The world is moving towards everything digital and OTT is one of the biggest parts of the digital movement.
If you are using streaming media in order to build your audience, extend your viewership, grow your organization, and develop revenue streams through your growing popularity, then you most likely need to utilize a lot of things. Lightcast.com is a place where you can do many things at one time to enhance your OTT experience with its variety of products and services.
Featuring for CIO Women Magazine’s this issue is Marlene Kisslinger, The Most Influential Women To Watch Out.
The Company:
Since 2010, Lightcast.com has been the pioneer in multi-platform and end-to-end OTT solutions. They have enabled publishers to create and manage TV Apps, Mobile Apps, Web Apps, and Social Media Accounts in real time.
Their award-winning CMS, The Media Cloud, allows publishers to upload, transcode, store, and manage all on-demand content such as live streams, gallery thumbnails and images, metadata, language versions, subtitle files, and other sidecar files for real-time publishing across Websites, Mobile Apps, Web Apps, TV Apps, and Social Media Platforms.
Inspiration For Choosing This Field:
Looking back, Marlene never actually wanted to become an entrepreneur. In fact, she grew up in a family of extremely hard-working, successful employees with high work ethics, above the ordinary, but none of them had started companies.
Marlene Kisslinger belief system taught her that launching & running a successful company is something that only rich people would be able to do. Little did she know that with a sparkling idea, perseverance, consistency, and the right partners you can achieve almost anything.
With a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre, Film and Media and a Master’s Degree in Business Administration with a focus on HR, as well as years of experience in media production, filming, editing, and streaming media it felt natural for Marlene to direct her journey in this particular field where she could contribute in the areas of product development, customer success and HR, all of which are necessary when you want to start a company from the ground.
A Word For Budding Entrepreneurs?
Marlene Kisslinger says, no matter how hard and frustrating it can be, never lose your why. When you know your why, and the reason why you do what you do, you are on a path to success. You may not always feel great along the way, and you may not instantly see success, but trust that it will all come together if you are persistent and if you stay true to yourself.
If Marlene’s Life Were A Book:
If Marlene Kisslinger life were a book it’d be called “Consistency is Key!”- Marlene Kisslinger
Growing up, Marlene Kisslinger was extremely shy, she didn’t realize her full potential and was confused about her purpose in life. Over time she realized that persistence, reliability, and consistency, could open new doors to growth.
Despite all the challenges and difficulties, life threw at Marlene Kisslinger, she was always persistent. No matter how small or big the responsibility, she always tried to take full ownership of everything she was entrusted with. Carrying those values along with her, she now leads a successful INC 5000 company with employees in 5 different countries.
“Staying consistent to Marlene Kisslinger true values has been the key to success.”- Marlene Kisslinger
Education Shaping The Enterprise:
Marlene Kisslinger experience in the area of media production, video editing, and graphic design as well as on-demand and live streaming has helped her in understanding the client’s needs and their challenges in better ways. One of the challenges almost every media publisher is facing is time constraints.
Because there are such tight timelines and deadlines, making efficient tools to deliver content to a greater audience is extremely valuable. That is one of the main USPs of Lightcast.com, says Marlene.
But that’s only half of the story. According to Marlene Kisslinger, without onboarding the right talents at the right time Lightcast.com would have never been recognized as one of the most reliable and innovative streaming providers in the market.
With an MBA in Human Resources, Marlene Kisslinger learned the fundamentals of talent acquisition, talent development, and international human resource management, which has been very helpful for a micro-multinational company with small offices and teams in multiple locations.
Advice That Impacted Marlene’s Leadership:
Marlene Kisslinger says she has soaked up advice from many who have accomplished great things, but there is one piece of advice that had a strong impact on her that she often shares with various leaders.
To quote Marlene Kisslinger:
“The biggest mistake you can make as a leader is making yourself irreplaceable. You might get more applause from people around you, but you will never see the full potential developed within your team. Make yourself replaceable by multiplying yourself in others, and shake off the fear that someone else might take your seat. Enabling others to surpass you will lead to greater growth.”
Paving The Path Through Challenges:
Lightcast.com funded the start-up entirely by itself without any external or venture capital and reinvested every dollar that came in.
Not having extra capital to burn pushed challenged them to be extra smart and they had to stretch every dollar to its limit. This made Lightcast.com better in so many ways. Even today they carry this mindset of resourcefulness which they do not want to lose in the future as well.
They had only one ambitious goal in mind and that was to build the best multi-platform OVP and Media Management System for the mid-market. In addition, what made start-up years fun for them was being able to be creative while focusing on product development entirely with full freedom and without any pressure from the investors.
Reasons Behind The Long-Standing Success:
A pitbull-like determination and longevity. The trending term of the last ten years for it is sustainability and, in that respect, sustainability is exactly what is behind Lightcast.com’s long-standing success. We were not built as an overnight wonder with the goal to exit quickly at inflated valuations.
We built Lightcast.com in order to service customers for many decades. In a sense, we are anti-inflated but focus on intrinsic value, deep underlying tech, and long-term sustainability. If we had to choose between explosive growth during 12 months or consistent and sustainable growth over 12 years, we would pick the 12 years every single time without hesitation.
Growth Trajectory Over The Years:
In 2012 Lightcast.Com started to accept a handful of customers. Soon enough, a small focus group of media publishers gave them their feedback on the services of Lightcast.com during the initial development phase.
In 2014 Lightcast.Com started to accept customers officially and since then their monthly recurring revenue has grown by a whopping 1600%.
Since Lightcast.Com are a SaaS company with long-term contracts for recurring business services, it can project continuous growth with comparatively high accuracy.
Judging by the recent growth acceleration, Even without any investment into marketing or sales, acquisitions of smaller streaming providers, or strategic partnerships, Lightcast.Com are expecting continuous YoY growth in the mid-double-digits in the coming years. This is just based on the current organic growth if they do nothing but manage the status quo.
Expanding The Services Further:
According to Marlene Kisslinger, the majority of Startups and Vloggers, content creators, and media publishers come to Lightcast.com in order to launch TV Apps and/or Mobile Apps for streaming and Lightcast.com seeks to extend its portfolio of publishing properties even further.
One of the key factors= for choosing Lightcast.com is the cost-efficiency and opportunity to save on valuable financial resources because it is usually less expensive than other “patch-work solutions”.
Lightcast.com simplifies OTT and multi-platform publishing for organizations of all sizes – from the smallest to the largest.
Aside from the financial savings, the sometimes even more valuable time resources are another factor why publishers choose Lightcast.com. It allows them to “get more done faster” through the proprietary Media Cloud real-time content and app management system.
All connected publishing properties, such as apps, players, podcasts, and social media channels, can be managed in one place, with syndicated workflows, and all user/viewer data and reporting is in one place.
The Media Cloud has over one thousand functionalities for professional media publishers, ranging from DRM, geo control, social sharing settings, real-time app control, app builder, player builder, and more.
Various workflows can be automated entirely by using programmable workflow presents, allowing publishers to save as many workflows to set preference profiles as they like. The majority of Lightcast customers seek to address audiences worldwide and to maximize exposure across as many platforms as possible.
