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How WarnerMedia became the world’s largest remote video production team

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How WarnerMedia became one of the world’s largest remote video production teams.

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How Sesame created content across all mediums through Covid

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How one of the world’s most beloved brands continued to create content through Covid

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Donec nunc libero, condimentum ut posuere in, gravida at lorem. Suspendisse vel nunc nec massa suscipit porta sit amet eget erat. Sed ac laoreet quam, nec auctor tortor. Morbi risus augue, porttitor vitae sapien eget, vestibulum porta erat. In volutpat, libero non viverra laoreet, libero sem eleifend enim, id auctor elit mi fringilla libero. Duis at cursus leo. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris hendrerit dictum odio, sed imperdiet risus ultrices non. Phasellus hendrerit et magna et rutrum. Praesent nec orci ac ipsum aliquet molestie vitae sed mi. Proin libero mauris, rutrum eu velit eu, blandit egestas justo. Nulla eget justo fermentum, ullamcorper ligula dignissim, interdum mauris.

Nam sodales iaculis tristique. Quisque fringilla metus at pharetra dictum. Pellentesque venenatis ullamcorper egestas. Quisque venenatis nunc magna, at tempus ligula porttitor vitae. Nunc sit amet leo mauris. Ut suscipit lectus vel malesuada commodo. Quisque quis tempor risus.

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Fusce vestibulum ligula odio, vitae dapibus augue tempor nec. Etiam sit amet mattis quam, eu vehicula nunc. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum nibh odio, vulputate id faucibus id, consequat vel massa. Maecenas nec suscipit dui, at viverra arcu. Suspendisse mollis eros ligula. Cras tincidunt non libero et bibendum. Donec turpis eros, pulvinar a erat eget, tempus fringilla magna. Donec sed feugiat dui. Morbi nisl erat, mollis sed tincidunt ac, faucibus at dui. Vivamus auctor libero velit, ac aliquet purus fringilla eu. Donec risus nibh, commodo in tincidunt sed, dictum et tortor.


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How Sky continued to produce video through the pandemic

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How Sky, one of the largest broadcasters in Europe, kept on producing video through the pandemic

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Donec nunc libero, condimentum ut posuere in, gravida at lorem. Suspendisse vel nunc nec massa suscipit porta sit amet eget erat. Sed ac laoreet quam, nec auctor tortor. Morbi risus augue, porttitor vitae sapien eget, vestibulum porta erat. In volutpat, libero non viverra laoreet, libero sem eleifend enim, id auctor elit mi fringilla libero. Duis at cursus leo. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris hendrerit dictum odio, sed imperdiet risus ultrices non. Phasellus hendrerit et magna et rutrum. Praesent nec orci ac ipsum aliquet molestie vitae sed mi. Proin libero mauris, rutrum eu velit eu, blandit egestas justo. Nulla eget justo fermentum, ullamcorper ligula dignissim, interdum mauris.

Nam sodales iaculis tristique. Quisque fringilla metus at pharetra dictum. Pellentesque venenatis ullamcorper egestas. Quisque venenatis nunc magna, at tempus ligula porttitor vitae. Nunc sit amet leo mauris. Ut suscipit lectus vel malesuada commodo. Quisque quis tempor risus.

Suspendisse luctus imperdiet lacinia. Cras purus massa, porta eu elit eget, ullamcorper tincidunt magna. Quisque elementum a nisi ac imperdiet. Pellentesque id hendrerit leo. Pellentesque ac rhoncus mauris. In bibendum auctor quam. Aenean et arcu nibh. Aliquam erat volutpat.

Fusce vestibulum ligula odio, vitae dapibus augue tempor nec. Etiam sit amet mattis quam, eu vehicula nunc. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum nibh odio, vulputate id faucibus id, consequat vel massa. Maecenas nec suscipit dui, at viverra arcu. Suspendisse mollis eros ligula. Cras tincidunt non libero et bibendum. Donec turpis eros, pulvinar a erat eget, tempus fringilla magna. Donec sed feugiat dui. Morbi nisl erat, mollis sed tincidunt ac, faucibus at dui. Vivamus auctor libero velit, ac aliquet purus fringilla eu. Donec risus nibh, commodo in tincidunt sed, dictum et tortor.


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How Lockdown affected video workflows in Higher Education

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How Lockdown affected video production workflows in Higher Education

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas faucibus eget dui nec pellentesque. Vestibulum ut sem non augue ornare placerat. Aenean ac ligula eu augue rhoncus consectetur vel nec lectus. Praesent bibendum leo non sodales efficitur. Ut et semper augue. Suspendisse potenti. In hendrerit ligula sed urna convallis tincidunt.

Donec nunc libero, condimentum ut posuere in, gravida at lorem. Suspendisse vel nunc nec massa suscipit porta sit amet eget erat. Sed ac laoreet quam, nec auctor tortor. Morbi risus augue, porttitor vitae sapien eget, vestibulum porta erat. In volutpat, libero non viverra laoreet, libero sem eleifend enim, id auctor elit mi fringilla libero. Duis at cursus leo. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris hendrerit dictum odio, sed imperdiet risus ultrices non. Phasellus hendrerit et magna et rutrum. Praesent nec orci ac ipsum aliquet molestie vitae sed mi. Proin libero mauris, rutrum eu velit eu, blandit egestas justo. Nulla eget justo fermentum, ullamcorper ligula dignissim, interdum mauris.

Nam sodales iaculis tristique. Quisque fringilla metus at pharetra dictum. Pellentesque venenatis ullamcorper egestas. Quisque venenatis nunc magna, at tempus ligula porttitor vitae. Nunc sit amet leo mauris. Ut suscipit lectus vel malesuada commodo. Quisque quis tempor risus.

Suspendisse luctus imperdiet lacinia. Cras purus massa, porta eu elit eget, ullamcorper tincidunt magna. Quisque elementum a nisi ac imperdiet. Pellentesque id hendrerit leo. Pellentesque ac rhoncus mauris. In bibendum auctor quam. Aenean et arcu nibh. Aliquam erat volutpat.

Fusce vestibulum ligula odio, vitae dapibus augue tempor nec. Etiam sit amet mattis quam, eu vehicula nunc. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum nibh odio, vulputate id faucibus id, consequat vel massa. Maecenas nec suscipit dui, at viverra arcu. Suspendisse mollis eros ligula. Cras tincidunt non libero et bibendum. Donec turpis eros, pulvinar a erat eget, tempus fringilla magna. Donec sed feugiat dui. Morbi nisl erat, mollis sed tincidunt ac, faucibus at dui. Vivamus auctor libero velit, ac aliquet purus fringilla eu. Donec risus nibh, commodo in tincidunt sed, dictum et tortor.


