Jigsaw 24: Why technical support is heading for a perfect storm

Ian Somerville, head of support at Jigsaw24 Media

Support used to be relatively simple in the old box-shifting days. Back then, you could walk into any server room and immediately identify the products in use based purely on the hardware in the racks. Each product performed a clearly defined set of tasks and was completely supported by a single manufacturer. True, trying to picture the problem that clients were facing while talking them through fixes over the phone was an art form – quite a bit trickier than simply dialling into the system and taking remote control – but, on the whole, providing technical support was much less complicated before SaaS. Yet, while almost every other aspect of media and entertainment workflows has been completely redesigned around the SaaS model, the industry’s approach to support has not – and a perfect storm is brewing.

The integrated solutions that make up today’s technical stacks are undoubtedly an improvement on the islands of yesteryear, but they do make support more complicated. Now, when a customer calls up saying that their Media Composer isn’t playing back video, the problem could lie within Media Composer, the video card, their network or even the storage system. And, while individual manufacturers’ support contracts cover the individual components, they don’t cover the full solution. At the same time, thanks to a combination of skills shortages, budget cutbacks and the democratisation of technology, many facilities don’t have the breadth and depth of inhouse engineering expertise that they used to.

This combination of increased technical complexity and decreased internal capacity means that facilities are more reliant on the additional support that media systems integrators like Jigsaw24 Media provide than ever before. However, it’s often the first thing that gets cut from budgets because there’s a perception that it’s either unaffordable or not needed. Neither is true, but support is like insurance: no-one wants to pay for it until they need it.

In fact, the industry should be spending more on support, not less. Because more complex problems require support teams with more experience, and using the same engineering team for installations and technical support runs the risk that support calls will go unanswered in times of crisis – or that the person who did your installation won’t be available when you need them. And wouldn’t it make sense if, rather than waiting for something to break, and then scrambling to find and solve the issue, we adopted a proactive approach to actively reduce downtime? That way, dedicated support teams could regularly log in and look after your infrastructure, patching updates and preventing failures rather than fixing them.

A common industry complaint is that there isn’t enough standardisation between technologies, formats, facilities and broadcasters. When it comes to support, however, we’d argue that the opposite is true. For so long we’ve costed support as a standard percentage of the technology sale, but this model is really no longer fit for purpose. Supporting Sienna on AWS is very different to supporting it on-prem and the level of service needed by a production company with edit suites isn’t the same as what a full post-production facility requires. In an ideal world, each support contract should be subject to a full service design process and costed based on the client’s unique requirements.

We just need to look at the trainlines to see how expensive and unreliable services become when we don’t invest in looking after technical infrastructure. All we ask is that, before you cut the support line item in your next budget, you consider whether it’s a compromise you can afford to make.

 

Source Elements: Designing Remote Collaboration systems for Humans

Rebekah Wilson, CEO and co-founder, Source Elements

Once a technology becomes an inseparable part of a fundamental human characteristic such as communication, that technology is no longer a neutral tool. It starts to shape and be shaped by humans in a collaborative way. What fundamentals must we be aware of so we can optimize remote technology for those who create, monitor, review and approve time-based media?

Remote collaboration is shaped by and for us

Any collaborative act can be made remote. The only question is, what do we lose in the process? For time-based media creators, we demand collaborative systems to be aligned with the specific, exacting demands of our complex, task-specific collaboration workflows, while being reliable enough that we can trust the same technology to not interrupt our creative flow. Additionally we seek rewarding experiences that satisfy us as social human beings: experiences that bond us as we enact our performative roles together. A human-focused approach encourages more collaborators online for workflows such as remote recording for ADR, overdubbing and interviews; review and approval, for live and playback sessions; or any other real-time interaction related to the production of time-based media.

