Jane Sung, COO, Cinedeck tells TVBEurope how the company quickly developed cloud-based solutions to help customers through the pandemic, and how that is leading to massive benefits in terms of scalability and flexibility.
What impact has the pandemic and its continuing aftereffects had on the company’s approach to R&D and product development?
As was the case for a lot of businesses, we went from an in-person setup to having to be much more remote. That is particularly challenging for roles such as product development where interaction is key. The other big challenge was that we very quickly needed to adapt our solutions to enable our customers to operate in a much more cloud-based environment. Our product developers rose to the challenge and were able to quickly develop cloud-based solutions that enabled our customers to keep broadcasting. These are now some of the biggest tools in our portfolio.
What are the biggest challenges you are facing in R&D and product development/deployment in the current landscape?
Other than the obvious restrictions on in-person interaction, one of the biggest challenges we faced coming out of Covid was supply chain shortages. One of the things we have done to circumvent these supply chain issues is to stockpile key components to ensure that our production lines keep flowing. The introduction of our cloud-based ingest tools, Capture2Cloud and CD2, alongside our standard hardware tools, also helped to mitigate some of this. With cloud-based tools, there are of course no hardware/component supply issues as associated with on-site hardware.
Where do you see the most opportune areas for innovation in your area of the market, and what tech/solutions will drive that development?
The media industry is continuing that shift to cloud-based tools for every part of the workflow. What started out of necessity is very quickly leading to massive benefits in terms of scalability and flexibility. While there are lots of tools out there, we are continuing to see new innovations emerge allowing video providers to do even more in cloud-based environments.
What are you working on currently that excites you as a product team, and what can we expect to see at IBC 2023?
Ahead of IBC, we will be announcing a new solution, ConneX. ConneX is a flexible and scalable media processing platform that makes it easy to connect powerful, automated workflows with our award-winning capture, conform, and media processing technologies. It makes it easy to modify content on the fly getting you from record to delivery faster and easier without having to write code or invest in expensive software.
We have also been working on integration with Filmworkz, enabling our customers to repair and restore media as part of their workflow.
