32 GENIUS INTERVIEW Renard Jenkins
companies, manufacturers and vendors. I beta tested so much gear back then and was so pleased to see my feedback taken seriously. That sparked the fire for constant learning that still burns in me today. The ability to innovate and grow people are the things I enjoy most about my career. I get to do both in my new role.
FEED: How did you come to WarnerMedia and what are your responsibilities there?
RENARD JENKINS: The decision to leave my former employer and join WarnerMedia was probably one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make in my career. However, being offered this position and ultimately accepting it has turned out to be one of the most exciting adventures in my career thus far. My job entails leading the content transmission team, which is responsible for content acquisition and its associated technologies for the WarnerMedia portfolio within North America. We also support sports, entertainment and news bureaus all over the world. FEED: Can you tell us about your time on the job so far, including how you have dealt with the restrictions imposed by the pandemic? RENARD JENKINS: This has truly been an insane time to shift gears and start a new job. However, it has been extremely exciting. Due to the pandemic, my first large assignment was to figure out how to move my entire staff (two separate locations) from fully on-site and hardware dependent to fully remote and cloud- based without a degradation in service. The expectation was that it would take us about a year to accomplish this task. However, my managers and our incredible staff accomplished the task within two weeks. This was largely due to a heavily integrated interdepartmental collaborative environment that allowed us to work very closely with our engineering peers, our software development peers, our transport and compression peers, our brands and with our vendors to create an entirely new way to work in record time. We all worked together to begin designing, implementing and utilising cloud-based tools, remote functionality and various other tools and means to create a secure environment in which to mimic on-site capabilities. FEED: What are some of the big tech challenges at WarnerMedia and how are you and the team solving them?
I WOULD TAKE APART ANYTHING THAT I COULD GET MYHANDSONWHILEGROWINGUP
RENARD JENKINS: Well, I will only speak for the content transmission area in which I manage. The biggest challenge in the transmission space right now across the whole industry is legacy platforms that require manual intervention and dependency upon legacy gear and hardware. Then, of course, that leads to legacy workflows that are primarily limited by their linear design. I am looking at going beyond just a move to the cloud or a move into the IP space. I am leading the charge for us to create a content fabric. I want to create an environment where your content is available upon completion, no matter where you are in the world. I would like to move transmission beyond pushing and receiving. I want to see it grow into an interwoven content universe where metadata, content and ancillary media-based extensions are seamlessly transmitted and accessed through an agnostic orchestration level. This would allow users to discover, utilise, replace and upgrade content and apps at will with limited work stream interruptions or repercussions.
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