Remote workflows are fundamental

Why we started working remotely is practically a non-issue in 2023: we live in a post-pandemic world. Why the world continues to embrace working remotely even after travel restrictions can be summarized by four main reasons:

  • Accessibility: for reasons of distance, geography, disability, cost, family, lifestyle.
  • Relationship building: good feedback is crucial to a project’s success which relies on participants having open communications. Remote workflows foster stronger relationships by enabling more frequent real-time interactions between participants, a secondary effect being that of building familiarity through exposure, and therefore leading to higher trust.
  • Environmental: an hour of synchronous remote work between two participants emits about 15 grams/ 0.52 oz of CO2. For comparison, an average new car emits around 112 grams per km / 3.9 oz per mile of CO2 (European Environment Agency, 2020)
  • Creative solutions: creators who actively use remote technologies to create specific forms of media, such as song-writing, AR/VR, and multiverse are creating experiences that do not and cannot exist in traditional formats, thus forming new markets and new cultural formats.

Remote workflows are inconvenient

Time-based media creators looking to work together in real-time over the internet must overcome technical challenges such as latency, compression restrictions, acoustic and noise degradation, secure file access and storage management, tool integration, and so on—each according to their specific workflows, toolsets and corporate and government regulations. The design of any technology typically involves the tool maker identifying target markets and developing features accordingly. Thus, off-the-shelf remote collaboration software generally caters instead to universal, commercially viable workflows prioritizing speech intelligibility and echo cancellation, rather than media production workflows. Despite these obstacles, remote collaboration, even using software that only meets our minimal requirements as media creators, has become an increasingly valuable tool for creators and their stakeholders seeking to save time and costs.

For all the benefits of remote work, people will invariably choose being together over working over a distance. This suggests that the remote collaboration experience is lacking: at some point we prefer to not do things remotely rather than be forced into uncomfortable environments. Remote collaboration systems can also lose our trust by being unreliable, unresponsive, not giving us enough information when they fail, not giving us opportunities to get to know our fellow collaborators so we can build relationships.

Some of what is missing in remote collaboration is:

  • Informal interactions, such as running into people in the hallways and kitchens
  • Restricted and interrupted listening: high latency makes it difficult to have fluid conversations for long periods of time, and compression and two-dimensional displays limit our sensory input and therefore ability to trust what we are seeing.
  • Cultural references: who provides the reference in time? In a typical studio environment, we would enter and the engineer manages the session. The client on the sofa, the talent in the booth, they can have informal chats in-between the work.
  • Remote exhaustion: When we are in the same room together, we have established norms when we need to pay attention: in remote situations we are always paying attention because we don’t have normal cues to indicate when we are needing to give our attention, so we get quickly exhausted.
  • Timezones! The biggest unsolved challenge yet, that of the need to live our lives according to sleep patterns and daylight access as the earth rotates.
  • Technological risk: we do not all yet have intuitive tacit knowledge for remote systems and feel safe using it in professional settings.
  • Security: our media and systems must be transported and transferred securely so we can trust to share them.
  • Access to technology: software quality, network latency, ease of use, cost, access, training etc.

The way we work remotely is not the way we work when we are together. We’ve been trying to put square pegs through round holes, so it’s time to talk about trade-offs.

Remote workflows work when we make trade-offs

Evidently based on recent years of many, many successful remote projects, remote collaboration works suitably well even given the limitations: this is because we adapt and make things work, or we choose what not to do when being remote: we make trade-offs. Human interaction evolved to work under certain conditions: being in the same place, at the same time, with a certain agency as prescribed by cultural protocols according to the situation. Technology has given us a new kind of space, where the original rules don’t work so well and how we manage trust, truth and communication is equally dependent on the ways that technology allows us to interact. By understanding how and why those interactions are modified, interfered with and interrupted—according to the interfaces we use—allows us to not only design improved interfaces but to better cope and “stay with the trouble” (Nevejan, 2020). Clearly, given the proliferation of remote messaging and communication tools that have flooded our twenty-first century lives, it is critical to us as humans to make the effort and choose to be together in time even under nonideal conditions, versus choosing to not be together in time and work asynchronously and perhaps slower and less efficiently.

