FEED: Turning to our vendors, you get to hear about these challenges from the other side, and from multiple broadcasters. What were some of the major themes you heard from your customers in 2020?
RAOUL COSPEN: Obviously, our customers’ issues are our issues. It was definitely a terrible time for many of our customers. I remember, when it all started, talking to a customer of ours in New York and they explained to me that they went from 300 people on site to just seven in one week.They already had the infrastructure ready to support those kind of things. People who are working with cloud and those kind of technologies, they’ll switch and adapt more easily. Others struggled a lot more, because they didn’t necessarily have the infrastructure.We started to offer what we call Galaxy xCloud, which is a SaaS solution that you can consume out of the box in the cloud, with remote editing capability and connection to your network. Customers like France Télévisions started to adopt this way of working so they could get people to work from home, but as Carl just said, supplying laptops is always an issue. I think the coronavirus pandemic has radically changed the way our customers think.There is really the ‘before Covid’ and ‘after Covid’. I think Covid just accelerated what was going to happen anyway. More and more people are starting to work from home and, by nature, the newsroom is a very distributed organisation. People are often spread all over many sites. TOM DICKINSON: TSL has two main markets, the production side of the business, serving mobile trucks and live events, which went to almost zero in a matter of weeks.The pieces that kept going were where there was a major integration project still going on. At the beginning of the year, before I joinedTSL, I was in the rental business and all the business for trucks and sporting events just stopped, literally in a day.
DNF Controls, the company that TSL bought last year, focuses on the manual overrides for news and the ability to do ad insertion. Usually those are button panels; you hit a button to stop the automation system and go to ‘live breaking news’ for example. But that’s in a physical building with someone hitting that button. So the first call we got was a request for a web app and web keys so our customers could do that remotely without anyone in the building.We quickly put in web keys so you can do manual breaks, commercial insertion and stop the automation remotely from a different location. With most of our news networks distributed, we can have any station override and control anybody else’s stations playout. So that business has continued well, because we quickly had to write code to do web keys and code to do more virtualisation of our equipment. Going forward, everything we’re developing involves virtualisation and being cloud-based.We can’t assume you have a person in a room hitting a button all the time.
“ITHINK COVID JUSTACCELERATED WHATWAS GOINGTO HAPPENANYWAY”
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