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How the Bengals Kept Their Fans Engaged During Lockdown

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How the Cincinnati Bengals Kept Their Fans Engaged During Lockdown

We interviewed Seth Tanner, Director of Content for the Cincinnati Bengals to see how they managed to create content during lockdown.

Brendan Kelliher:

What is your role?

Seth Tanner:

I am the director of content. I oversee all the video production. I oversee digital and social platforms, and everything else in between.

Brendan Kelliher:

So you do video. Do you work on post production?

Seth Tanner:

I am primarily video background which is why they brought me in – it’s my forte. I have an expansive video production skillset.

Brendan Kelliher:

So, does that carry over to editing as well remotely? Or is that going to be in house? What’s your view on that?

Seth Tanner:

We are actually shopping options right now for remote workflows with AWS to see if that becomes an occurrence in the fall to where we’re staying at home again for an extended amount of time, as we’ll have different sponsorships that will need to get done. I just had my first conversation with the AWS team. We’re looking into cloud based solutions in terms of computing and also disaster recovery and storage.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

So obviously, the NFL hasn’t been playing any games right now, but what kind of content have you been producing while in lockdown and now going into phase one? I know you had mentioned sponsorships. Have there been any kind of interesting projects? How has the adjustment been? Did you have to stop creating some kind of content or did you have to fast forward into something different because of the lockdown? Tell me a little bit about that.

Seth Tanner:

Interestingly enough, my first day with the Bengals was March 16th. Everything shut down on March 14th. So I’ve worked from home starting day one with the Bengals. We started creating new content, right off the bat.

With all leagues, football is a year round sport due to the draft and schedule release. We began to focus heavily on digital and social. A lot of teams leaned into live production for live parties and such. We leaned into that a considerable amount ourselves, but our greatest successes came from listening to our audience base and producing the content that they wanted to actually consume.

We’ve gotten very analytic while being strategic in how we approached the content to be produced. We are currently working with limited resources. Our team didn’t have access to the office, which meant the office server was unobtainable. It was inaccessible. We do have a VPN to get to it, but it wasn’t an efficient solution. For a while, we were pulling individual files in a very restrained kind of way. That made things really tough, which is why we’re starting to look at cloud solutions.

We had to be very calculated in the content that we were creating because with our limited access, we needed to use the content that was available to us. We started relying a lot more heavily on the fun stuff during the pandemic. A lot of teams were leaning into coming together as a community and we noticed that type of content wasn’t performing as well for other teams as they had expected it to. We didn’t want to waste the little resources we had into doing the same thing that everyone else is right now.

Even Popeye’s Chicken has a COVID-19 response video. You know what I mean? We decided to just keep it fun. We agreed to keep it lighthearted, and we started producing fun, hype videos based off of the draft, based off of Joe Burrow, and everything else in between. We took a lighthearted approach while leaning into our digital and social platforms to make a fun distraction for people.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

How big of a team were you managing during all of this? Were they able to adapt? How did that work out?.

Seth Tanner:

I have a staff of five currently and we’re looking to expand in the future. Much of our day to day collaboration was done via video chat. The team was used to working in the office, so like many, they hadn’t had much experience with like Teams and Zoom, so it took some time for everyone to get used to that.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

I know you weren’t personally using the VPN, but were they going in through the VPN?

Seth Tanner:

Part of this transition, will be getting the server into working order for us to have the best SAN in the future. Right now it’s a tad disorganized, so whoever knew where a file was would be the one to retrieve it.

Especially, I didn’t want to go in there and like one by one pull these files that I can’t watch and not know what they are. I became very reliant on my staff to access that footage via the VPN.

Brendan Kelliher:

Do you reuse your content? Do you reimagine? Obviously you’re stuck indoors, you can’t do too much. Or are you looking for remote shoots with video cards, that type of thing? What’s your status there?

Seth Tanner:

Remote shoots? No. Even when talking to players you want to minimize their exposure. There was talk about seeing if we could get a camera operator into a players house, if we had a strong feeling we were going to pick them. Optics are so important when it comes to this business. We want to make sure that we are being socially responsible to the community and exposing players in any additional way, just is a deal breaker for us. So we haven’t looked into remote shoots or anything like that.

Many teams have started doing Zoom calls in place of their press conferences. We wanted to make sure that we’re documenting our first year with the new draft picks in the proper way. So how are we going to actually improve that? One of the solutions is robotic cameras. We’re looking at PTZ cameras that we can utilize.

Brendan Kelliher:

All right. So you’re going to reuse content where you can maybe, if they’ve got not so much Facebook, but maybe Twitter. They’re not going to be on LinkedIn, but some of your, maybe YouTube or social channels or what have you, then you can kind of ingest that information and then reuse, re-imagine it, and maybe kind of publish that the best you can until you get on those live feeds, right? Or those live shot?

Seth Tanner:

Yeah.

Brendan Kelliher:

Makes complete sense. Okay. That’s interesting. You also mentioned you have five staff. Is that five staff working with you from an editorial perspective? They go out and hunt? They’re going out and being creative? What kind of capacity are they?

Seth Tanner:

My social media coordinator is the one that’s normally the one that’s going out and finding that stuff. He’s the one that best utilizes those channels. But I also have a team reporter and she has pretty good rapport with the players. So if I want to get interviews or anything on Skype or anything like that, then she’s the one that usually hunts that stuff down. It’s typically those two that are looking to do that. I mean the other folks have different skill sets. Those two seem to know the social back channels the best.

Brendan Kelliher:

So when you are taking this information and you need to edit and put a piece together and then publish it, do you have any initiatives right now from your team or from what you want to do to get obviously the information out to the public? Do you have any deadlines that you’re coming up against? Do you have any areas that you’d like for people to understand with the rookies coming in, what camp may look like, etc?

Seth Tanner:

We’re in an interesting position because the league canceled voluntary workouts for players. Usually this time of year, we’re pretty busy with the first set of voluntary practices, but they’ve moved that to being  just a virtual Zoom chat, for all the coaches and players. Unfortunately, we don’t have that practice footage. It’s just a ton of stuff that people want to see. Joe Burrow out on the field for the first time. I like to take a conservative approach when there’s no content to be created, I don’t want to manufacture it from nothing. I want to do it based off of the stories that are available to us and the content that our fans are going to consume.

A  lot of teams have many idle hands right now working from home and it’s because their day to day job has been not as busy as what it would be if they were at their stadiums or at their practice facilities. So, for lack of a better term, useless content is getting pushed out and you’re seeing fans not react to it. They’re kind of just ignoring it and moving on.