 How to succeed in remote collaboration with time-based media

A well-designed remote collaboration environment must be both suitably sophisticated to manage and aid participants so they can perform their role, yet simple enough to operate without needing extensive training—better: no training at all, where interfaces are intuitive and allow us to behave naturally. Natural behavior requires that we feel safe within the environment. We feel most safe when we can act: this means having agency within the software process. Our ability to act in any situation is characterized by our level of autonomy, reactivity, pro-activity and communicativeness within any system. We can increase agency by adding elements of intentionality, knowledge, belief, choice and obligation (Tanaka, 2006).

Designing remote collaboration systems successfully will mean that we must pay attention to re-using existing, natural interaction modes where possible rather than forcing new ones. We must consider playful, informal areas to encourage social interactions and foster relationships such as safe, unrecorded channels for communications, while making it obvious when work is happening and when it is not. More efficient technology will allow for shorter sessions: avoiding remote-fatigue. Asynchronous interactions allow those who cannot be there to participate in other ways, such as recorded playback and time-based comments. And as participants, we must seek to extend our remote relationships outside of the online environment—travel to conferences, set up meetings with our counterparts when possible, get to know each other as friends. Where human imagination is paramount, we will find ways to be social. By knowing how humans like to work—and enjoy working—we are led toward design patterns that are not only functional but transformative.

Find out more about Source Elements and remote collaboration at www.source-elements.com

eSports 2.0: revolutionising eSports through the cloud

Jonathan Smith, Solution Area Expert – Cloud, Net Insight

eSports is on a high, with numerous new global tournaments and competitions rising to engage millions of dedicated fans around the world. Immersive technologies, 4D simulation, and Building Information Modelling (BIM) marry the ‘virtual’ and the ‘physical’ to create unique and compelling experiences for growing in-person and streaming audiences.

The global eSports market is expected to reach almost $6 billion by 2030 (Straits Research 2022), growing at a CAGR of 21.9% during 2022–2030, driving exciting monetization opportunities for eSports content — from advertising, sponsorship, and rights deals to delivering hyper-personalized consumer content, real-time game stats, graphics, highlights, and pre/post-game content.

While for years gaming had a special place in gamers’ hearts and digital platforms’ bottom lines, technology innovations like cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Virtual/Augmented/Extended Reality (VR/AR/XR) have taken VR sports and gaming a step further. Today’s eSports is all about high-performing athletes moving from controlling the gaming console to being at the center of the (virtual) stage — they become the eSports.

Over the last couple of years, new eSports have been created and are going viral among fans powered by the cloud, 5G, and the latest cognitive and VR technologies. Reliable and low-latency connectivity and effective live feed management and distribution at scale are critical parameters for the new eSports to take off and thrive.

The next generation of eSports

The new generation of eSports athletes is armed with high-tech gear powered by sensors, cameras, and computer vision. eSports stadiums are typically blank venues equipped with intuitive technologies that transform them into cutting-edge competition arenas. What’s even more interesting is that opponents sit in similar venues across different countries, hundreds or thousands of miles away, yet give the illusion of being physically next to one another. In-person and virtual audiences globally are immersed in the game and are integral parts of the competition. This unique choreography of players and fans requires stringent synchronization and accuracy to work and deliver compelling viewing experiences and allow the monetization opportunities that digital platforms, advertisers, sponsors, and rights holders are eager to tap into.

How does it work in action?

Camera feeds coming from each player across every venue are sent to a centralized cloud production system and are combined with graphic overlays to create the virtual environment. This is where the right technology toolset is critical for the success of the overall project and the quality of the viewing experience eSports fans enjoy. Deterministic latency is a mission-critical capability to seamlessly merge a physical and virtual event in real time, and transport live feeds effortlessly. Any delay variance, even in the milliseconds, would severely damage the player and viewer experience. This means that the right cloud media delivery platform is necessary to enable the transport of live feeds for production.

The cloud revolution in eSports distribution

For eSports, success comes with achieving the right scale. The greater the richness across digital platforms, markets, and geographies, the bigger the audiences and growth opportunities.

