TMT Insights is a professional services and software company working within the media and entertainment (M&E) industry to offer market strategies, technology workflow solutions, third-party vendor management, and operations management software development. With expertise in all aspects of production, post-production, and distribution workflows, TMT’s overarching goal is to accelerate the use of technology across various groups within an organization, helping clients in the M&E world streamline their existing business processes, grow their operations effectively, and thrive in the long term. Pulse 2.0 interviewed TMT Insights CEO and co-founder Andy Shenkler to learn more about the company.
Andy Shenkler’s Background
Shenkler is a lifelong media buff with a passion for show business (emphasis on the “business” part) and was pioneering supply chain advancements long before that term even entered mainstream use. As an early adopter of cloud-based content management services, Shenkler has over 20 years of experience in leadership, product development, and advisory positions across the media and entertainment industry, helping drive both startup ventures and established global organizations to new levels of operational efficiency and technological innovation. And Shenkler said:
“I started my career during the mid-1990s when the internet and web technologies were in their infancy and just becoming embraced by the general public and the business world. It was a fascinating time of creativity and innovation, fueling new ideas and opportunities. The entrepreneurial spirit was contagious.
“My college roommates and I formed a digital technology group before I moved out to Los Angeles prior to graduation to work at the web hosting service GeoCities (later acquired by Yahoo). I moved on to EMI Music, joining one of the first digital music groups in the industry with the goal of supporting products to compete with Napster.”
“My next stop was Barry Diller’s IAC Corporation running product and search for CitySearch (a division of Ticketmaster). Before long, I got a call from my old boss at EMI, who had just started at a company called Ascent Media, heading their digital post-production business, and I joined them as a consultant.”
“We built supply chains for Sony Pictures and Paramount, and I ran that operation through 2009 when Sony decided to build a fully functioning digital supply chain that all M&E companies could use. I headed up that program as part of Sony NMS through 2017 when I was tapped to become Chief Product and Technology Officer at Deluxe Entertainment. Then, by late 2020, when Deluxe had been sold to a private equity company and COVID significantly changed the landscape of how everyone did business, the time was right for the creation of TMT Insights.”
Personal Path Complementing Professional Life
How has your personal background complemented your professional path? Shenkler shared:
“I’ve always loved movies and television; I can quote most films or classic episodes. I even went to film school, but not to be a director, writer, or cinematographer. My goal was to produce movies, focusing on the “business” side of show business: technology, licensing, distribution, production, merchandising – everything that goes on behind the scenes. As I continued further down the path to where technology meets business, it became even clearer to me that this is where my passion was.”
“The entertainment business is unique in that you get to enjoy seeing your work unfold in such a public setting, even if the particular contribution seems minor. A perfect example is during my time at Ascent Media when we were preparing for the iTunes movie launch. We spent an entire Thanksgiving weekend in the office, having turkey dinner at our desks and hand-transcoding files. Then, two weeks later, we saw Steve Jobs presenting the work we did. That was pretty satisfying, and I can point to so many other examples like that.”
“These early experiences at EMI and Ascent were where I discovered my natural talent for seeing complex ecosystems and distilling them into simple operating processes. The supply chain concept really aligned with how my brain works. If you drew a Venn Diagram of technology, strategy, and logistics, I fit where they all meet perfectly. We were building some of the first digital supply chains in the industry, even though they weren’t called that just yet.”
“So, while I ultimately didn’t go down the path of producing films, I still get to work with people across the industry and engage in multi-faceted discussions about how content is created. I get to be part of influencing, developing, and implementing those processes. In all of my roles throughout my career, I’ve had the luxury of not being just internally focused but working in tandem with different companies to reshape how content is created and distributed. That’s what I love, and I’ve been fortunate to join with other like-minded people who share my passion here at TMT Insights.”
Formation Of TMT Insights
Could you describe the early days of TMT? Shenkler reflected:
“Within the first three months, one of our new clients had a significant ransomware attack that brought down the entire company on Christmas Eve. Coincidentally, the executive who brought us into the organization and I had both lived through the Sony hack in 2014 when I was running their digital supply chain. Now, facing a similar scenario, she asked for our help in moving everything to the cloud as quickly as possible. We were successful in bringing the entire operation to the cloud and processing content for their clients by New Year, which led to our first long-term engagement for our company.”
“When you first start anything, it’s all about relationships. You reach out to people you know, they reach out to you, and through trust, they give you work. Then once, you amass a certain body of work, you can go to other people and demonstrate a track record of performance based on trust as well as the reputation you are building.”
“My business partner (Hannah Barnhardt) and I had solid relationships with a number of people, we started reaching out, and from there it grew. We are fortunate to have team members who we’ve known through our shared times at Ascent, Deluxe, Sony, and others. We started this company knowing that we had a cadre of experts who we trusted and who were already comfortable working with each other. Our ability to go from zero to a hundred was super-fast, successfully side-stepping many growing pains and organizational complexities associated with starting a new business.”
“That was almost four years ago. We started with the two of us, and now we’re 40+ people and growing, with teams in the US, UK, Poland, Philippines, and India, and there’s no end in sight.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates TMT Insights from the competition? Shenkler affirmed:
“We pride ourselves on the fact that any new people we bring on are already experts in their particular area, whether it’s domain experts in media and entertainment or experts in software development. It is not our culture to send inexperienced individuals to be trained by our clients, regardless of how degreed they might be, it’s not our clients responsibility to teach them, and even more so, not their responsibility to pay for it.”
“Our approach is, ‘Let us help and guide you. You don’t have to teach us.’ Sure, there are nuances to your business, but we can bring you additional information you don’t have to help you go faster and smarter. We already know what’s behind door #2, so you don’t need to open it. Let’s go this way instead. This really resonates with our clients.”
