U.S. Department of State maintains mission-critical video communications with Blackbird

Posted: 23/09/2020

The global pandemic has had a substantial impact on organisations as employees were advised to socially distance. Corporates, enterprises and governments adapted by turning to remote workflows to keep operations going. As a result, many large-scale CEO townhalls, corporate conferences and training seminars as well as day to day communications have moved online.

For national governments broadcast communications are important at the best of times and mission-critical in times of crisis. It’s vital to keep workflows simple to ensure speed of delivery and ease of management at the same time as delivering content at scale, for audiences of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands.

The U.S Department of State was ready. In place before Covid-19 struck, the department had switched production of its digital news from traditional on-premise editing systems to Blackbird for agile, ultra-efficient, super-fast and, crucially, remote-ready workflows.

The deployment of Blackbird was designed to raise the quality of output and drive engagement across online news outlets as well streamline internal productivity. Blackbird also ensured that for everyone’s safety the Department was able to respond with a remote video production solution without disrupting the news flow.

The U.S. Department of State’s video and production teams are using Blackbird to clip, edit and publish news broadcast seconds after live to its social channels including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, as well as delivering longer form content to its own website and other digital news outlets. It counts 200,000 YouTube subscribers, more than 2 million Facebook followers and 5.9m followers on Twitter.

Working across multiple U.S. based sites, production teams are also able to instantly access videos kept in Blackbird format from the department’s archive for the repurposing of content to maximise reach across multiple platforms.

The U.S. Department of State chose Blackbird because, simply put, it can do things that no other cloud video platform is able to do. Blackbird can deliver unparalleled speed, high quality, full interoperability and scalability with a quality of production on par with conventional broadcast.

That’s the least you should expect.