Once the live feeds are produced and the virtual setting of the eSports game is created, these feeds need to be distributed to the right destinations, including mobile and desktop applications, digital platforms, and streaming channels across the world. Given that each destination has its technology as well as language requirements, it is essential for industry players to curate and customise the feeds to meet the needs of each market and digital platform. Once again, the right media tech infrastructure enables eSports companies to tailor live feeds to each destination’s requirements, adding relevant graphic overlays and language settings as well as ensuring format compatibility. This geographically distributed environment requires seamless networking – not only to allow for efficient collaboration between teams in different locations, but also to get access to a global pool of talents – a necessity now more than ever.

Harnessing the monetisation potential

While sports is a key driver of linear TV consumption, a key downside is the lack of personalisation when it comes to what viewers are consuming visually in the fabric and infrastructure of the stadiums. This is a missed opportunity for media companies, sports organizations, and advertisers to generate more advertising income and boost Return on Investment (ROI).

As a cloud-native sport, eSports can overcome this limitation by leveraging the power of cloud technology to create more revenue streams. eSports is data-driven — It is born out of and delivers powerful data analytics. This data can be utilised by the eSports industry players and advertisers to curate the virtual environment and personalise it to distribution demographics and even individual fans — monetizing content along the way. From targeted advertising, including tailored graphics and banners, to second-screen content, the opportunities to ‘speak’ to each hyper-engaged viewer and sell this real estate are limitless — thanks to the power of the cloud.

Winning the game

Cloud technology has reshaped sports by producing and transporting live feeds from physical venues to the cloud for distribution to linear and digital platforms. eSports is taking this process further. AR esports lives and breathes the cloud — it is created, distributed, and monetized in the cloud.  Regardless of their physical location, fans are taken along the journey enjoying unparalleled experiences.

eSports seamlessly combines the physical and virtual worlds to create fascinating athletic and viewing experiences. The power of super-fast, low latency, and reliable connectivity enables athletes and fans from anywhere in the world to come together and eSports to be born. Industry players have a host of new revenue opportunities at a greater scale to tap into — it’s a win-win scenario for everyone.

With cloud and AR innovation accelerating, so will the production and distribution potential of eSports, making it even more exciting and engaging for larger audiences worldwide — and more profitable for the industry.

In a time when technology doesn’t cease to amaze us, eSports promises to take us on a unique journey.

Are you ready?

Evergent: Partnering with Content Providers to Expand Streaming Boundaries

Vijay Sajja, CEO & Founder, Evergent

The most successful content providers build their systems based on foundational partnerships out of view of the end user, yet deeply considerate of their patterns and preferences. For such partnerships themselves to be successful requires the right interlocking mesh of forward-thinking requirements, adaptable tools capable of receiving and applying the requests and experienced teams driving the vision to fruition.

The further we distance ourselves from the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, the better the vantage point we have to view just how dramatically our lifestyles, habits and the world around us are forever altered.

Consider the plight of in-home video entertainment providers, thrust into the spotlight role of all-encompassing delivery systems for any form of amusement, news, art and more to occupy a restless and quite captive audience across all corners of the globe. In those early days of enforced lockdowns through our still-fresh climate of baby-step engagements with more of the outside world, these once regional and often formative content providers have for the past couple years been tasked with expanding their reach, their offerings and their foresight quickly amid a streaming landscape literally shifting under their feet – or else perish. The pandemic may have wreaked havoc on countless industries, but in the video streaming world, business was – and still is, according to PwC – booming.

The providers who successfully maneuvered this enforced scenario of long-term opportunity and short-term challenge did not do so alone. Meeting these demands in such a fast-moving market requires not just the vision to know what needs to be done, but the right-fitting technology tools to enact these requirements, scaled to anticipate and accommodate future end-user needs.

For Shahid, the first Video-On-Demand (VOD) and Subscription Video-On-Demand (SVOD) streaming platform delivering movies, live TV, original content and more to the Arab-speaking world, the subscriber base was skyrocketing – more than 10x growth in under a year of existence. And, in this evolving Over-the-Top (OTT) landscape, the response demanded had to be both fast and considerate.

