NFL Digital Powered By Jennifer Leung

For someone just 30 years old and seven years out of school, Jennifer Leung brings a wealth of IT, video engineering and sheer life experience to her role as director of product for the National Football League.

A first-generation American, she worked her way through college with internships at major corporations including Northrop Grumman, IBM and GE, and parlayed the last of them, with NBC, into a series of jobs with NBCUniversal that culminated in the launching of a 24/7 streaming service for MSNBC.

All that know-how and proven ability to execute caught the attention of the NFL, which hired her last year to manage and improve its digital offerings.

“Our major mission and theme is we want to build a fan-first experience, and we’re going to rely on our audience to give us their voice and the feedback we need,” Leung says. “We have lots of room to play and test and learn.”

NFL.com is “still the breadwinner in our portfolio,” she says, but “we’re focused on audience reach and content promotion, and how do we optimize moving audiences to the right experience. Right now, that’s often mobile.”

The NFL has found a rare talent, says Katie Curtis, who managed Leung as SVP of television systems at NBC and now works as VP of technology for fashion retailer Opening Ceremony.

“What’s unique about her is that she has this drive and curiosity to constantly research and stay ahead of technology,” Curtis says. “But I would also put her on the execution and operations side, being able to identify how to apply technology in a cost-effective way.”

Leung has been named TVNewsCheck’s 2016 Technology Woman to Watch. She will be honored during the same ceremony and reception that will see Michelle Munson, co-founder and CEO of Aspera, receive TVNewsCheck’s 2016 Women in Technology Leadership Award. The ceremony and reception will take place at 6 p.m. on April 19 in Room N-227 of the Las Vegas Convention Center during the NAB Show. (If you’re interested in attending the ceremony, email Samantha Cerminaro.)

Leung was born in Bensalem, Pa., and raised in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Md., by a Chinese father, a refugee and self-made software engineer, and Colombian mother, who worked in property management.

Each summer, Leung and her younger brother would travel to Colombia to visit their aunt and uncle and attend local school with their cousins, giving them a year-round learning experience.

“It was amazing,” says Leung, who describes herself as a “passionate learner.” In Columbia, she found a more advanced math curriculum and broader set of history topics than in her U.S. school.

Leung pursued her interest in math and science at the University of Maryland. Leung worked her way through as a commuter student. At one point, she had two full-time jobs and went to school at night.

“I learned to focus on priorities,” she says. “When you have that little time and that many commitments, you need to be laser-focused with what you do with your time and what you want to accomplish.”

She graduated with a B.S. in electrical engineering with honors in 2009.

While in school, Leung interned in enterprise architecture at defense contractor Northrop Grumman and information management at GE Healthcare.

In the fall of 2008, she took six months off school and moved to Austin, Texas, for an internship in systems characterization for IBM, working on microprocessor chips and learning new software code.

“It was my first very technical job,” she says. “I actually developed a script to do automation testing of microprocessors right before they went to manufacturing, so we could make sure we were programming the chips correctly.”

Another internship introduced her to media. She landed a summer spot at NBC Learn in New York, which draws on the NBC News archive to provide streaming video clips of historic events on a subscription basis to schools.

Leung’s first project was integrating NBC Learn’s proprietary video player with the Blackboard learning management system used by schools to post schedules and grades.

After graduating from Maryland, Leung returned to work for NBC Learn before beginning a two-year program in July 2010 as an associate in the NBC Operations & Technology Leadership Program (OTLP). She started in TV systems, helping to bridge back-office and front-office sales and billing software.

In early 2011, after Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal was approved, Leung worked on the transition team shifting the NBC properties off their old IT systems for payroll, business data, traffic, sales and research.

She moved to Los Angeles, and found the work so interesting she stayed past the usual six-month rotation period under the OTLP program and did another six months.

“That was my introduction to [technology] portfolio management,” Leung says. “I had to gather weekly updates to CIO, speaking to very senior level leaders across the country about where things stood. That whole assignment was how concise you could be, how to draw uniformity across the entire portfolio.”