“Also, we are still a specialty niche company, unlike the larger professional services organizations that tend to see everything as IT. They may boast that they support many media and entertainment companies, but what most are really saying is that they do IT services (DevOps, IT infrastructure, or an IT help desk) for media and entertainment companies. It’s a sector for them. Doing an SAP implementation for a studio doesn’t necessarily mean you have an M&E practice.”
“We’ve turned that whole model on its side. From our perspective, TMT delivers media solutions for media and entertainment companies across the entire spectrum of content creation, localization, linear, streaming, sports, and live events. Since media is so pervasive, we are extending our footprint beyond ‘traditional’ M&E companies and further delivering digital supply chain and media workflows for the travel and hospitality industry, consumer products, corporate production, etc. We categorize our core function as media & entertainment, while crossing verticals. It’s a slightly different way of looking at things.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core technology and services offerings? Shenkler explained:
“The M&E industry is facing a unique set of challenges on a daily basis: the global demand for diverse content is exploding, delivery timelines are compressed, and customer expectations are heightened. Our professional services include a mix of traditional consulting, CXO advisory services, and software development, while our core focus sits with architecting, building, and implementing complete media supply chains for streaming, fast channels, linear broadcast, and other distribution models. New types of workflows and operations management are needed, and Polaris, our operational management and orchestration software platform, has proven to be that answer.”
“Most M&E organizations already have a significant amount of tools and resources in place, some homegrown and some SaaS or licensed, but it’s an unwieldy patchwork of disparate tools for managing the business end-to-end. They lack the single unifying solution, a “single pane of glass,” necessary to tie everything into one integrated platform.”
“Designed to sit on top of and across those existing technologies and subsystems, Polaris provides teams with an aggregated and cohesive interface that presents data for users and not just instrumentation for engineers. It brings order to the chaos and presents information in terminology familiar to an organization without having to make context shifts when logging into the different software that is performing specific functions. It eliminates the need for keeping track and communicating on “scratch paper” in Google Sheets and Airtables, and provides statusing to everyone across the supply chain, greatly reducing the need to chase and becoming more self-sufficient. All of which is so much more necessary since the world has turned to operating remotely.”
“Our new MediaOps division’s charge is providing highly skilled teams of media engineers who take the heavy lift off onboarding, R&D, and implementation of new technologies (AI, automation, metadata packaging scripts, etc.). Given the amount of tools that are always becoming available, the speed at which the business is moving, and the fact that these types of resources are in high demand, our MediaOps offering creates a level of predictability for an organization to have access to the highest quality experts to act on behalf of or augment an organization’s existing team to keep up with demand. That’s more critical now than ever since M&E organizations are under intense cost and time pressure to manage, deliver, and monetize content more efficiently.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Shenkler cited:
“We’ve had year-over-year growth of almost 100% for the last three years, continuing to partner with some of the largest studios and brands in our industry. Plus, we have no debt. We self-financed the business and don’t operate beyond our means.”
“With only a few years under our belt, we’ve been able to surpass milestones that far take us outside of the traditional “start up or infancy” phase. We often talk about the size of our team with people because it seems to be an emotional metric that others use to give some sense of relative size to your business. However, we don’t evaluate our business that way, in fact, we believe that in an apples-to-apples comparison of a similarly sized company from a revenue perspective with double the number of people, doesn’t mean they are doing better, it simply means they are spending more.”
“One only needs to look at the over-hiring and misconstrued belief that played out at technology companies during COVID and now watching their increasing reductions in force to know that just because you can have more of something doesn’t always mean it’s a good idea.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Shenkler about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“How much space do we have?! There are many we’re proud of, but I’ll name a few:
One of our recent engagements with A+E Networks is a perfect example of putting our combined technology resources and industry expertise to work for a customer. A+E is known for its diverse and rich content library, but as that volume grew, it became increasingly difficult to manage and fulfill orders efficiently. We worked with them on a comprehensive solution that was as much about change management as it was about operational transformation. The power of Polaris, supported by our team’s knowledge, helped A+E regain ownership of its media supply chain, which has led to tangible results.”
“The international anime brand and streaming service Crunchyroll engaged us to build out their new digital supply chain ecosystem, which we architected and deployed using a combination of the SDVI Rally media solution in conjunction with our Polaris Platform to create a powerful solution for orchestrating content ingest, subtitling, dubbing, and packaging for delivery on the company’s popular anime OTT services. In addition to the buildout of the platform, our MediaOps team reconciled, conformed, and delivered more than 250k components of video, audio, subs, and ccs into the system in three months and delivered a launch catalog to Amazon for the company’s first channel launch.”
“The international broadcaster Sky recently consolidated control and visibility of its global content supply chain system on Polaris as it continues to migrate all functions related to movie and TV content across its U.K., Germany, and Italy operations onto the platform.”
“And the list goes on.”
Future Company Goals
What are TMT’s future goals? Shenkler concluded:
“We’re focused on growth at the right pace that makes sense for our business. There is still a wealth of potential in the U.S. market, while at the same time we are actively growing our European presence in parallel. It’s a bit trickier in Europe given that the market is more fragmented, but we believe that will lead to greater opportunities.”
“We’ll also continue to grow more into our current offerings that we have developed, since there are very few firms bridging the gap between content operations and traditional engineering, or devops. That’s where a group like TMT’s MediaOps group can play a key role bridging the gap between content and technology groups as our teams speak both in depth.”
“There’s still a rising tide. We tend not to do things based on time and materials, which is the traditional consulting model. We try to create predictability for clients, viewing most things as projects, even processes like onboarding, so clients always know what something will cost. It’s about changing the paradigms that people have traditionally used to measure success.”