What we’re trying to do is to take a very tactical approach in the stuff that we’re putting out. If there’s a story there, then we’ll do something with it. We recently did a hype video paying homage to Carson Palmer and Chad Ochocinco. And now we’ve got Joe Burrow throwing to Tee Higgins. So you just take the opportunities that are provided to you during this time. We won’t try to manufacture content out of nothing but instead will take the opportunities as they come to us.

Brendan Kelliher:

So I would imagine that an archive or a library of content that you can get to pretty quickly, easily, and be able to kind of get in there, kind of review it and be able to share that and maybe collaboratively edit on that, maybe a strategy that could be helpful for you guys in the future?

Seth Tanner:

Yeah, most definitely. And that’s why we’re starting to look into cloud disaster recovery, cloud media asset management. We’re trying to figure out, like I said, speculation is not the business of the NFL, but I’ve got to prepare for every likely scenario. We have to be ready to work remotely at the drop of a hat.

Brendan Kelliher:

That’s the way to do it though, you got to get ready, like you said, right? Preemptive or proactive as opposed to reactive. So you’re doing it right.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

I love the story about the hype videos and that you didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing. So I kind of wanted you to dig a little more into that of possible. What channels do you push out to? Where are you putting this content? On your website? Who’s watching it?

Seth Tanner:

It depends on the content that we’re pushing out. There are different demographics for each a channel that we utilize, but we are really trying to stand out in a field where it seems like everybody is trying to get out the same message. Part of being with the Cincinnati Bengals is we had one of the smaller channels in terms of audience size and we’re trying to grow it before we get to the summer and before we get to the fall. There’s an added value to digital and social during these times. There’s higher traffic going on. There’s higher engagement going on, and we want to make sure we’re capturing or capitalizing on that.

We just want to stand out. We want to make sure we’re not giving everybody the same content. We’re trying to capture college fans. We don’t know what the college season will look like in the fall, so we’re trying to capture those college fans that might be looking for something to do on a Saturday or Sunday. The best way to do that is by simply standing out from the rest of the teams.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

That’s a great idea. I love that. So now that you’re slowly starting to come back into the office, as you are right now, how is your workflow going to change? Is everyone going to have to get used to coming back into the office again? Do you think it’s going to slow down your production times? Speed it up? What are your feelings?

Seth Tanner:

The production time is going to speed up. I have direct access to the server now, so that’s nice, but I think we’re still doing most of our meetings over Zoom or Teams. It’s different not being able to go into somebody’s office and not having face to face conversations with them. We’re basically in here kind of working remotely still, but just being in the office is nice. The production time is sped up just because I have direct access to the server, but like I said, I don’t want to go back to the old way. I don’t want to end up back to a dribble when it comes to producing content; so, that’s why we’re planning for the future.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

What kind of content are you most looking forward to producing once this is all over?

Seth Tanner:

I just want to get player content. We want to manufacture real content. I want our fans to have player interaction. People care about, hearing from the players themselves. I’m really excited to start getting to showcase the team in person and let their voices be heard out on our channels rather than us just making something flashy that people like. I mean, you’ve got to do that stuff too, but quite honestly, we want to get back to paying attention to football.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

So one last question from me. You actually gave us some earlier, but if you have any others, tips or tricks for anyone else, who might have to be stuck at home for a little longer, if they haven’t yet went into phase one. What helped you and your team get through it? Was there anything that you tried to do that failed and you learned, well, we’re never doing that again, or anything that worked amazingly?

Seth Tanner:

It seems like there’s still a cap on live streaming in terms of how big it can get for you. We produced a live streaming show, and then we did a very much less produced version of a live show just based off of resources and timing going into that moment, and they performed basically about the same. I think a lot of people are learning about the tools that are available for live streaming. And there are some fantastic tools out there which are relatively inexpensive, including vMix.

It’s definitely a whole genre of digital, social, content creation that is highly valued, but you’ve got to be strategic during these times. You don’t want to inundate your fans with content  they don’t care about. So just be thoughtful and strategic going into that.

**Edited for readability


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How UMBC Created Content In-House During Lockdown

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How UMBC Created Content In-House During Lockdown

Gabrielle Skidmore:

Tell me a little bit about your role and what your team does.

Corey Jennings:

I’m the marketing producer for our video content. I also handle other pieces of content that aren’t standard photography or video; such as 360 photos and virtual tours. I work very closely with our Web Team to build out short animations or gif style videos for content on our websites. We also utilize some web-based services to produce simple animations based off our news stories. I manage the onboarding of those processes, while trying to produce a higher quantity of content, all with lower staff resources.

Corey Jennings:

The large majority of my role prior to the pandemic crisis was filming original pieces or interviews, and then putting them out for communications methods. We’re still doing some of that. We’ve been working with our events teams much more now to produce on campus events, while making sure the quality is all there. There’s less capability for filming, but we’re trying to utilize some more of the marketing resources that we have to better serve our internal customers.

Corey Jennings:

We’ve also been producing more marketing materials. As of now, trying to figure out what we will be doing next and what’s happening in six months, eight months, 10 months is a bit challenging; where in the past, we were able to plan ahead a little bit more. Our traditional marketing timeline starts in January – where we would produce a larger piece to be rolled out in March and then have that live for the year. Unfortunately, that isn’t happening this year. We may produce some smaller pieces in-house, which could be exciting, but in the past we’ve worked with outside people to get it done much faster, with a higher production value. Regardless, we utilize very high end equipment to ensure that our brand is the highest quality possible. However, the biggest challenge within any department is just time.

Corey Jennings:

So that’s where we are right now. We’ve transitioned away from filming and editing to just lots of editing. We do a lot more work now with given footage, and coaching individuals on how to film themselves – and then we will edit that.

Corey Jennings:

We are trying to figure out what messaging will work for both incoming and current students and staff. As a university, our brand, doesn’t just extend to the prospective students. It also is highly motivated by alumni and faculty and staff, so those messages are very important to us. It’s a little bit challenging to figure out what’s the right balance of trying to continue to communicate with them, but also, what are those communication methods and channels that they make sense for? Is it a direct email? Is it something that goes on social? Is it something that is put out a different way?

Corey Jennings:

I’d say that’s the biggest thing, and it’s really interesting because we’ve taken our marketing spend from print and have been slowly moving towards video. Within the next 12 months, we are hoping to have made a rather large shift to video.

Corey Jennings:

Our other challenges include international vs. in-person classes. We’re very much a traditional college where the majority of our classes are in-person, on-campus. Luckily, we’re within the university system of Maryland, so we have a sister college that handles the majority of online learning. In the past, the politics of our university system were such that we were the traditional college and the sister college would handle the online learning, and there was a clear separation so that everybody would be happy –  but now it’s becoming a bit more blurry.

