CIO50 2023 #17 Will Everitt, Seven West Media

Name: Will Everitt
Title: Director product solutions
Company: Seven West Media
Commenced role: April 2020
Reporting line: Group CDO
Member of the executive team: Yes
Technology Function: 103 staff

As director of Seven West Media’s product solutions team, Will Everitt leads product strategy, innovation and technology transformation for 7News and the 7plus streaming service.

Being in the midst of the content streaming wars, the organisation realised providing its users with a more personalised experience and making it easier for them to discover content, would be key to increasing engagement with them.

“This is even more important when you consider that we are measured against the likes of Netflix and Disney rather than other Australian free-to-air streaming services,” Everitt tells CIO Australia.

AI-power personalisation

The group embarked on a personalisation strategy enabled by artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“We didn’t rush into the decision, as we need to be strategic and think about the entire journey,” says Everitt.

“It was never a single feature, a short-term band aid or low hanging fruit – but the next generation of 7plus as a product. We chose technology and partners that we knew would be capable and something that we, as a team, could grow into.”

The company partnered with AWS, working “shoulder-to-shoulder” with it to experiment with new personalisation technology as it became available.

“We’ve worked out which of their products worked for the goals we had, and which ones needed a different approach,” says Everitt.

“It’s definitely not been a linear path and we stuck to a measured, test and learn approach.”

Everitt and his team quickly moved from a proof-of-concept to introducing specific use cases to customers, starting with a single ‘Recommended for you shelf’ to introducing multiple recommended shelves.

More personalised features were added incrementally, such as AI and ML driven recommendations under based on what users watched before, similar content to what they were watching and genres.

Personalisation, or dynamic user experience, has been on the team’s quarterly roadmaps consistently since mid-2022.

“We always saw personalisation as something that would be another lever that would deliver material growth,” says Everitt.

And it has delivered significant value for the organisation, he says.

“Personalisation has been a significant contributor and 62 per cent of all content consumed is on 7plus – content that is not broadcast and is exclusive to the platform. 7plus is now 40 per cent of revenue growth, which was a goal for FY25 that we have already achieved.”

Platform unification

As part of the organisation’s transformation journey, it also wanted to maintain fewer platforms on which it offered its 7plus streaming service.

“Delivering a product like 7plus means it needs to be available not only on web and mobile devices, but also on as many smart TVs as possible,” says Everitt.

“Whilst you can use products and frameworks to build once and deploy across all platforms, we generally find that these often don’t capitalise on the native device’s capabilities.”

Initially, the development of the service was done on a separate code base for each different platform, including iOS, tvOS, Android, Android TV, Samsung, LG, and PlayStation, with each needing to be maintained and enhanced separately.

“It was a siloed strategy that had served its purpose initially, but wouldn’t accelerate 7plus into the future,” says Everitt.

The company embarked on a platform unification approach to consolidate the number of 7plus platforms into as few code bases as possible.

“While we wanted fewer platforms to maintain, we also wanted to provide the best experience possible – one that is consistent and with feature parity. So rather than reduce all platforms into a single codebase, we decided to unify where it made sense.”

It consolidated iOS and tvOS, Android and Android TV, and Samsung, LG, PS4 and PS5 and so the team now maintains only three code bases. Additionally, the same team builds both Apple and Android code to ensure a consistent user experience.

“We now have a framework that allows us to build on one platform, Samsung, and then port and tune to LG, PS4 and PS5.”

Platform unification has reduced the cost in maintaining and building for smart TVs and other devices.

“The unification also has reduced our time to market in introducing features across the range of devices, and most features are delivered across devices within the same quarter, where previously this could be over a year,” says Everitt.

“Our audience consumes on three different devices through the course of the day, which is why experience and feature parity consistency is important. Customers don’t consider 7plus on different devices as a different platform, to them it’s all 7plus. Today’s expectation is that anything I can do on one device, I should be able to do on another.”

Marked performance improvement

The combined results of platform unification, personalisation and experience evolution has seen a marked improvement in performance for the 7plus service, says Everitt.

The minutes served on the service increased from 2.8 billion in the first quarter of 2021 to 4.1 billion during the same period in 2023. In the same timeframe, customer support queries reduced by 54 per cent from 24,000 to 11,000.

Louis van Wyk