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Hot on the heels of our Special Events in London to introduce elevate.io several of us attended IBC in Amsterdam. 

Atmospherically IBC 23 was noticeably more energetic and optimistic than the post Covid 2022 show. 

Cloud was still a discussion point, and it was much more through the pervasive lens of AI (or co-piloting as I heard it called many times). This is undoubtedly being looked on by most people at IBC as an enhancer not a replacement of humankind in the media workplace. Certainly, this was bringing a huge amount of interest to our partner, Microsoft’s booth. Whether it is reimagining content creation or distribution, enhancing customer experience or improving monetisation, Microsoft has a co-pilot opportunity ready and waiting.

Generative Ai is unquestionably the Genie out of the bottle but use cases are still limited.  However, watch this space, this space is only going to grow. 

Feeding into the potential of AI is of course the need for data. The future will indeed be data driven and the need and benefits of knowing everything about the customer, end user and the environments they are operating in will be key. Something the team developing elevate.io are very well aware of.

The media cartographer, Evan Shapiro shook things up when he observed shrewdly that media and mediatech companies are sleepwalking into a new user centric era, akin to dinosaurs still working on outdated business models with short term thinking. Longer term moon-shots were in shorter supply than he would like and the innovators dilemma where bigger companies were creaming off short term profits was much in evidence. 

Blackmagic’s success as the main sponsor of IBC with a larger stand than Adobe and Avid is a powerful demonstration of the continued consumerisation of audio-video technology for creators and professionals.

Our partner in IPD VIA Create, EVS, had an incredibly busy stand as well as showcasing the video editing platform developed together with Blackbird they were also introducing Extra Motion, their first foray into AI.

In conclusion it was heartening to see the industry excited and ambitious about the future and enough changemakers in the midst to drive innovation and find new ways of thinking outside the existing ecosystem.

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This has resulted in a significant rise in the use of virtual meetings and demonstrated the efficiency gains this flexible working brings as everything from conferences to commerce is re-thought. Corporates are finding they are required to spend less money on office space, infrastructure and travel.

What began as a rapid response by businesses in China has spread to global hubs, such as Silicon Valley, as a policy to discourage centralised congregations while keeping the economy going.

Two of the largest virtual workspaces and productivity software platforms in the world, Alibaba’s DingTalk and Tencent’s WeChat Work, were overwhelmed by the number of users at the beginning of last month as the extent of the problem became clear and became a key part of the solution to containment.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are just some of the major corporations that have instructed parts of their workforce to work remotely, in turn surging demand for videoconferencing and online meeting services like Zoom.

Remote working is key to reducing the risk of daily commuter transmission rates and the benefits of telecommuting, including stress reduction, increased productivity, a wider talent pool, and better work-life balance won’t subside with the epidemic.

The emergency adoption of remote work promises to speed up the transformation in the way companies operate – leading to long-term changes in workforce behaviour, according to analysts including Roberta Witty, at research and consulting firm Gartner, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

Those working in the professional video production industry have a head start, particularly those able to edit video remotely with Blackbird as easily as if they were on site with their original material.

That’s because Blackbird is the only professional video editor available in a browser. Production staff can work with Blackbird from home on Mac or PC with all the editing tools they need – even on bandwidth as low as 2 Mb/s. It’s a genuinely distributed ecosystem meaning that remote production teams can access video fast from any laptop, making it immediately available worldwide.

With the current crisis very much a developing story, many more companies in hotspot zones will likely begin considering or enforcing home working. When eventually everything does calm down, we may just find that this global disruptor has accelerated positive changes in the evolution of work.

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The need for speed is equally true when maximising the value of sports rights.

If the event is not being watched live, and especially if the result is known, it quickly loses appeal to fans. The asset’s shelf-life diminishes rapidly the further from the event itself. It’s why the value of live has always been at a premium and why the ability to let fans share in the action as near as real time as possible is vital if teams, federations and rights holders are to monetize the short window of opportunity.

The sports industry is already harnessing the power of digital and social media and there’s still plenty of room for growth. According to GlobalWebIndex, 22% of consumers say that following sports events is one of their main reasons for using social networks, climbing to 39% among live social video viewers. The challenge for sports broadcasters and sponsors now is to offer an immersive digital experience as well as a compelling reason to watch sport on TV, as they look to maximize audience reach and monetization.

Eleven Sports, for example, operates a dedicated online platform to rapidly clip, edit and publish premium sports content including the UEFA Champions League, La Liga, the NBA and Formula One seconds after live to its social channels and OTT platforms around the world.

In fact, a live stream can be edited just 6 seconds after live in Blackbird, with a curated clip posted to social platforms such as Twitter within 30 seconds.

Like an athlete wearing Nike Vaporfly, Blackbird turbo boosts editorial turnaround to give your sport the competitive edge.

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