Corey Jennings:

I’m not involved in those conversations to be clear, but it is an interesting shift that speaks to what we can we provide as a university that’s different from the other universities, and how we take our community based aspects. We pride ourselves in being inclusive, understanding and helpful, and those across all departments. We need to translate that into classes and live events without also causing computer screen fatigue.

Cory Jennings:

It’s great to e-meet people, but it’s not the same as going out to get lunch; so we’re also trying to acknowledge that by doing shorter events. An event that may have been an hour before is now half an hour. How do we add pieces in to promote that kind of coffee beforehand stuff, but also recognizing that that’s hard to do? How do we put a message out to say that it’s okay to take time off? Those pieces are really coming into the forefront right now for us.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

How do you foresee yourself going about creating this? Is there a plan set in place? You said you’re going to try a half hour versus hour events. Do you have some kind of a calendar put in place or are you still waiting to see what’s going to happen?

Corey Jennings:

We’re working off of our traditional calendar of events. Some events have been moved or changed. In-person, larger weekends, such as homecoming, unfortunately had to be cancelled, but the more university-wide events focused on students from a larger staff or the president, are still happening. For those, we will be using a more relative calendar, whether it’s the same day or something different than last year, but it’s same relative week, time of the year, those pieces. So that’s really what we’re doing.

Corey Jennings:

My role is especially focused on giving people the understanding that there’s a huge difference between a live event and a virtual event. You need to be more concise with virtual events or pre-produced videos that will try to replicate an event. It’s very important to share all of that knowledge we gain from this across the university. We have to understand that there are other people working on campus, maybe student life focused, or faculty departments, and trying to share resources and share documentation and those kinds of procedures that we’ve built up and try and make sure everybody’s on a level playing field so we don’t have to recreate the wheel every single time we create one of these events.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

I remember earlier you mentioned you’re doing a lot of editing. Do you find yourself reusing a lot of content, maybe recycling from homecoming in the seventies or something like that, just trying to keep video flowing?

Corey Jennings:

Yes and no. Our current visuals are trying to acknowledge the situation. So we’re not trying to say that this doesn’t exist because again, there’s not a timeline for this, and we probably won’t be the same as we were previously – even if we get a vaccine that cures Covid. By acknowledging that our procedures will be different, we were able to brainstorm solutions and utilize some lower quality WebEx views, cell phone cameras etc.

Corey Jennings:

A challenge for us in the marketing department to say, “Okay, well, we’ll live with this piece of content that maybe doesn’t meet our previous visual or audio standards, but we’re going to take a lot of time on the back end and try to make it as good as it can be,” right? So taking audio and video and editing it, manipulating it as we can; but also acknowledging that this is what everybody’s seeing. This is the situation everybody’s in. Not everybody’s going to have a professional camera and it’s especially not safe for us to go into everybody’s home.

Corey Jennings:

For the larger university-wide communication pieces, we are doing some light interacting with the president and other key faculty. These pieces, however only come out once a month or once every other week at max, and are very specifically filmed with just one or two people in the piece. This is a big change, as we used to use a lot of people in our shoots. We’ve also found ourselves reusing B-roll clips, that had many students in them – so the library of clips has really been helpful. Everybody reuses footage for certain pieces of marketing, but we’re trying to acknowledge that the current time that we’re in while also being able to market what a university is, which is a huge challenge, visually, to be honest.

Megan Linebarger:

You said that you already had a mission to increase the amount of video that you were all producing well before this happened, so you were already doing that, but now that we’re in this situation where we have to communicate and everybody, and especially as a university, has to communicate with the student body, with faculty more virtually and so I would assume with using more video, but also production is going down, do you think that you will actually in effect have to be producing more video than you even had originally planned to be producing given that?

Corey Jennings:

It’s interesting. The number of projects that are on my computer for a given month have certainly increased, but the production level and detail has decreased. There’s not an overwhelming amount. It’s more increasingly one off messages, for example edit a WebEx video quickly by doing this simple piece to it. Prior to Covid, we would film for 1-2 days, then would craft a story, and put our marketing angle on the clips. We have not and will not pause any marketing. We have pieces in market and we’re doing what we can, but it is unclear what the future holds for us. We know six months from now we can’t be using the same band-aid fix, so we just need to get through what we can now, and will cross that bridge soon.

Corey Jennings:

While those projects have increased, our pre-production planning pieces have decreased. This is mainly because these pieces would have been a live event. We would have went and filmed and produced a highlight reel, or worked with our event filming staff. Now the difference is we are crafting the story of the piece from the beginning now, rather than after the fact creating a story from something.

Corey Jennings:

It can be challenging because my job is both marketing and content development. Besides recruitment, we focus on alumni communications, internal communications and community pieces. Not all of our content is a “We need to get more students,” video.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

Those are definitely challenges. What would you say your biggest challenge was and what was kind of a solution that maybe led into a success story around it?

Corey Jennings:

I don’t know that I have a good answer to that. I’d say the biggest challenge is trying to understand everyone’s different directions. The way we communicate is rapidly changing. We need to benchmark ourselves against other universities and brands in a positive way. There’s been lots of backlash from certain content that brands have risked to put out – but then there’s also been lots of positive feedback. I think this is highly based on the political climate and timing of that moment. Sometimes the brands were not great, but they put out some awesome content during the right time that generated positive feedback. It’s challenging put so much time and effort into a piece and be worried about any pushback that may come out of it.

Corey Jennings:

Something that has changed for us was the way we represented our brand. It was rare that we showed people in our brand visuals, but now we want to show people keeping their six foot distance. It has been challenging to fit both our old world model of what our visuals were to show community, but also represent this COVID time and ensuring that people are staying separate and safe. And what is it safe? Safe is relative in every single case and situation.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

Did this change the way you store video or how you share it with your team? Did you have to move everything to the cloud or are you working on a VPN system? Were there any challenges associated with that?

Corey Jennings:

Not really. I’m the sole person within our department, so I don’t have a large team that works with me. I was able to take home all of my equipment so I have everything from my office in my personal home right now. I’d say that’s a positive and a negative. I took home, our network and storage, and my computer monitors, everything, because at the time, we were unsure how long this was going to last. I had to upgrade my internet connection. I can look around at my colleagues and see that they will have to pay more money to work from home, because their video quality is terrible.

Corey Jennings:

I live in an area with Comcast, which is very challenging. I have very slow upload speeds but amazing download speeds. As a video producer, I need upload so I had to upgrade to the highest speed that I could get because of that challenge.

Corey Jennings:

We use Vimeo for our online reviews tools, and we’ve been pushing people over time to use it more efficiently. It’s already been very helpful as it makes it very easy to see what changes need to be done and ask questions based on them frame of those pieces.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

Were there any unexpected surprises?