Rather than try to assemble its own in-house multi-purpose platform, complete with content delivery and customer management systems, to address such unprecedented growth, Shahid, a part of the Middle East’s leading media company, MBC Group, partnered with Evergent to deliver a comprehensive suite of customer management and monetization tools that support user registration, subscription management and other critical functions.

Shahid recognized the service’s rapidly growing customer base required not just optimized back-office business functions to stay afloat with demand, but a beefed-up user experience to turn those initial engagements into long-term relationships – and thrive. In the Evergent Monetization Platform (EMP), Shahid found the right collaborative platform to streamline operations by improving usability, enabling reliability and transforming the subscriber acquisition and payment experience, upping its all-important subscriber engagement.

The Evergent team helped this leading provider of entertainment in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) develop a solution that essentially overhauled its internal platform operations. This significantly reduced time-to-market for Shahid’s product and service offerings and increased the reliability of those offerings once delivered. Evergent’s EMP seamlessly migrated more than a million active Shahid subscribers from the legacy platform. Once migrated, these subscribers enjoyed a multi-currency payment platform and various pricing models. Shahid’s exploding customer base crossed geographic boundaries, each region presenting its own unique payment preference and go-to-market strategies.

As Dominic Farrell, Shahid CTO, noted following the successful Evergent implementation, “The past 24 months have seen a period of unprecedented growth for Shahid, as we successfully pivoted our product from the region’s leading Catch-Up platform to a Premium OTT SVOD service. In order to support this growth and the rapidly evolving OTT landscape, we need a trusted partner who was able to help scale our business across complex and varied regional markets whilst supporting multiple currencies, languages and payment methods. Not only did Evergent meet this brief, but they allowed us to migrate and deploy their solution in record time with zero visible disruption to our core business.”

EMP offered a solution that enabled Shahid’s much sought-after speed and flexibility by migrating some of the service’s most critical application payloads and addressing complex use cases. By providing Shahid with a true end-to-end solution, Evergent automated workflows, payment processes and promotional strategy. As an example, Smart TV promotional support was enabled for Shahid’s SVOD ecosystem based on brands, models and TV screen sizes.

The Evergent team also delivered on Shahid’s critical requirements to incorporate flexibility and simplicity into its growth response. By working together to create parent-child hierarchies with multi-regional business units, each territory is managed as a separate business entity with unique product catalogs and segregated subscriber and revenue data. This achievement not only simplified Shahid’s revenue model, but drastically reduced billing time. Along with Evergent’s broad multi-currency payment capabilities, Shahid now has a wider reach across global locations regardless of subscriber currency.

EMP’s subscriber engagement and monetization functionality cuts a wide swath, enabling continuous support for notifications and promotions, including prepay, tiered and lifetime, and powering high-value live events for the provider’s sports content arm. The ability to deliver new and more creative offerings helped Shahid achieve higher customer acquisition rates of as much as 75% since partnering with Evergent.

And for those acquired customers, Shahid’s platform is now equipped with a complete view of the ongoing relationship. Evergent gives Shahid the ability to track each and every customer touchpoint by recording the entire customer transaction history, and promotional event data. Shahid’s market reach has also been expanded through Evergent’s efficient partner management capabilities, enabling a seamless onboarding of third-party vendors and OTT platforms including GoBx, Toshiba, Tornado, Samsung, PUBG and Hisense.

The Evergent maxim of treating each customer engagement as a partnership–“Aligned with your Business Aspirations”–bears itself out here. The Evergent team behind EMP takes a consultative approach to every implementation, interaction and request, in contrast to a more low-touch, transactional sales agreement– providing consistent support during implementation to ensure long-term customer success.

The teams at Shahid and Evergent continue to collaborate and innovate with additional growth opportunities and partnerships, such as Shahid’s recently signed deal with commerce firm Paymob , which provides additional payment method offerings to customers. For Shahid, as with all Evergent partnerships, while the initial desired outcome was achieved, the partnership remains ongoing, creative and just as fruitful.