50 ROUND TABLE Covid-19
Singular
Andrew Heimbold, CEO
Like everyone, our first priority has been the safety of our employees. Our entire team is working from home and in compliance with their local regulations. This wasn’t much of an issue, considering we have employees working remotely around the globe already. As a cloud-native platform, for us there was no infrastructure change. Everyone can simply log in and get their work done. To support others outside of our organisation, we accelerated our launch of Singular for Nonprofits, a programme that allows non-profits or charities to use Singular completely free. During this time, it’s crucial that organisations can get information out to their audiences, and we hope that Singular can help. This programme was a follow-up to our growing Singular for Schools initiative, which allows
Vualto
Camilla Young, CEO
with virtual activities. We have a Friday quiz night, gaming tournaments, exercise challenges, gardening challenges – one team even has a weekly TV review club where they choose a show and discuss it the following week From the Vualto perspective, we have both lost and gained from this crisis and I am sure that our experience can be mirrored across the industry. As a provider of streaming services and DRM, we have experienced a 30% increase in the demand for DRM licences, predominately across AVOD and SVOD platforms. In conjunction, bandwidth usage from our broadcast clients has increased twofold due to an increase in both content (predominately news) and viewers watching for longer. We’ve seen an increase in existing DRM customers being asked about the robustness and security of their DRM solutions by major film studios – presumably because more premium film
During this unprecedented time, we have really had to learn on the job, finding out what works and what doesn’t and connecting more than ever with our clients and employees to discover their needs, as well as our own. By the time the lockdown in the UK was announced, we had our entire company working from home remotely. This included our network operations team, who now have mini monitoring stations set up in their dining rooms to provide 24/7 monitoring and support. The team transitioned well. We use Slack to communicate internally and the team created some new channels; one for the parents with ideas on how to keep your little ones entertained, a random channel for funny anecdotes and memes, and a gaming channel where colleagues can play against each other. We felt we were all missing the usual office banter and just being around people, so as a team we have really engaged
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