Corey Jennings:

The amount of work, especially at the beginning! I was very pleased that I brought my office home, because I would not have been able to handle the amount of work that came my way in such a short period of time. We became involved with producing all of the commencement materials, including the announcement and build up to commencement. The week of commencement, I had three other videos that needed to be worked on, all while I was working on commencement, which is not normal. Normally we’re not even involved in the run of show for that, so that was a huge shift.

Corey Jennings:

When Covid first started, our photographer had no work because there was nothing happening on campus to photograph. It made us realize that video is such a storytelling medium, and that it would be in our best interests to use video to tell our story in a new way.

Corey Jennings:

The biggest challenge is nothing’s the same

Gabrielle Skidmore:

What were your video highlights and successes?

Corey Jennings:

There’s a lot of people who more open to video now. I’m seeing more staff willing to work with video whether it be filming it or being in front of the camera. We’re finding it easier to get projects done in a faster timeline now because there’s not as many barriers to entry. We have been responding to the moment where  prior to this, we were relatively slow at getting approvals or writing scripts or getting things put together.

Corey Jennings:

There’s been a lot more freedom in the editing side because there’s not as much expectation. The lowered expectations allow for a bit more creativity for how you tell the story.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

Do you have any tips or tricks for anyone else that would be in your position or anything you’d like to share?

Corey Jennings:

Get used to the fact that cell phones are fantastic. There’s not much you can’t do on a cell phone these days – and that includes video. A lot of cell phone footage can look really great and people will still want to watch it.

Corey Jennings:

The quality coming out of an iPhone or a really great Android phone these days is amazing. And the biggest thing is just tell no one to use their computer, computers are terrible for video. We all look horrible right now. (referring to zoom video!)

 


The post How UMBC Created Content In-House During Lockdown appeared first on IPV Curator.

How Fightful Excelled in Virtual Interviews (and Came to Prefer Them!)

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How Fightful Excelled in Virtual Interviews – and Came to Prefer Them!

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Tell me about your organization and what it is that you do? How you use video?

Sean Sapp:
I’m the managing editor for fightful.com. We cover Pro Wrestling, MMA and boxing. MMA and Pro Wrestling have been two of the only live entertainment or sports that have been going on during covid. Obviously, pro wrestling is more towards the theater aspect of things, while MMA is more of a legitimate sport, but we’ve still been able to maintain and even add our coverage. We’ve had a few of our most successful months since lockdown unfolded, which is an unfortunate reality is that there are more people to ingest content in that regard. We had to pivot how we do things. Last year, I did mostly of in-person interviews filmed on video. We spent quite a bit of money getting production where we would like it. Now, we’ve switched to all Zoom and Skype interviews, and I’ve learned I get a lot more time with subjects when I get to interview them at their convenience as opposed to a convention setting ahead of a wrestling or an MMA event.

Sean Sapp:
Besides giving me more of their time, I find they open up more. It feels like more of a natural conversation with segues and transitions. The way that we pivoted has definitely changed things for the better for interviews to the point to where I’ll focus more on virtual interviews even after everything goes back to normal. We’ll still do in-person interviews but the methods in which we have discovered are more effective as far as gaining content, creating content and getting people interested.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
What have you been interviewing them on? So of course you’re not interviewing them right now after a fight. How are you coming up with ideas to create content?

Sean Sapp:
I always aim for evergreen content. Content that if I release it in six months for some reason, that it will be just as effective now. I have content from interviews that happened last November, and will be releasing those next week, but it won’t be dated, nothing that I asked was dated in that regard.

Sean Sapp:
There are some things in which we don’t necessarily have the benefit of doing that with like, if WWE contacts me and says, “We want you to interview our tag team champion, Kofi Kingston. It’s about WrestleMania.” WrestleMania is tomorrow, well, I’m going to ask him things that are interesting, but I have to get that interview out by the time they want me to, because that’s the conditions of which the interview is being conducted. So a lot of times it will be, “Hey, what are you doing during all this? How are you managing? How has it affected your schedule or routine?” Because MMA fighters and wrestlers specifically, they have routines.

Sean Sapp:
MMA fighters have routines. Pro wrestlers have insane schedules. They’re always traveling. They’re flying across the world, if not the country. Now they’re centrally located in Orlando, Florida, or Jacksonville, Florida. And they’re not traveling a lot. They’re taping a couple of days, then they’re not going back to work for a couple of weeks. And it’s a culture shock for a lot of these people that spend two days a week at their homes and now they’re spending two weeks at a time at home. It’s quite the transition for a lot of these athletes and performers.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
That definitely sounds right. So it sounds like you have a lot of stuff in your archive to dig through, is that difficult? Do you find yourself editing much of your archive? Do you have a team that helps you?

Sean Sapp:
I do have a team, but I handle most of the editing. I do a lot of the video editing. I have a producer for some video projects, but usually it’s me that does that because I know the direction and what I want the content to go for my site. So if I sense that someone is going to have something that pops up in the news and I have an interview with them in the can, I’ll schedule that accordingly.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Were there any technical challenges during this time?

Sean Sapp:
Not really. I’ve noticed the transition from Skype to Zoom. I have noticed that and I think that most people who were familiar with Zoom knew that it was going to take off during this period. And the thing that I like about it is, there’s been nobody that I’ve interviewed that has had trouble using that software. And this isn’t a plug for Zoom or anything. If they want to pay me, they’re more than happy. I’m more than happy to accept their money but everybody from active wrestlers to like 60, 65 year olds who I’m interviewing more about the business side of Pro Wrestling, it’s simple. Link, there you go.

Sean Sapp:
So that’s been the biggest transition, but it’s been a blessing in disguise because now I can record within Zoom while I’m recording on my own software and stream it to a private link. I can do that a lot of different ways. If I want to go in afterwards and edit in alternate angles because of that, I’m able to do that. And that makes it a lot easier. It’s one of those situations where I was forced to learn something new, but I’m really glad that I did because the benefits have been so positive.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Were you and your team working remotely? Do you usually work remotely? How’s that going? Is there an office you go into or…

Sean Sapp:
Well, this is my home office. I work 15 feet away from my bed, which is super nice, but we don’t always work remotely. Wrestling and MMA are traveling brands, as is boxing. So I got used to traveling to do certain interviews.

Sean Sapp:
A lot of companies went on to do virtual scrums. Now I miss traveling a little bit, but I think it’s more one of those things where I can’t have it so I want it type of thing. Like I want to travel because I haven’t been able to lately.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Do you keep all your video up in the cloud or do you have it on hardware in your home office? Or how are you going about that? How are you getting it to your team to help you edit and archive and all that?

