Quanah McBride

Quanah McBride has been a Layercake director since mid 2022. Layercake provides software technology and data engineering, consultancy, and product services with speciality in sports, video, broadcast, and media services born out of their wealth of experience in these areas on both the customer and provider sides. McBride and Layercake work with leading media and sports organisations including the AFL, VRC, A-Leagues, QRL, Cricket, NZR, NZRL, NRL, Working Dog, Seven, and Sky News. As early adopters to IP video and digital and cloud technologies, McBride’s and Layercake’s experience to help organisations seamlessly move to the digital age navigating them through technology obstacles to solutions that work and are sustainable (cost, operationally, and environmentally). He uses his vast technical and operational experience when working with clients to ensure that they can deliver the right outcome, build capability internally, and drive future growth and innovation. McBride has been instrumental in the development and rollout of Layercake’s award-winning Streamcake and Mediacake products. These products focus on media and video orchestration and automation enabling smart live and VOD streaming solutions and media asset distribution and commericalisation. Streamcake orchestrated video for the Cluch.tv OTT platform, seamlessly delivering streaming of 120+ concurrent live streams online from schedule, graphics, CMS through to CDN, and VOD generation. McBride led the recent innovative implementation of the new QPlus.tv for Queensland Rugby League(QRL), partnering with DoubleTake Sports on the production side and leveraging Streamcake, Enveu, and AWS technology to provide a “field to consumer’ subscription offering.

McBride was previously the GM of digital technology & operations at the National Rugby League, where he headed up the NRL Digital Technology and Operations team. He was hired (alongside a couple of specialist personnel) by NRL in 2015, tasked to set up and manage the transition of the NRL’s digital and production operations from outsourced model. They successfully launched in late 2017 and the operation has grown incrementally. It delivers NRL’s internal content production and technical capability that enables NRL to have a direct relationship with the NRL online community (~3m NRL account holders and growing) through content and other solutions/offerings.

During Covid, the Digital team and operations were able to help get football back quickly though technology solutions and ensure that their online community was kept engaged through the no live sport period as a result of earlier decisions including digitised archive content, cloud, and remote technologies. The NRL Content and Digital operations supported the wider NRL from Elite through to Grassroots and service rights holders, sponsors, and NRL’s own online platforms.

McBride was responsible for delivering the NRL Network’s technical operations; managing technical partners and internal resources that support the NRL’s Digital Network; and the NRL Clubs and States’ digital media production and media services from source to online viewers. He worked closely with the football departments, broadcast and rights partners, as well as key technology partners delivering the best outcome for the NRL’s rights holders/sponsors.

McBride has a broad range of experience across multiple industry verticals – finance, media, insurance, IOT, and consulting – that all help in developing solutions and efficient operating models. He has been instrumental in delivering innovated video and media technology solutions, such as the live server side ad implementation for Sochi Games with Network Ten(TenPlay), FreeTV and OTT solutions, NRL.Com, NRL Archive, AFL Photos, NRL Imagery, MySideline, Cluchtv, Qplus.tv, Play.AFL, Victorian Racing Club Media, Contractable and live streaming solutions.