What do you do when a pandemic hits? Depends. As an individual, you take precautions to steer clear of it, as a politician, you see how best to capitalize on it, and as someone invested in a business, you ensure its continuity. With coronavirus taking over the streets, industries have been forced to reconsider their moves. While most of them have taken a hit, Content seems to have done alright. I’ve been in the field for most my life, and the one saying that has always stayed true here is that the show must go on.
With more than half the world advised to not get off their couch, there isn’t much to do, but binge; binge like it’s the last day on Earth. On a good day, an average person streams 2-3 hours worth of content! With the pandemic bringing life to a halt, people have started resorting to content online. Netflix added close to 16 million subscribers in the first quarter of this year alone, while Disney+ added 22 million more in just 2 months. What does it mean? Granted everyone’s hungry for content, but is there enough content to feed them as well? What should have broadcasters and channels done to survive an ordeal like this? Forget that, what can be done now? There are a lot of unanswered questions and not a lot of noise! Read through.
Business Continuity and Resilience
To ensure business continuity is to devise a fool proofing tactic, to make sure your business is still on all four wheels in the event of any disruption. So it’s like a Plan B. As a business in the modern world, you are part of something bigger. You’re contributing to an economy that can shoot up, destabilize, or tumble into a slump because of how you function every day.
“If content is queen, then technology is the golden chariot that is carrying her treasures far and wide.” – Priyanka Chopra Jonas.
And we want the chariot on the move, rain or shine. You’re always going to need a safety net. I say, start fixing it up while you have no significant need for it. Business continuity is often mistakenly interchanged with disaster recovery, although the latter is merely a subset of the former. While everyone is busy changing passwords every four weeks and scoring more 9s to ensure high availability, I say go after accessibility and connectedness.
Surge and Delivery
If not anything else, the pandemic has been a trend setter. OTT platforms like Hotstar, Netflix and Amazon Prime have seen a significant increase in usage. In order to meet the surge-demand, telcos requested the OTT platforms to tap down their streaming quality from HD to SD. With terms like ‘Quarantine and chill’ and ‘Netflix Party’ being thrown around, delivering shows and sustaining subscriber interest has been the top priority of the industry. With our feet dipped in the waters of content supply chain management, we have partaken in that necessity and contributed to it in our way.
For newbies who are unfamiliar with how the conveyor belt is set in a media factory, it goes something like this. Ideally, anything that you see on your screen goes through ‘n’ number of processes, all of which can be categorized under ‘Pre-Production’, ‘Production’, and ‘Post-Production’. The convoluted pipeline of content delivery has all sorts of twists and turns. So, it only makes utmost sense to come up with a platform that eliminates that need for so many components and condense it all in one place.
Pre-production is what constitutes the fundamental elements of content creation; like writing, scripting, charting, scouting for locations, casting, crew and more. These are the foundations that will blow life into what follows next.
Production quite literally means the same. Stories that once arrived as mere words on a paper are brought to light here by your favourite actors, directors, producers and the million other people who contribute their best. When you last heard “Arre shooting ho rahi hai”, they meant “production ho rahi hai”. That should help!
Post-production is the one term that is often not heard of. A lot of what you see on screen is made to look the way it does in post-production. It is a cacophony of processes like editing, compositing, colour grading, rendering, audio mixing, mastering, re-editing, censoring, delivering. Often studios and production companies lack the dexterity to meet all the aforementioned processes owing to the lack of infrastructure in place.
Post-production adds the vitals to any movie or series; VFX and CGI for Marvel, Subtitles and summaries for the preservation of content on OTT platforms like Netflix, Hotstar, Amazon Prime etc, quality-checking of audio and video to ensure glitch-free viewing experience, all of these are essentials that make a Movie or show the marvel it is. Once it’s all reviewed and approved, the show is ready for broadcast on TV & to stream on an OTT platform. These are all tedious tasks that need constant back-and-forth communication in order to stay on the timeline because if a show is delayed, it costs the network big money.
Everyone in this complex workflow plays an important role and is indispensable to this process. Now, when all of this is happening in an office environment, it’s easy to communicate and connect and see where the holdup is at. But what happens when we’re quarantined at our homes? Like I had mentioned earlier, it is of utmost importance to shift a model that cuts down on human intervention and traffic and move to a more nuanced platform that allows you to continue to harness your skills and labour be it anywhere in the world. It’s time to take it online!
Distance and Drama
Being in the business for decades, I’ve overseen nearly all the ops. The critical output is that the show reaches the subscriber’s screen when it’s supposed to. But what’s a show without some drama? Backstage, they’ve got modules running for face recognition, brand recognition, metadata collection, analytics and so much more. For a lot of businesses, due to the lack of a safety net or inadequate tech, struggle has been no stranger. BTS is a whole other ball game. Traditional ways of running things, the weighty manual intervention, unclear threads of emails and poor communication has hindered their flow. This results in either delayed, postponed or cancelled episodes and the fee is hefty. COVID-19 enforced upon us a digital transformation. It gave us a nudge into rethinking our modus operandi.
Designated office space is the last thing people want to depend on. People need to be quarantining themselves, not their work. In a world where everything is rocketed to the cloud, why are we still dependent on cabins and vicinities? You know what they say, right? ‘Distance doesn’t matter’. In the words of Uday Shankar, Chairman of Star India and The Walt Disney Company India, “The landscape of India’s M&E industry has been transforming rapidly. It’s time to ride the wave of exponential progress towards digital accessibility and adoption”. This pandemic shook us all. Some of us were ready and some just weren’t. But let’s use this time to think cognitively, strategize and build ourselves a strong safety net. Prepare for the aftershock, there’s always a second wave. But this time, let’s ride it.
As I’ve quoted before, “Point is, you shouldn’t wait around for a pandemic to strike before your business needs and processes are made geographically accessible”. The M&E sector is fast-paced, no room for slack or error. There’s no pause button unless production companies themselves suspend shooting. When they say ‘It’s ShowTime’, they forget to tell you that it’s always showtime. I was in the game when ‘Netflix and Chill’ wasn’t a thing and as such, have seen the industry be hit by several disruptions. Today’s era of increased content consumption demands an efficient digital infrastructure. So, it’s high time we take our media to the cloud. With so many players, consumers, curators and shareholders, it’s a dynamic arena we’re knee-deep in. The expectations are high in this playground, whether you’re delivering the art or engineering the tech. But you know what they say, there’s no business like show business.
(The writer is co-founder of Desynova.)
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