Sean Sapp:
Most of it, I have effectively three copies of. I have one on an external hard drive. The files are also uploaded to YouTube. Our parent company has a Dropbox set up to where I can just take raw files, edited files, a little bit of everything, even behind the scenes content such as wild lines or outtakes are put up there too because we never know when we might need that. We might have interviewed a wrestler and nobody knows them right now. And then they blow up in a few years and we’ve got some outtake footage with them, people might want to see that. So we keep that on Dropbox as well. Not everything is on all three. Certain things are, but effectively, usually I have hard drive, YouTube and Dropbox.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Okay. Does that get a little difficult with all those different moving pieces?

Sean Sapp:
Yes, very. Especially considering, a lot of times with YouTube, there aren’t really good download options once you’ve uploaded something. So if I wanted to go on the back end of our YouTube channel, for example, it doesn’t really download in the best quality. You get it in an MP4 file. That makes it difficult because a lot of our video is 4K. We invested in some 4K cameras and some really good audio, and sadly, YouTube just hasn’t quite caught up there. But yeah, it is a little frustrating and there’s plenty of stuff that I have to remember. Have I uploaded it here? Have I uploaded it here? Do I have a copy of this? It can be a little overwhelming.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Do you mind me asking, who is your parent company?

Sean Sapp:
Shazzu, incorporated in Toronto.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Any video highlights or success stories during this time where something really great happened that you want to brag about?

Sean Sapp:
Of all things that took off, we posted a video of this Japanese pro wrestler eating a Reese’s cup for the first time and it blew up. It did like a 100,000 views and we’re like, “Oh, okay. Well, you just never know what’s going to hit.” Like there was one of a male wrestler and a female wrestler pretending to fight over toilet paper, that blew up. And those are just social media clips and the like, and sometimes you just never know what’s going to catch fire. I mean, that’s the benefit of viral media, is sometimes it picks up like that. But there have been some unusual things. We had a pro wrestler that was showing up at a Shania Twain concert that exploded in popularity because they had a little bit of interaction there. You just never know.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Those are great stories.

Sean Sapp:
Yeah. I’ve had a compilation of advertising segues that I did just blow up and do 40 – 50,000 that we do for funds because we think the segues are really funny and we compile that and it becomes one of the top SEO terms for that advertising product. And of course they’re thrilled with it because they get a compilation of their commercials on YouTube and it’s doing really well. So there is an element of luck, which, I mean, I’m still very new at learning a lot of those SEO strategies and implementing those.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Gotcha. That makes sense. So is advertising a main form of bringing in revenue or was it during this time or does it mainly come from when you interview the wrestlers and such?

Sean Sapp:
It really depends. So we have several different forms of revenue. We have the onsite revenue, which curiously in the past couple of days, we’ve had some issues with. There is an issue with ad sense, I don’t know if that’s across the board or just us. We have YouTube revenue, which is from the actual onsite. We have, I don’t want to say substantial, but a nice help from advertisers and that does help because all of our advertisers stuck with us

Sean Sapp:
Then we have, effectively, our premium revenue, which is a Patreon, which we are going to move onsite. That’s a significant percentage. I thought that that was going to decline because I assumed that people would have less disposable income. As it turns out, people actually weighed that, it would appear, and said, “Well, I’ve got more free time. I can handle $5 a month or so. And our subscriptions exploded over the last few months. I mean, I was shocked at how well that did. Advertising is about, gosh, I would say one third or one quarter of what we do on that. So I would say probably based on the amount that we bring in, advertising is maybe 10% if we’re talking podcast reads. If we’re talking onsite with Google and all that closer to 35, 40%.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
How do you think the industry is going to change as a whole? And how do you think, more importantly, video, creating all this stuff, do you think it’s going to keep booming? What are your thoughts? How do you think it’s going to change?

Sean Sapp:
I do think it’s going to keep booming. I do think that there are going to be people that will want to stay working remotely, whether it be convenience or concerns about their own health or their loved one’s health, whatever that may be. There are a lot of people who go and do those in-person interviews. And last November I was doing them and people didn’t want to shake hands. They wanted to do the fist bump instead, just for their own personal safety. They get a lot of people coming in contact with them every single day. So I do expect some people to say, “No, I prefer to do the remote method.” And I’m fine with that.

Sean Sapp:
Of course, you also have to wonder how the aesthetics of not having a crowd for some of these places is going to affect video content because, in our line of work, a crowd reaction is very important to how well something takes off. You can search online for Pro Wrestling and find tons of videos about the biggest pops, which means when a crowd makes an uproarious reaction to somebody coming out, or doing a move, or saying something. That is integral to that line of work, and they’ve been surviving barely based off of not having that for a few months. So I’m very interested to see how that affects things because you might not have those to the level that you did before.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Do you think they’ll be pumping crowd sounds into the stadium?

Sean Sapp:
I don’t think so. Wrestling used to do that a lot and now they’re having their own wrestlers sit ringside and react accordingly. That way, they aren’t absent of sound. Some of them use younger recruits and, that’s how they’ve avoided piping in sounds now. I think that if there was an actual crowd, it would have been more likely, but I think everybody would pick up on it now. If you transparently insult the intelligence of the audience, you run the risk of alienating them.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
My final question is any kind of tips, tricks, hints for how you got through keeping up recording video? Anything? Definitely do this, don’t do that. This works for us, this didn’t work for us, like that.

Sean Sapp:
Always reach out. I don’t know how much free time people will have moving forward, but over the last few months, people have had a lot of free time

Sean Sapp:
It’s been very, very positive in that regard. A lot of people that have opened up to me that I wouldn’t have thought would have originally. The answer will never be yes if you don’t ask the question, if you don’t ask people, if they’re willing to talk to you and all that for interviews. As far as video, be versatile, step out and do different things. We’re still learning a lot as well. We’re not where we want to be, but we’re open to trying a little bit of everything and I think that’s the important thing. Be confident with everything.


The post How Fightful Excelled in Virtual Interviews (and Came to Prefer Them!) appeared first on IPV Curator.

Copa90 talks on why cloud based solutions are vital during this time

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Gabrielle Skidmore:

Tell me about your company and how you handled the shift to working remotely?

Barry Flanigan:

COPA90 is a media business focused on football, so soccer, as you would say in the states. We’ve effectively built a network that reaches millions of fans around the world. We’re headquartered in London, but we deliver our content to a global audience. We reach about 100 million funds around the world. Pre-lockdown, we were creating probably around 2,000 to 3,000 bits of content a month. A lot of our content is video centric, so it ranges from at one end of the scale, what we would call longer form films. So anything that’s sort of 30-40 minute plus video content that tells the stories of football and fan culture.

