our owned-and-operated experiences and TV Everywhere services, and we partner with our own DTC service on Peacock.
Krefetz: Is content delivery live or on-demand?
Williams: It's all types—4K live, VOD, any type of content format at this point.
Krefetz: Have you gotten to the point where a lot of the workflows for digital and linear have been combined?
Williams: I’d say technology has certainly helped quite a bit from a linear feed standpoint. There’s a single feed that lets us work with a partner, whether it’s their satellite footprint, cable systems, or digital streaming systems. That’s been a positive shift.
It unlocks things also from a rights standpoint. I remember earlier days when there were different rights profiles we had to manage between traditional linear versus digital.
There’s been a lot of great work to make sure that content is cleared for all platforms. The by-product in terms of operational ease is that it’s the same content for all platforms now.
Delivering the Olympics
Krefetz: You'll be heavily involved in digital operations and distribution for the Paris Olympics this summer. What has been your experience with delivering the Olympics?
Williams: My first Olympics was London in 2012. We went from a single set-top box to having it distributed across all of the different set-top boxes as video on demand. Then we began working on how you watch it from a TV Everywhere standpoint.
More recently, we also worked on Olympics apps for a subset of our partners where it’s really a curated destination. Previously, our team worked with YouTube TV, where instead of seeing a 4-hour pre-primetime presentation of the Tokyo Olympics, viewers could search for when different events are on. We’ve done notifications depending on the partner and their capabilities. We also worked on an Olympics app for a subset of our partners that’s a curated destination. On the product side, we’re always looking at what new experiences we can create with our distribution partners.
Navigating content in NBC's Tokyo 2020 Olympics coverage
For the Olympics’ 17-day span, everything has to go perfectly. Right now, we’re working on figuring out things like, how many dress rehears- als do we need to do? What are the details of every single use case? That’s a lot of what we do. Certainly, we need to have a very solid plan, meticulous details, and a lot of testing to go back to everything we are delivering. A huge focus of ours is to try to shrink the turnaround time so that it shows up in the platform as soon as possible. With the other hat I wear, I’m focused on the delivery, making sure there’s a lot of testing and that content goes up.
In March, NBCUniversal announced plans for more than 5,000 hours of 2024 Paris Olympics coverage on Peacock.
Metadata and Content Discovery
Krefetz: What has changed in terms of how metadata is used?
Williams: There is definitely a lot more focus around metadata from a technical side. We need to make sure we have the right structure in place at the season level, at the show level, and at the title level. If there’s no metadata, then how does content show up?
Right now, everybody just tags everything. How do we get smart and tie this into the actual curation? There is still some work to be done in terms of how we work together and identify the right taxonomy to support our efforts.
Krefetxz: Analytics or metadata--which one is your favorite?
Williams: Metadata is my jam. It’s critical now to the viewing experience in terms of how you package content and how it feeds the algorithm to help viewers discover content. You can’t really talk about the viewing experience without metadata. The data description for the content is what feeds into the recommendation engines and creates the ability to find things.
Using metadata well is a way for platforms to have a leg up. If you really want to have people find your content, you need a way to drive that premium experience. That’s why I love it.
Krefetz: If metadata is the brains for driving content discovery and delivery, what else can you do from an operations standpoint?
Williams: There are a lot of algorithms that play a role in recommending content. We do need to make sure we have the triggers in our data so that it feeds the recommendation engine and the recommendations show up.
There’s also an editorial, human element. You have editorial teams that are working closely with marketing on how to curate the content based on what’s currently relevant or what you want to promote. We can look at some of the new tags that we can create so we can curate using the metadata to ultimately serve the viewing experience.
We are thinking about new ways we can curate content and test to see that we can bring the creative intent of the show and bring in, for example, a DEI lens. It’s a way to celebrate community or belonging.
Krefetz: How has analytics changed your job?
Williams: Going forward, we’re going to be more data-focused because we have a lot more data available to us to help us make informed decisions more quickly than when I started.
What is the data that we need to ensure that ad integration and ad operations are successful? If the data is Nielsen-supported, then what are the things that we need to make sure that it is compliant in that process? Those are all the things that go back to ancillary data as part of the packager.
The bulk of the work we do when we’re onboarding is to make sure we’re capturing data and have the right setup to enable that. Our biggest job is setting things up, beginning with onboarding, because once it’s built, we’re leaving it to the day-to-day experts to do the publishing, and everything should really operate as business as usual.
Krefetz: What is a common misconception about onboarding content?
Williams: When we talk about content packaging, everybody focuses on the video. But it is not just a video—it really is a package, consisting of the video, the audio, and the metadata. For every platform, we have a preset. The next level is figuring out what else we can do to help surface content based on the platform experience and the technology that’s un- derneath and to do this at scale and present the best experience for the viewers.
AI in the Media Landscape
Krefetz: What kinds of new things will generative AI bring to the media landscape?
Williams: I’ll begin with a caveat: This is purely Monica Williams’ opinion, and it may not be representative of NBCUniversal’s opinion on AI because it’s so new and everybody’s still trying to figure it out. Personally, I am very excited. It’s less about the routine innovation and the automation productivity savings, because—as with any technology—that’s going to be table stakes.
For AI, the opportunity is the new product, the new content, the new revenue stream that this is going to bring because it’s so democratized, anybody can really do anything with the way that gen AI is developing. Anybody can become a coder, for example. You don’t have to necessarily know a programming language to code. Anybody can become a producer. Anybody can become a creative. I think we’re going to see and unlock some of the new talent and new product that comes out. To me, that’s the exciting part of this.
Krefetz: Are you seeing any new viewing patterns?
Williams: We’ve always had a presence in short- form delivery, but now we’re looking at, how does that play a bigger role? I look at my kids, and they’re just watching clips all day long that are strung together into their own channels. That ties into a bigger conversation about licensing, delivery, and experience. Those are the areas that we’re absolutely tapping into.
Krefetz: What kind of challenges do you face with monitoring content delivery?
Williams: The challenge is figuring out what we need to do to make sure that it shows up every time. I can’t actually see what the viewer is ex- periencing if I’m not in the same footprint. If I’m in a Charter footprint, I can’t see what it looks like on X1 or Verizon. We do have alerts and systems to monitor the supply chain. Part of my role is working with distributors and vendors to see what tools we can build so we have that visibility. Once it’s out there, we’re just crossing our fingers and hoping it shows up. And sometimes it doesn’t.
Now, anybody with internet access can see what it looks like, but there are so many different devices. There are so many different ways to consume content. That’s the challenge. How do we move from a reactive to more of a pro-active way of monitoring so we have systems and tools to give us that visibility?
Krefetz: Any last thoughts to share on operations?
Williams: I tell my team that if we’re doing our job, we’re like ninjas: No one should even know we were there.