How Media Engineers Enable Disney’s Streaming Connection with Audiences
What is Media Engineering at Disney?
“Media Engineering is critical to our streaming platforms. We help bring Disney’s great storytelling to all of our users around the world. At our scale, we couldn’t accomplish what we do with off the shelf systems, so we’ve made deep investments in encoding technology, video playback, meta data systems and others. This ensures we can bring our content to viewers at a global scale, continue to innovate with advanced features like ultra-high-definition and stereo vision, and bring those capabilities to our users as quickly as possible.”
“Media Engineering manages the content platform pipeline for all the content that flows through our direct-to-consumer platforms, like Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. As part of our pipeline, we ingest content, metadata, and artwork, which is used to drive our browsing and playback experience. Working in Media Engineering at Disney gives a holistic view, across content production to media supply chain to distribution to our digital products. Disney has a unique blend of magic, technology, and experience that sets us apart from many other tech companies."
Why is Media Engineering important?
“At Disney, Media Engineering is essential because our technology means a better experience for viewers around the globe, and that experience with our products is an increasingly central consumer touchpoint. We've done tremendous amounts of research on what it means to properly deliver content to applications, both in the home and in mobile devices. We're continually looking for better ways to engage with our audiences by looking at analytics and watching viewer engagement.”
Can you give an example of a challenging project you’ve worked on?
“My team is responsible for ensuring that all the data related to movies, series, sports, etc., is correct. I help build internal tools to manage the metadata for streaming assets. For example, Hulu on Disney+ was a huge undertaking. There were over 100,000 assets that needed to be worked on in order to stream correctly. We had to figure out how to get all of that data into a unified format and distinguishable.”
“I work on the VOD (Video On-Demand) operational experience team and we're responsible for the VOD ingestion pipeline. Anything that needs to go up on our streaming services must go through a series of steps before going live on the service. That could be quality assurance, which requires tools for internal operators, or just managing the technological hand off to the different systems that need to process data. One example is The Bachelor finale and other big events. We work with operators to make sure everything is ready beforehand, taking video and metadata delivery from our partners, and doing all of the checks to ensure everything is high-quality and properly prepared.”
“Hulu on Disney+ was a huge initiative for our team and for the Company. We have a huge catalog on Hulu and we brought nearly all of it into Disney+. We had to make sure that every piece of content was properly ingested and could play out at high quality, without error, to a huge array of different devices and endpoints. We had to make sure that advertising worked, that the variances in packaging and coding were supported, and that all promotions and features we have on client reporting were all consistent.”
What makes working in Media Engineering at Disney different than anywhere else?
“At Disney, technology is often the magic you don’t see. You have the opportunity to work at the intersection of technology and creativity. We partner with creative teams to build technology that enables users to experience content in new and interesting ways. For example, Apple Vision Pro was a very big project that we were deeply involved with. Not just in making 3D streams work at scale, but also partnering to bring those streams to life.”
“Working in technology at Disney is a fascinating thing because people don’t think technology when they first hear ‘Disney.’ I challenge that because everything we do here has technology that drives it–from Disney Parks to the streaming services to Disney Cruise Line–everything is connected. One of the coolest things about this experience is that our brands are connected across the company. You don’t get that everywhere. Only here at Disney. That is something that is forever at the forefront of my mind when I think about why I work in technology here. It impacts not just me, but our guests and users around the world.”
Interested in learning more about Media Engineering opportunities at Disney? Visit Disney Tech!
