Coronavirus: How vendors are helping home workers

The spread of coronavirus across the globe has had a huge impact. Broadcasting, like every other industry, has seen its expectations turned inside out, with many staff now working from home.

Most manufacturers, too, are now facing delays in deliveries of products, and in spares or servicing, because of shutdowns in many areas.

However, with software-based services no one needs to be home alone, and a host of manufacturers have introduced initiatives to make it cheaper and simpler to work from home using cloud services and software. These include free extensions to licences and online training.

“The next several weeks are going to be strange, but they don’t have to be all bad,” said Emery Wells, co-founder and chief executive of Frame.io.

“First let’s prioritise health; then let’s rise to the challenge of becoming an industry that uses ingenuity to thrive in this time of crisis.”

The pandemic has forced companies to rush the adoption of remote working, something many aren’t fully prepared for. Frame.io surveyed its customers and found that:

• 40% are not fully equipped with the necessary technology
• 38% plan to adopt new tools but aren’t sure yet what those are yet
• 75% expect more difficulty performing their job function remotely
• 80% predict a major reduction in content volume and delay of their current work
• 57% expect to pivot to new revenue streams to compensate for a slowdown in production and related jobs.

To help with some of these points, Frame.io this week introduced a Workflow from Home training series on YouTube, hosted by its global SVP of innovation, Michael Cioni.

“While being forced to adopt cloud-based technology and remote workflows sooner than you expected isn’t ideal, we hope that this will lead to efficiencies across the board,” said Wells. “A situation like this will force companies to be creative with their remote work options,” and it means that “no one can ignore the cracks anymore in current business models.”

“It’s a really hard time for our industry,” added Fernando Küfer, CEO, disguise, who is “committed to doing what we can to support our community of freelancers, partners and customers across the globe.”

He hopes these initiatives will enable more people to access its software, and learn new ways to maximise efficiencies.

“Any one of us should feel very fortunate to be part of a close-knit community that rallies in times like this and comes back stronger,” stated Avid CEO, Jeff Rosica.

“Our customers are moving very fast and solving serious problems with a lot of creativity and ingenuity. Without question, chief among them is the imperative to keep news and post teams collaborating around the clock when they can’t be together because of facility closings or production shutdowns. As many pivot to modifying workflows so editors, mixers, journalists and others can stay engaged and be productive remotely, and in the cloud in some cases, we’re all sharing and learning a lot as we go.”

If this outbreak had happened just a few years ago, it would have posed even greater problems.

“Luckily, the last few years have seen a very significant shift in our ability to work remotely,” which could be key to minimising the effect of the outbreak, said Conrad Clemson, CEO, EditShare.

 “Systems are reaching near capacity, and this, coupled with a lack of infrastructure for remote collaborative working, such as hybrid cloud, has the potential to become very challenging.” George Kilpatrick, Masstech CEO

His company already has “an entire collaborative video production workflow in the cloud,” but it needs to be open and to work alongside others, including competitors, “to make sure that during this episode and whatever comes next, we help to keep things going, keep our businesses moving, keep our lives connected, share our stories and learn from this experience in ways that will make us a stronger and more connected society in the future,” he said.

“Most organisations are still primarily based on-premise, using on-premise applications and systems, including their storage, and when staff can’t get into the office system management becomes difficult,” said George Kilpatrick, Masstech’s CEO. “Systems are reaching near capacity, and this, coupled with a lack of infrastructure for remote collaborative working, such as hybrid cloud, has the potential to become very challenging.”

Masstech has been helping users understand how they can adapt their existing storage and workflow systems to remote working and is offering temporary free licenses to help them cope. “It’s a challenging time, and we’re keen to ensure that customers know we can help them within their current system and support contract, without them incurring extra cost,” he added.

Signiant is allowing its Media Shuttle customers to have unlimited users. “As the virus changes work patterns across the industry, it is more vital than ever for media professionals to have the ability to work remotely and collaborate globally - the very workflows that Media Shuttle enables,” said Margaret Craig, Signiant’s CEO.

“The demand for content has increased significantly due to the Covid virus, however, production has slowed dramatically and even stopped for studios and content producers,” said Rick Phelps, Chief Commercial Officer, Ownzones Entertainment Technologies. “They are now looking at their vast libraries to fill the demand and Ownzones is helping them to conform and publish their content to global platforms. A lot of large service providers who run their operations on prem have had to close down their operational facilities and cannot provide services to their customers. Ownzones is helping by offering our cloud-based infrastructure to transform and deliver content to global platforms.”

Rapid reaction forced
As the government’s response to the pandemic changes daily, broadcasters and manufacturers are having to adapt their systems equally quickly.

Last week, one Pebble Beach customer, a Spain-based service provider handling playout for 25 channels, was advised that everyone had to work remotely from Tuesday onwards. This gave it less than 24 hours to transfer the control of all of its playout operations to staff working from home.

Pebble Beach engineers immediately accessed their Dolphin integrated channel device remotely, adding a compressed IP output to the pre-existing SDI output (within same channel pipeline). “We were able to configure most of the software whilst the preview channel was running, and then restart when it was convenient for our customer so that the changes could be deployed. The team succeeded in making this happen by close of play on Monday, and the customer’s operators have been reviewing content, graphics and subtitles remotely since,” said Alison Pavitt, marketing manager, Pebble Beach Systems.

As remote working became mandatory in France last week, a Pebble Marina playout user approached Pebble to expand its web-based Lighthouse deployment to adapt to the changing circumstances. “We were able to quickly add new user accounts for the operators and the maintenance team, who now all have access to view playlists, timelines and statistics from their respective homes. They have also deployed the Channel Exception Monitor, which gives a consolidated view of any playlist errors across all channels, enabling early intervention if, for example, media is missing, or there are timing errors or invalid metadata in the list,” she explained.

Bea Alonso, Dalet’s director of product marketing, has been reassuring customers “that we have business continuity and disaster recovery measures in place for us to continue serving and supporting them,” and also asking what it can do to help address any specific challenges.

Many of its customers had already deployed remote workflows. “For these clients, providing them with temporary free licenses is certainly helping lighten the load. What we found, however, is that the main challenges come from not having a solid IT infrastructure in place that easily supports home-working workflows. To help with this, we are working closely with our clients to accelerate migration of their workflows and content to cloud-based content supply chains. There is no doubt that we will see plenty of innovation from the industry overall as a result of this global crisis,” she said.