Meredith Wolcott The Switch Sales director
What was the biggest technology challenge you’ve had to face in your work? With many global clients located throughout this evolving live sports, social media and streaming ecosystem, there is no one-size-fits-all or cookie cutter production or distribution solution. These challenging times have only increased the broadcast and OTT industry’s appetite for more bandwidth, data/analytics, redundancy, augmentation, and dedicated support delivered in a secure and cost- effective package for both home and away events. What were the stakes for not resolving it? Producing and delivering live content is more complex than ever, challenging rights holders and media companies to adapt to the soaring demands for captivating live events, QoE and on-demand assets. In turn, they are also dealing with the mounting challenges of crewing shortages, safety protocols, security restrictions and financial pressures. What happened? How did it work out? The Switch has always been a pioneer and industry leader in remote and cloud production, having even produced and
packaged over 150 sporting events in-house over the past two years. I believe that our elite production and remote ops team brings remarkable value and knowledge to the table, empowering a collaborative and scalable approach and road map to rapidly support every client’s unique production and distribution requests. What did you learn – and what would you do differently if you had your time again? I believe that the key to our longevity, and therefore success within the remote production and live event industry, is our constancy and ability to work alongside clients – forging valued and trusted partnerships that foster collaborative dialogue within a well-grounded foundation. These uncertain times have granted us all a silver lining. We’ve been gifted with a clean slate to reimagine and refresh previous workflows and workforce norms. For that reason, how will you use your fresh start to rethink, reinvent, and create change to bridge the gap between your pre- and post-pandemic practices, emerging production and technology tools – and the voracious consumer demands of today and for the future?
Lincoln Spiteri Dalet VP of engineering, Dalet Flex
What was the biggest technology challenge you’ve had to face in your work? Figuring out how to architect and deploy media services in the cloud has certainly been a challenge. The means of doing this are now understood, and DevOps techniques are maturing nicely – the same can be said for the architecture patterns and development of best practices. Still, figuring out how to apply these things to a product in a phased approach, dealing with the distributed nature of such deployments, managing security and making the necessary changes to internal delivery practices, present a significant cognitive burden to any product delivery team. Ultimately, this is a people challenge as much as a technology challenge – one that requires a cultural shift, permeating across the whole organisation. What were the stakes for not resolving it? The media industry is moving forward with the adoption of services delivered
as SaaS – or deployed within cloud infrastructure. For vendors and customers alike, standing still is not an option. One will either run out of clients, or vendors that are willing to support legacy deployment models. For vendors, it will become harder to continue innovating at pace, and scale their business in any meaningful way. What happened? How did everything work out? Back in 2014, we started our journey of technology transformation – and have gone through several iterations as we learnt new things (sometimes the hard way!), or as tech became available. This was not a project with a start and an end per se. We adopted an agile approach, sometimes chasing value opportunistically. As with any big transformation programme, there are moments where one needs to be brave and bold with the choices made, and the challenge is to keep people on your side. To a large degree, things are working out. But the
journey continues as we learn more, and seek to exploit technological and product opportunities that come as a result of the very dynamic technology ecosystem, as well as industry flux from cloud adoption. What did you learn – and what would you do differently if you had your time again? I have learnt that people are key. It is not so much about bringing experts to the table; it is about finding individuals who can become experts and are willing to adapt and learn new things – such people probably already exist in the team. When dealing with new technologies or methods, complexity comes dressed in a cloak of simplicity. One must be aware of the limitations and implicit ignorance on certain topics, that will lead to naive solutions which work, but won’t scale. Mistakes will be made, but you should capitalise on them by adopting a supportive, no-blame culture. Finally, socialise the changes across the organisation early.
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