Sanjay Duda Planetcast COO
What was the biggest technology challenge you’ve had to face in your work? The pandemic certainly presented significant technology challenges for all global media and entertainment organisations – but importantly, it accelerated change and transformation that was already underway. Helping customers effectively shift to cloud-ready workflows and drive business efficiency has been a hugely rewarding challenge. We also had to quickly address the need to put our monitoring and operations on a hybrid cloud, enabling operators to manage most functions from the safety of their homes. One of the most difficult problems our industry faced has been a lack of access to reliable, affordable playout disaster recovery. We’re committed to solving this headache for global media companies, and that’s why we launched our free cloud playout disaster recovery services this year. The media industry is among the least protected in the world, and high-value entertainment, sports and news content is often at risk, without effective playout disaster recovery in place. Disaster recovery systems What were the stakes for not resolving it? are mission-critical, protecting commercial revenue and brand reputation, minimising downtime if a channel happens to go off-air. But it can be costly – Tier 1 broadcasters might double their playout cost with disaster recovery services, and many smaller broadcasters simply can’t afford it. What happened? How did it work out? As part of our company’s recent international expansion, we introduced a free initiation into our cloud-based disaster recovery platform for the US and European
media and entertainment market in April, launching at NAB Show 2022. The service is free-to-provision and free-to-maintain for our US and European customers, meaning member companies only need to pay for services if they are activated – providing an accessible route to content protection and avoiding potentially substantial financial losses for time spent off-air. The offering is underpinned by our advanced cloud technology, which can also be used by media companies to launch and operate pop-up channels on the fly. The launch was met with an overwhelmingly positive reaction from the industry community – we understand this is a real issue companies are faced with today, and we’re convinced we can help bring peace of mind, while enabling business growth. What did you learn – and what would you do differently if you had your time again? Disaster recovery can be make or break for international media and entertainment brands. Broadcasters need to protect their content as best they can, but the past two years have also demonstrated the need for a more flexible, cloud-based approach to media workflows, to empower greater business agility and scalability in a fast-evolving market. We are very proud that we’ve helped overcome a key challenge for our industry. So, if we were to do anything differently, perhaps we would have launched our free disaster recovery sooner! THE MEDIA INDUSTRY IS AMONG THE LEAST PROTECTED
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