Mobile-native UX technology is a natural progression of the cloud and SaaS-powered disruption we are seeing across media and entertainment over the past year as distributed workforces need the right tools
By Keith Buckley, President & CEO at Xytech Systems
The media and entertainment (M&E) industry is being transformed before our very eyes. It’s not the first time M&E has reinvented itself – whether from black and white to color, or analog to digital – but the fundamentals of content creation and delivery are changing more rapidly than ever. The shift to the cloud and a create-content-anywhere approach continues to revolutionize how programming is produced, distributed, and consumed. Like many others in our industry, I witnessed it firsthand at this year’s IBC Show in Amsterdam, where customers, partners, and industry thought leaders echoed the same idea: “We’re embarking on a disruptive journey unlike we’ve seen before.”
As anyone who’s attended IBC for many years knows, the show consistently reflects the changing aspects of our industry. In recent years, we have seen less of the show floor lined with legacy hardware – big clunky boxes that once represented how committed a company was to the industry’s future. In the past, a lot of budget was traditionally allocated to assembling infrastructure, provisioning lines between facilities and setting up satellite and fiber transmission hardware – building up the physical. Today, that’s evolved and people are forced to rethink the need for greater agility, finding innovative solutions that can help them adapt to today’s tight economic conditions. Of course, there’s still hardware on the floor today, but the software driving it has become increasingly prominent, as has the ever-widening use of the cloud.
Migrating to the cloud
The cloud isn’t new to the media industry. But in recent years, media organizations have increasingly looked to extend their use of cloud technologies to improve their capabilities – which offer greater flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. The most obvious example of the cloud playing a growing role has been in delivering digital libraries through over-the-top streaming services as more and more media companies follow in Netflix’s pioneering steps.
But the cloud is also disrupting the behind-the-scenes functions of the industry as well. We’re seeing that the creatives – both the on-the-ground production teams and freelancers dispersed remotely – must now adapt to new workflows and tools when producing content. This shift was accelerated by the global pandemic, which forced many content creators to work in the cloud, as many production teams and creatives found themselves in geographically disparate locations employing remote and distributed production techniques. This established new ways of working, giving a new impetus to the Hollywood studios and mainstream broadcasters to consider shifting more production to cloud-based methods.
Serving the needs of remote workers and distributed workforces
Though the pandemic has receded, the remote working culture is now firmly established. Remote production workflows and business models that were crucial in ensuring continuity of service during the pandemic have proven their worth. New technology offerings from both legacy providers and new entrants are enabling more creative ways to create content. And mindsets across all elements of media production have adapted. All of these changes have ensured that remote practices and technologies are firmly cemented in the industry. Remote methods not only boost flexibility and efficiency but also serve to make productions more sustainable, lowering their overall carbon footprint, particularly for live events, by decreasing travel and the transport of equipment.
However, deploying remote teams and distributed workforces creates challenges in terms of how show producers schedule and coordinate productions, organize media assets, oversee delivery, ensure compliance, and communicate with stakeholders. In the last five years, we’ve seen a 185% increase in Media Operations roles as a result. At the same time, the focus on driving operational efficiencies impacts everyone involved in managing productions, particularly in live television.
This focus is where the benefits of the cloud are making a big difference for those in media operations that are taking advantage of its capabilities. Many production and facility managers are tapping SaaS solutions to achieve cost efficiencies across their resource mapping, enabling them to quickly gain insights from business analytics that can inform scenario planning – essentially, allowing them to take a lot of the excess out and maximize resource utilization.
Hello Mobile Operations – establishing an evolutionary path
As the growth in cloud-based production approaches has enabled teams to do more with less, we have sought to evolve our offering.
We first took a bold decision to re-energize our end-to-end Media Operations Platform™ through standards-based APIs in the cloud, allowing every customer the ability to gain access to all the features they need, along with an expanded pool of potential integrations. This SaaS integration allows the production community to essentially tap into features when they need them.
In the next few months, we will release our most innovative solution yet, a mobile-native UX. This innovation marks the next phase in the evolution of our Media Operations Platform™, capturing the most crucial web platform features for use across any smartphone or tablet to empower production crews and creatives to remotely manage calendars, contacts, and time cards. And from there, we’ll continue to add functionality that enables mobile control of the full suite of features in the Media Operations Platform™.
As the first company in the Media Operations space to pave the way towards mobile-native workflows, our next-generation UX ensures that creative teams everywhere, whether working remotely or part of a distributed workforce, can now take their workflows on the go, wherever they are.
We’re immensely proud of giving the industry the ability to go ‘mobile’ and adapt workflows to suit any need. Of course, for us, it’s always been about the people. We acknowledge the impact of remote work and remote production as critical components of all types of content creation. We recognize that more people are
editing and operating equipment for a single production from disparate locations. Having the ability to use a mobile-native application to schedule and perform work order start times speaks to where workflows are heading now, and we’re excited to be the ones paving the way.
NAB Show 2023 – ‘New York’
This year’s IBC show was another resounding success for Xytech. We welcomed hundreds of customers and new connections and had many meaningful conversations with industry thought leaders, media, and analysts. We also gained valuable feedback from the production community – hearing directly from creatives about how we can take our tools to the next level. Enabling our users to meet viewer demand for more and better content is what drives us.
Looking forward, we’re excited for the upcoming 2023 NAB Show New York. Here, we’ll continue to showcase our role in the development of tomorrow’s production capabilities – and, of course, more demos of our latest mobile-native UX tool.
If you’re around, we’d love to meet with you! Reach out to us by filling out this form, or come chat with us at our booth, #1034.