This is the third in a series of posts reviewing excerpts of the 2021 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS) and the second post about how the brands of technology suppliers were ranked by respondents to the 2021 BBS.
The previous articles about the 2021 BBS reviewed the most important technology trends and the 2021 BBS League Table for ‘Easy to Work With.’
This post examines the metric of ‘Vision of the Future’ for media technology suppliers profiled in the 2021 Big Broadcast Survey.
A substantial portion of a supplier’s marketing activities, such as large trade events (even the virtual equivalents), are dedicated to articulating a technology vision for future product offerings. In many instances, a supplier’s vision and future product roadmap are determining factors in current purchase decisions.
A good recent example is the ongoing transition of media operations into virtualized processing environments. Even before it was technically feasible to move certain workflow segments into virtual environments, media customers were indicating (in the Big Broadcast Survey) that a vendor’s virtualization roadmap was a primary consideration in the purchase decision.
We started measuring the customer perception of an individual supplier’s ‘Vision of the Future’ several years ago. As part of the 2021 BBS, we were interested in developing a more complete understanding of how customers were evaluating a supplier’s ‘Vision of the Future League’ and whether this was independent of a customer’s perspective about a suppliers actually ability to deliver on its stated vision. This curiosity led to the introduction of a new question in the 2021 survey, visualized in the below chart (which we discussed at length during the 2021 Devoncroft Virtual Summit held in November).
The left-hand side of the above chart shows (no names) how the covered suppliers in the BBS were ranked across four quadrants, having the two dimensions of (i) Vision of the Future (y-axis) and (ii) Ability to Deliver in Timely Manner (x-axis). A position in the top right-hand quadrant indicates a supplier is viewed as having both a more attractive ‘Vision of the Future’ and a high ability to deliver on the vision in a timely manner. As the scattering of the plots indicates, there are clear differences in the suppliers profiled.
The right-hand slide of the chart displays all responses across all suppliers in the form of a heat map. What the heat map makes apparent is a rather strong (near linear) correlation between the two dimensions. Reasonable people can differ on the interpretation of this relationship. One could observe customers exhibit tremendous credulity toward a suppliers’ ‘Vision of the Future’ and are inclined to believe a vendor can deliver on this vision – regardless of the practical ability to deliver. We believe this conclusion is at odds with associated end-user interviews undertaken by Devoncroft. A more likely explanation is customers taken into account a suppliers’ ability to deliver when ranking ‘Vision of the Future.’ Such a conclusion would add further merit to tracking the brand driver, ‘Vision of the Future.’
Notwithstanding the above, please note ‘Vision of the Future’ is not the only – or perhaps even main – reason driving many customer purchase decisions.
The ‘Vision of the Future’ findings in the 2021 BBS are shown below as an overall industry league table containing the 30 highest ranked suppliers for the metric ‘Vision of the Future.’
An explanation of how these results were calculated can be found at the end of this article. Please note that both audio and video brands are included in these rankings, and that the table below shown brands in alphabetical order, NOT in the order in which they were ranked in the study.
The 2021 league table contains large cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure), IT equipment providers (Arista, Cisco), and well-known digital application vendors like Adobe and Apple. ‘Vision of the Future’ is not just the domain of large technology companies, as there is good representation in this league table of familiar media technology suppliers such as AJA Video, Ross Video, or Zixi.
How these rankings relate to a customer’s purchase decision is an important aspect of interrupting the data. A more detailed review of the relationship is available to clients of the BBS reports.
Given the events of 2021, it is interesting to also present last year’s league table for ‘Vision of the Future’. The 2020 version is provided below.
As illustrated in the 2020 and 2021 BBS League Tables for ‘Vision of the Future’ there was a reshuffling of the leaders between 2020 and 2021. The tables have 16 common members, meaning a little less than half of the 2021 BBS League Table for ‘Vision of the Future’ is new.
How These Results Were Calculated
2021 BBS participants (and 2020 BBS participants) were asked to provide their perception of how a variety of media technology suppliers ranked in terms of ‘Vision of the Future.’ The scores were measured on a 10-point scale — with 10 being best in the market, and 1 being worst in the market.
This data was then aggregated and averaged to generate the global score for each brand based on these responses.
Please keep in mind when reviewing this information that the table is presented in alphabetical order, not in the order brands were ranked by respondents to the BBS. Also, the charts in this posting measure the responses of all 2021 BBS respondents, regardless of their company type, company size, geographic location, job title and budget for broadcast technology products.
To get full value from this data, it is necessary to evaluate these results on a granular basis. If you would like more information, please contact Devoncroft Partners.
Please also note that inclusion of any brand in the above table is dependent on inclusion in the 2021 BBS and available sample size. The minimum sample size for inclusion in these charts is 30 respondents. Therefore, it is possible that a highly regarded brand was excluded from these findings based on sample size.
The information in this article is based on select findings from the 2021 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), a global study of media industry trends, technology purchasing plans, and benchmarking of media technology vendor brands. Several thousand broadcast professionals in 100+ countries took part in the 2021 BBS, making it the largest and most comprehensive market study ever conducted in the media industry.
Related Content:
2021 Big Broadcast Survey Global Trend Index
2021 BBS League Table for ‘Easy to Work With’
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