1. Great to see some old friends once more and also made some new ones
Clearly a lot of people really are ready to meet in person again. The flight out from LHR to Berlin was like the BA flight to Vegas. Full of industry folk.
2. Sustainability was and is a big topic
Kudos to the DPP (Abdul) for really leading this charge and for highlighting that this is not a ‘nice to have’ as scoring for sustainability and carbon emissions will start to feature prominently in future RFPS. Much like regulations around data storage have been driven by the SEC it appears they also will soon want to see accurate details around emissions reported also. That means we, the vendor community, will need to share our baselines and progress also. Glad that OM started an internal project on this in 2021 and will be working with the DPP to ensure we are on track. If you want to see a broadcaster doing this well then check out the work Charles-Edouard Monier and the RTL Netherlands team are doing.
3. RFPS
No one likes them, they are old before they are answered and often written with a company or technology in mind. Some broadcasters are considering, or have, dropped them. Good!
4. Multi-Cloud
Everyone wants it but no-one can afford it. It was clear that having all eggs in one siloed basket is not desirable and many recognise that they are effectively locked in to their public cloud vendor. A very robust conversation was had!
5. RISE
Top job Carrie presenting, in the main, to a room of middle aged white men. The very encouraging thing for me is that those in the room seemed to be onboard and ready to address this very important issue. As discussed throughout the event, finding new talent for our industry is a real struggle so the work RISE are doing with the Academies and addressing gender diversity is super impressive. Keep up the great work!
6. Industry Demographics
Going to do a short video on this (yay I hear you say). The media and entertainment industry is supported not just by the hyperscale public cloud companies or well established $30m+ revenue corporations but thousands of small and medium size companies. Yet the trade shows and membership bodies tend to lean towards focusing (panels, interviews etc) on the companies with the larger revenues or funding as they tend to be able to spend more on sponsorship and Platinum memberships. It’s natural to do and not necessarily wrong but we do need to work out how best to include the SMEs without whom innovation would largely die in the M&E space.
7. Innovation
With the last point in mind the smaller companies innovate every day or they cease to exist whilst larger organisations provide their staff with ‘innovation time’. I would hang my hat on the fact that most innovation comes from the startup and scale up community in our industry and they are the ones with the least voice. Time to make it a lot easier for SMEs to access broadcast technology teams please.
Overall a super event to be at and fabulous to engage with the broadcasters who did manage to hang around for the networking and the industry day! Well done Mark, Rowan, Anh, Adbul and the whole DPP crew.
Diolch,
Nick
About Object Matrix
Object Matrix is the award-winning software company that pioneered object storage and the modernisation of media archives. It exists to enable global collaboration, increase operational efficiencies and empower creativity through deployment of MatrixStore, the on-prem, hybrid and cloud storage platform. Their unified deployment approach ensures content spans on-prem and cloud storage whilst their focus on the media industry gives them a deep understanding of the challenges organisations face when protecting, processing and sharing video content. Customers include: NBC Universal, TV Globo, Warner Bros. Discovery, MSG, ATP and the BBC, to name but a few!
