Inside the Media Operations Hurricane
The modern M&E landscape is a hurricane of collaboration—across internal teams, contractors, partners and distributors. It’s this collaboration that not only defines how most media organizations approach content creation and distribution, but it is also largely what has contributed to the development and success of evolving technologies and artistic visions.
We call this situation a hurricane, though, because for all of the myriad benefits it provides to media businesses, it also presents challenges—organizational, managerial, and operational. After all, if a project is propelled by dozens of simultaneously moving parts, then assuring that each of those elements is consistently functional is far more stressful than if there were fewer components to keep track of.
For M&E enterprises who rely on older technology to collaborate, such as FTP-based solutions, the strain of these scenarios is constantly and exponentially magnified, and the resulting pressures often fall on IT.
Consider the following hypothetical: you’re a film studio working on the latest blockbuster. Principle photography went as well as anyone could wish, and—as you enter post-production—you’re in constant communication with a variety of post-production houses and service providers to help bring your vision to screens around the world. Over the course of this process, thousands of valuable files will have to be sent back and forth and forth and back, and with something archaic like FTP, the labor of setting up connections with each party, ensuring permissions and viewing and monitoring activity can cause bottlenecks, delays, and security risks.
Operations is at the eye of the hurricane, keeping everything moving and everyone informed–creatives, partners, customers, distributors, finance and IT – but without the proper tools, operations is often dependent on IT to set-up new partners, report on status and identify problems.
Media Shuttle is specifically designed to provide accelerated and secure file transfer via an easy to use, simple to provision, and straightforward to adopt SaaS solution. With Media Shuttle, any number of portals can be created for different teams and projects and each can have their own portal administrators, providing what we call “delegated administration.” Media Shuttle empowers operations to actually…well, keep everything operating, –whether that be through controlling user permissions, setting up notifications, reporting and monitoring on status, all from a simple but powerful browser-based administration console.
By making it easier to delegate responsibility—and by providing a solution that’s as intuitive to creatives as to tech veterans—we’ve allowed every member of a given project to accomplish the goals of their workflow, and to keep the entire machine running smoothly.
The M&E industry is an increasingly complex web of relationships among an increasingly wide variety of organizations, and as customer demands get higher, and technologies more advanced, that complexity is only likely to grow.
