INTERVIEW
managed the feeds, we brought it back; it was a live to tape workflow except for just the final episode. That's what we did.
What were the main logistical challenges that LTN Global faced and how did you address them? One of the big challenges, and you see it every day on television, is that the quality isn’t great when folks are talking via zoom or skype or any other system. I mean, the latency is good and we can have a real conversation, but it's not the same. We provided a managed service, so we were constantly monitoring and troubleshooting and enabling really strong connections. We spent a lot of time making very average home Internet connections reliable enough to do a major television production. And then, of course, all of the communication and coordination that goes along with it. Because of the Covid-19, you don't 44
have big production teams of experts going in and plugging stuff in. Those are real challenges that LTN, along with our partners, were able to overcome. We produced what I think was probably the-best-of-its-kind in today's world production. American Idol was unique, because of its production and emotional quality.
To sum up, what was, in your opinion, the biggest challenge of that production? The biggest challenge was managing home Internet connections. Honestly, that was huge. The core LTN technology, at its heart, is all about managing the unreliable nature of the Internet. That's the core of what we do.
You also helped NFL Draft. Could you also explain what your role was? The NFL draft is a whole other set of workflows. American Idol was about 24 known contributors coming into a show. The other big area that we see
a lot of is “well, what if I want a virtual audience of 500 or a thousand?” “How do I bring sort of nonknown contributors to a production?” That’s a big deal. For the NFL draft, we brought in 500 fans. The monitor that was behind the commissioner was all driven by acquisition through live video cloud. These were folks sitting in front of their phones and their cameras. We provided the mechanism to bring them all in and manage them to have a conversation and then we handed it off to downstream partners. Basically, we enabled these 15 fans of a team to appear when that team is being talked about. Then the commissioner could interact with them. That experience was just one example, but there are lots of entertainment shows that we’re working with, such as MTV or others that we haven’t yet announced.
Coming back to the Covid-19, how has it affected LTN Global? Do you consider that it