An eye to the future

AN EYE ON THE FUTURE

During IBC, Avid CEO Jeff Rosica sat down with Jenny Priestley to discuss the return to trade shows, the industry’s move to the cloud and what that means for the company, and why encouraging the next generation of talent is so important

One of the biggest announcements pre-IBC was the news that Avid would have a stand at the show after all. Back in February, the company had said it would not be exhibiting at either NAB or IBC due to the pandemic, but that decision was reversed during the summer as the impact of Covid began to wane. And it certainly paid off, with Avid’s slightly smaller-than-usual stand as busy as ever. “We decided to come back, and I’m happy that we did,” Avid president and CEO Jeff Rosica says. “I think IBC from our standpoint has been very successful. The traffic was good, the booth was busy the whole time. We’re very happy about how IBC has turned out.”

Asked if that means Avid is planning to be back at trade shows full-time in 2023, Rosica says that the company has learnt a lot during the pandemic, including that many of its customers like other forms of interaction. “We learned that our customers want other types of marketing, they want virtual events, they want face-to-face events,” he explains. “We’ve been doing more one-on-ones with customers, we built a new customer experience centre at our headquarters, so our mix has shifted. Major trade shows are going to be part of our mix going forward, but they will be different. You’ll probably see us invest a little bit less in major trade shows because we’ve invested more in other areas, but they will be part of our future.”

Back to this year’s show, and Rosica says the key theme from clients at IBC is ‘we’re getting back to normal, whatever normal is’. But, there are some key priorities for the industry as we move forward. “It’s all based on the transformation of their business,” he adds. “Obviously, business models are changing, that’s having a lot of impact on operational requirements and technology needs that they have. Everyone’s just trying to figure out how to create high-quality content and do it more efficiently. It’s not just cost, it’s also labour availability.”

Rosica continues: “There are so many things constraining the ability to create the level of content they want, so they’re looking for technology to help strategically answer some of these things that they’re doing. But it is all about efficiently creating more content, faster. Cloud is obviously a big part of that. Cloud isn’t about just lifting and shifting things from on-premises to a public cloud. It’s about innovation. It’s about changing workloads, changing the way businesses operate, transforming the way things are done. If you’re not doing that, you shouldn’t be going to the cloud.”

Avid hasn’t been backwards in moving forwards with the cloud. Rosica himself announced the “next generation” of the company’s MediaCentral platform at IBC 2017. Five years later, how does he view the role of the cloud as the industry continues adoption? “I can’t speak for every

vendor, but if you look ahead two, three years from now, I think we will be very mature and pretty sophisticated as an industry around cloud deployments, and technologies enabled by cloud are going to come forward,” he says. “We’re already making very good progress in 2022. If I look ahead at the innovation, what will be going on in 2023/24, I think we’re going to see continuous progress towards a new vision of how our industry buys and deploys technology.”

Asked where Avid fits into that new vision, Rosica states that he hopes the company “fits right into the centre! Joking aside, Avid has already made a lot of progress in the cloud,” he continues. “We’ve done a lot of work with Disney, Marvel, and Paramount. Recently we made an announcement about Amazon Studios building their studio in the cloud and as they said, Avid is the centrepiece of that strategy. I think we’re already pretty far along, and there’s other work we’re doing that we haven’t gone public on.”

Another topic close to Rosica’s heart is encouraging the next generation of the media tech industry that this is the place for them. Again, this is an area where Avid has been front and centre in terms of making its technology available to those who aren’t yet working in the industry in order to help them to gain experience in using its solutions. “We have to make the tools really accessible and available to people, and that means they can get to them inexpensively and without having to jump through hoops to be able to get access to them,” he stresses. “We need to continue to develop learning tools that help people. How I learned to use tools in the media space is not the same way people today are learning tools. They want more snackable content, they want smaller, bite-size ways of learning these tools.”

It’s equally important to raise awareness of the jobs that are available in the industry, something that TVBEurope has been doing with our online Meet the… feature. Rosica believes that as an industry, we need to make those roles more accessible and offer more training. “Not everyone can afford the most expensive higher education at a film school or journalism school. We need to do more to get those programmes into education earlier. Not everyone even goes into higher education. How do we do more for people to learn the jobs and learn the tasks so that they can be employed?” he ponders.

“I think it’s critical for our industry. If you look at the rate of commitments that the big streaming providers have for content creation in the next few years, we’re getting to a dangerous collision point where we’re not going to have enough people to get the work done,” Rosica continues. “We’ve got to get out to the next generation creators, and that means we’ve got to open our eyes and minds, making sure we’re getting to people all around the world, we’re getting to more women in this space, people of colour, people from different backgrounds. We’re going to have to go wider than we typically have. We can’t just keep hiring in London, Los Angeles, and New York.

“That talent can be anywhere in the world, and they can get jobs anywhere in the world, because people can work remotely, people can work in new ways. I think that really opens up a lot of possibilities.” n