Case study

Outdoor Channel optimizes financial workflows with Revedia from SymphonyAI Media

09.15.2022 | By Mark Speyers

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Network unifies disparate tools to improve affiliate management

Outdoor Channel is a longtime leader in the outdoor television genre. Dedicated to the outdoor lifestyle and conservation, the independent cable network provides a complete spectrum of hunting, fishing, shooting, and adventure entertainment. Outdoor Channel is the largest outdoor TV footprint in the country. Its content can be viewed in HD and is accessible by broadband and mobile platforms.

Director of subscriber and revenue management Brandy Spickerman is a fixture at Outdoor Channel, having worked in the affiliate operations department for over a decade. As such, she’s no stranger to the variety of financial tools the team has utilized throughout the years. When Brandy and her operations leadership team decided to revisit their financial workflow solutions to maximize the department’s efficiency, their process involved a thorough assessment and extensive due diligence. Which led them to Revedia.

 

The challenge

Selecting the right revenue management solution is a high-stakes decision. For Brandy and team, the assessment went beyond just Outdoor Channel; as one of several networks owned and operated by Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, they were responsible for consolidating the variety of tools used to manage revenue streams across all Kroenke networks.

For twenty years, Kroenke networks had used an on-premise tool from a third-party vendor. The Outdoor Channel finance team had to regularly work with information technology (IT) staff to ensure that the tool’s software builds were up-to-date and valid.

Brandy and her team were further taxed by the need to manage separate instances for each of their network channels. It was difficult to visualize data sets across services. Brandy says the daily processes required to run the business were both complex and tedious. She acknowledges:

“With every software platform you use, you find workarounds. But with our old database, there were a lot.”

Brandy and the team came to the decision that a new approach was in order.


Solution

Brandy had a vested interest in evaluating and selecting the solution that Outdoor Channel would ultimately deploy, as she works in the system daily. Her Affiliate Operations department and others in the Kroenke portfolio started with a common goal: to see all networks and their affiliate distribution revenue on one screen.

Another important requirement was that each Kroenke network be able to fully manage all accounting and reconciliation procedures. Kroenke networks’ finance teams had long favored a managed services offering.

Once the Kroenke finance team made the decision to use Revedia, they could see a path ahead that was clear, bright and smooth. As Brandy says:

“SymphonyAI Media’s team really leaned in to listen to us and help us configure the workflow properly.”

With Revedia, the ease of creating an agreement, assigning an MVPD and setting up a new distributor is easy. The team says adding and adjusting rates is a feature that simplifies their work, along with many other features.


Results

From initial scoping to the ingest of legacy financial data and through to training and development, Brandy says:

“SymphonyAI Media’s team made us feel special in the beginning and that hasn’t changed since. As a customer, we can pick up the phone and talk to someone.”

Day by day, the two teams have grown together and developed trust that transcends agreements, invoices, and payments. From the core technology to the features that Outdoor Channel selected for the best value and price, Brandy and the team are confident they can count on SymphonyAI Media to be their trusted partner

About SymphonyAI

SymphonyAI is building the leading enterprise AI company for digital transformation across the most important and resilient growth verticals, including retail, consumer packaged goods, finance, manufacturing, media, and IT service management. SymphonyAI verticals have many leading enterprises as clients. Since its founding in 2017, SymphonyAI has grown rapidly to 2,000 talented leaders, data scientists, and other professionals. SymphonyAI is an SAIGroup company, backed by a $1 billion commitment from Dr. Romesh Wadhwani, a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist.

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