Leung’s next move came in summer 2012 to NBC’s Olympics division (then a separate group from NBC Sports, since integrated), where she ran the “Highlights Factory” on-demand online video product as manager of digital media platforms. 

“That was my introduction to video, and all the systems that empower producers,” says Leung. “I would not have done as well in that rotation if I hadn’t understood the systems architecture from my previous work.”

She got to work with Olympic veterans like NBC Sports SVP and CTO Dave Mazza and NBC Sports VP of Post Operations Darryl Jefferson, and came away with “a very deep appreciation for operations, which is just as important as the technology that powers it.”

For her Olympics work, Leung was part of a large team recognized with a 2013 Sports Emmy Award — the George Wensel Technical Achievement Award — for NBC’s multiscreen coverage.

After the Olympics, Leung went to work for NBC Sports VP of Technology Eric Black and made a formal shift to working on NBC’s digital platforms. She led the build and launch of the first-generation LiveExtra streaming platform used for Sunday Night Football, The Golf Channel and the NHL.

In June 2013, Leung moved to MSNBC as director of product development and helped relaunch the network’s website in 2013, living in Seattle for four months to do so.

She then led the year-long development of Shift, a 24/7 live streaming network introduced in December 2014, and also created an integrated TV and digital debate platform for the 2015 State of the Union presidential address.

In building Shift, Leung says her first priority was to get the “right ecosystem and partner set” with key players including encoding specialist Elemental Technologies and content delivery network Akamai.

While the initial concept for Shift was a 9-to-5 network, Leung created a scheduling platform that relies on heavy automation and allows Shift to run around-the-clock with minimal staff.

“We built Shift in record time,” she says. “What helped was that I literally had experience across every piece of the video supply chain before I got to Shift. I knew what I needed to build out an infrastructure, and I understood the underlying infrastructure.”

After two-and-a-half years at MSNBC, Leung was ready for her next challenge as product development began to wind down due to the election cycle.

That’s when Silicon Valley veteran Linda Tong, VP of product and innovation for the NFL, came calling with a new opportunity in Los Angeles. Tong’s experience in the mobile space and startups was appealing to Leung.

“One of my major motivations was that I had worked in traditional media my whole career, and I wanted exposure to the tech industry,” she says. “But I wasn’t ready to fully commit [to a Silicon Valley job].”

Leung’s team is currently building a new content management system (CMS) to support all of the NFL’s web and mobile products. She is also leading a redesign of the eight-year-old website, which she says is in the early stages and is “going to be an evolutionary, not revolutionary, initiative.”

Leung says the NFL will look to improve its “NFL Gamepass” on-demand subscription service and its “NFL Now” online video network, and continue to experiment with live-streaming games, such as Yahoo’s coverage of a game in London between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars last season. (At press time, the NFL announced a streaming deal with Twitter for its Thursday night games next season.)

But she is quick to point out that for the foreseeable future, the league’s most valuable video product will remain traditional broadcast and cable TV rights.

“We will experiment where it makes sense, and not potentially risk our brand reputation and fan experience,” Leung says. “We are monitoring the [streaming] space very closely, and we want to make sure we’re well positioned. But I still think we’re quite a long way out from seeing every NFL game delivered live via IP or digital.”

Like every content publisher, the NFL is experiencing “huge shifts” from the web to mobile properties, Leung says. She notes that Google says over 50% of its total searches are now made on mobile devices.

That said, apps aren’t necessarily the biggest priority, as the mobile web still has the broadest reach across a diverse world of smartphones and tablets.

Instead, Leung wants to make sure the “mobile web plays nicely with our mobile app” in order to best engage fans. The NFL’s goal is to first engage a smartphone user on the web, then perhaps lead them to an app if they click through an article they like. 

“The mobile web is the reach play, and the app is the engagement play, and we want to make sure we are where the audience is,” she says. “When you think about how many folks are on social networks, and the evolution of search, the first touchpoint of the brand is the mobile web.”

 Learn about TVNewsCheck‘s 2016 Women in Technology Leadership Award-winner, Michelle Munson, co-founder and CEO of Aspera, here.

Read all of TVNewsCheck‘s NAB 2016 news here.