Barry Flanigan:

We place much of that content on our own website or onto YouTube. We are also all the way through to the other end of the scale, which is short, snackable feed-based content, that goes on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and everything in between. We describe the Copa90 brand as being how football feels. What we mean by that, is that you go to traditional sports media, to find out what’s happening in the game of football itself, for example the scores, and the lineups, and the stats. But you come to COPA90 to understand how you feel about it. It’s that emotional connection with the game, that world of fan culture. It matters so much to young fans in particular, that’s where we can focus the content that we create.

Barry Flanigan:

The model is not based so much on match streaming, and actually showing football rights, although we do actually do that in places with partners. Our goal is to bring to life the whole world of football from a fan’s perspective. So the reason that’s relevant to the answer to your question is that we, through this period, although there’s been no football on by and large, although the game just returned last night actually in the UK. The English Premier League restarted last night with the first couple of games, and all behind closed doors. It is slowly starting to come back. Since our model is less based on actually showing football, there’s still a lot of fan stories and content that we’ve been able to create. Fans don’t stop being a fan of the game just because the game is not actually taking place.

Barry Flanigan:

We’ve been continuing to make content through the whole lockdown period. We’ve inevitably had to change some of the workflows and the ways that we actually worked, because we can’t send crews on production shoots, and we were not all together in the office creating content. We put in place quite a few workflows to support remote working. One of the things that’s been very crucial to that is our cloud infrastructure, which is what you at IPV focus on I believe.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

Yes.

Barry Flanigan:

In 2018, we made the decision to move a lot of our content workflows into the cloud. It was really important for us to have a much more robust way for all of our archive content, as well as the new content that we were creating to be managed because up until that point, like a lot of production and media companies, we had a pretty fragmented approach to the way that we were managing our archive assets, and it was spread across Dropbox and portable hard drives.

Barry Flanigan:

The initial move in 2018 to get into the cloud was to have a much better way of managing our archive, as we’ve been making content since 2012. We have about 200 to 300 terabytes worth of footage and owned IP, and that goes all the way back to 2012. There’s a lot of content in there that we wanted to manage more effectively, and have that available for us, as we reuse a lot of archived content in the fresh content that we make, as well as a lot of that content is evergreen. It’s less about the actual matches, and it’s more about the stories of the clubs and the players. There’s still a lot of content that still resonates, even though it was made two or three years ago.

Barry Flanigan:

That decision in 2018 put us in stronger position going into an unprecedented crisis like this, because we already had all of our footage in the cloud, tagged with metadata so we could access it easily. We could repackage and look at ways that we could use the archive content, at a time when we couldn’t shoot a lot of fresh content. The first sort of big shift I guess, is by being in the cloud and having that archive content readily available to our editors, which made it much easier for us to be able to continue to publish a lot of the archive content at a time when we couldn’t go and send people on traditional production shoots. That kept a volume of content flowing through into our channels.

Barry Flanigan:

A commercial opportunity was also from that content, because we could package and license it out to distribution partners around the world. For example, we work with Sky, one of the main broadcasters in the UK and a customer of IPV. We deliver our COPA90 channel onto their on-demand platform, Sky Q. The cloud workflows that we have are quite important to that, because we can create feeds of content that come from our media asset management system, and make sure that there’s no interruption to the content that flows out to partners like that, even though we’re not in the office. So first thing is being able to use the archive in a more effective way. That will very definitely continue beyond this crisis. That’s something that we’ve always planned to do with our cloud infrastructure.

Barry Flanigan:

The second shift is for the new content that we’re making. We’ve had to think creatively about ways to produce content remotely without having the luxury of being able to go on a shoot. Like many other businesses, we’ve been getting used to various workflows around Zoom, and other tools that enable us to create content remotely, but then have it edited centrally by our team. Some of those formats that we’ve created, have been our own editorial formats, but we’ve actually done a lot of interesting work with brand sponsors that we work with. One of our main revenue streams is working with sponsors who are heavily involved in football sponsorship, like Visa, EA, and Pepsi.

Barry Flanigan:

EA is a good example of this. We created a format with them called, “stay at home, play together”, which was using player ambassadors that we were able to shoot content with remotely. We put in place quite a lot of workflows to be able to effectively create an interview format that was hosted by Rio Ferdinand, who is a well-known ex player here in the UK. He was then hosting a FIFA tournament with other players, who were then playing each other in a challenge format. The point of that content was less about the actual game of FIFA, and it was much more of a good format that enabled us to create content with the players interacting with each other, and talking about general things about their life, that then was relevant to fans, that we could put out on the channel. That was also a commercial bit of work as well, that supports EA’s overall brand strategy.

Barry Flanigan:

The second big shift in the business has been learning to create remote content in ways that we probably haven’t had to think about before. If we were doing that format previously, we would have sent a production crew along to shoot the player, to create content on location. Obviously now, we’re trying to get used to effectively using remote tools.  Vision mixing in the cloud, for example, and bringing all that together into a format that works. I think the third element that’s been interesting for us, it’s always been core to COPA90’s model, that the content doesn’t just come from us. We’ve built out a fan network, and we call it our creator network. We encourage fans around the world to create content on our behalf, to tell their stories own on COPA90.

Barry Flanigan:

That’s been a really interesting element during a time like this, when football fans around the world are experiencing all sorts of emotions. We’ve had a flow of content that comes into the business, from the fan network around the world. Our cloud infrastructure is quite key because we can pull that content, then we can manage it within the cloud so it’s readily available and is tagged with metadata. This makes it available to our editors to then on our channels. Just hearing and seeing the type of content that comes from fans around the world and gives them a sense of what they’re feeling around the game not being on. Linked to that, we do a lot of strategy and insights work. Beyond just making content, we help brands with research around fans.

Barry Flanigan:

Given it’s been such an unprecedented time, we’ve actually been helping some of our brand partners understand how fans feel at the moment. We’ve been doing various research studies with our fan community, and we then kind of bring to life those insights and we deliver it to our brand partners. That’s been an interesting sort of ongoing piece of work that we’re doing with our fan community. The main point is even though there’s been no football on, it doesn’t mean that fans stop being fans. We’ve been thinking of particularly using a cloud infrastructure to create content, and reuse our archive in innovative ways, that enable us to still maintain a flow of output to the audience, and also involving the audience in the content that we create.

Barry Flanigan:

Hopefully, we’re not back on lockdown and there aren’t subsequent waves, but you never know how this is all going to play out, so we need to be prepared for anything. On the more technical and content operations side, we made smart decisions early on to move to the cloud, which are now paying dividends at a time like this. I think we’d be in a much more difficult position during this time if we hadn’t made those investments in cloud infrastructure 18-24 months ago. It would just make our day to day that much more difficult without having that cloud infrastructure in place. We’re very glad that we did that!

Barry Flanigan:

Looking forward, we haven’t moved fully to the cloud, so we don’t do end-to-end full editing in the cloud. We still edit remotely, and then upload the content to the cloud. So we’re not doing full editing through the whole kind of workflow. That’s definitely something that we’re interested in going forward because that would make it even more efficient to be able to effectively have our editors, who are all working from home at the moment, be able to actually edit in the cloud. At the moment, we’re still kind of pulling files down for them to edit. We use Adobe Premiere as our main final editing tool. So we are still doing that remotely, finding ways to get files to them. And then that’s being uploaded back into the cloud.

Barry Flanigan:

I’d love to take us to a place where we’re actually going that one step farther. And I know there’s many media businesses that are looking at this at the moment. Given coping with a situation where for some time it might be a case where people are working remotely, and particularly producers and editors are working remotely. So how we can continue to just streamline the process of making it as easy as possible for them to produce content.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

It sounds like you were really well set up for the whole change. Bravo. You were definitely lucky you were so well prepared.

Barry Flanigan:

In some ways we’re sort of a disruptive business. We don’t have the luxuries of some of the big broadcasters in terms of budgets and technical resources. We keep our model quite lean, but COPA90 has really sort of honed it’s model, through major tournaments, like the World Cup, and the Euros back in 2006. I think it was because of that experience of creating content rapidly during a major tournament, it meant that it was a more obvious. The content getting created by fans around the world, and it had been distributed out to lots and lots of different places,made it a more compelling business case for us to move to the cloud early.

Barry Flanigan:

Major tournament experience has ironically, put us in a good place at a time when there aren’t any major tournaments. It’s going to be some time before that’s back. Since we put the infrastructure in place then, it actually led to us being able to cope much better with this current situation.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

Were there any technical challenges, or issues trying in getting your team used to working remotely?

Barry Flanigan:

I describe us as being quite adaptable. We couldn’t have anticipated it. Again, we don’t have the luxuries of some bigger, more traditional broadcasters. But one of the things it does mean is that we move and react very quickly to things. Compared to some bigger businesses, we were able to adapt relatively quickly to the sudden new way of working. That being said, it still took us a week or so for us to get our heads wrapped around this. I think you can have the best infrastructure in the world, but there’s still no getting away from the limitations of people’s home broadband speeds at some part of the workflow chain.

Barry Flanigan:

So that was a little bit of a challenge just initially. Just working out, literally, who had good connection and who didn’t have good connection. We put a VPN in place to help out. We’re also using file transfer tools like Signiant, that just make it easier for our editors and our production staff to transfer files between the business. The first couple of weeks was a mixture of everybody being a little bit shellshocked, combined with just trying to get used to new workflows.

Barry Flanigan:

Even beyond the technology, just trying to figure out when do we need a Zoom? When do we not need a Zoom? Tools like Slack, for example, that we’ve been using for quite a while, have really come into their own in this time, because just enabling us to organize projects. Whereas previously, we may have had a meeting to organize things, using tools like Slack to keep everybody in sync. We’re trying to use Zoom and Hangout in an appropriate way. As I’m sure many people have learned, if you’re on back-to-back Zoom or Hangout calls from 9:00 in the morning, till 6:00 in the evening, it’s quite tiring.

Barry Flanigan:

There’s some things that can be done over Slack, and don’t need my team to literally be on a video conference. Much like the rest of the world, we’re still figuring it out.

Barry Flanigan:

March was about just getting the logistics set and making sure that everybody was able to work from home. We also needed to make sure that everybody was healthy and can look after families. We were settled down a little bit by April, and learning that this was the new reality.

Barry Flanigan:

Next we will start to create our output and manage this next period of phase 2 when football is back, but in a limited way, since fans still won’t be allowed in the stadium. At some point, hopefully we get to phase three, which is either later on in the year, or going into next year. Hopefully we will be through this initial piece of the crisis, and things will have started to come back to some form of normality. We’re already thinking about what we’ll do around that shift in the business as well.

Barry Flanigan:

We are liking the flexibility of remote work. It’s probably something that we will want to continue with in some form. We don’t need everybody in the office everyday. Quite often we have people out on location, with fans or at games. We’ve always worked in that way anyway, but it raises interesting questions around how much of the workflows that we’ve put in place should we actually continue with, even at a time when this crisis has passed, and we’re all able to go back to working like we did before?

Barry Flanigan:

Coming out of this, it will be interesting to see what we have learned, and what improvements we will make to our way of working. Being a business focused on football and sports, there’s a whole load of technical and creative innovation that this period is really accelerating in terms of remote cloud-based working. It will be fascinating to see the games coming back behind closed doors, without fans there. How will they recreate the fan experience when fans can’t actually be in the stadium? We’ve already seen a lot of interesting experiments and technical tests around that.

Barry Flanigan:

The fans who are in the stadium have always been the core way we look at football, but there’s also a much bigger audience for the game all around the world. The bigger clubs have global fan bases, and much of that fan base will never have the opportunity to be in the stadium. Now everybody is in that boat, where nobody can be in the stadium. How do you bring to life the atmosphere and the emotion of the game for people that are watching it remotely? I think we’ll see a lot of creative innovation around that space. The technical vendors who can support some of that thinking, are going to have an interesting place coming out of this.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

Do you have any tips and tricks for other companies that would be in this situation that maybe weren’t as prepared as you? Such as, “Hey, going forward, try this,” or, “Don’t try this?”

Barry Flanigan:

It’s probably not the most inspirational message, but I would just bang the drum for cloud-based workflows. I know just from being in the industry and my network, many of more traditional companies that were hesitant about moving activity to the cloud, and unsure of the business case. There are a lot of benefits by being in the cloud as a content company, and more importantly, I think this period shows that cloud based processes are no longer just a luxury, but a necessity.

Barry Flanigan:

And to echo the point I said earlier – people don’t stop being a fan of a sport just because the sport isn’t on, and there are many creative and innovative ways to feed that fandom. If anything, what we found is that fans crave that community at a time like this. It’s the importance of sports beyond just the game itself. I can’t remember who said it, but somebody said that, “football is really not important at a time like this, but it’s the most important of the not important things.”

Barry Flanigan:

The point that they were trying to get across was that there’s that sense of community that comes from being a fan of a sport is now more important than ever, when people need that sense of community to get them through these times that we live in. I think that’s where organizations that are involved in sport have a real role to play. It’s beyond just covering the sport. It’s how can any business involved in sport help foster that sense of community at a time like this? I think that’s a thought provoking piece for anybody involved in sports at the moment to think about, which as we progress through this and come out of this, how do we keep that sense of community going for fans around the world?

**Content edited for readability

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