Transcript Cindy:Welcome, everybody, to the Emotion Systems webinar on file-based audio, remote working for the new and unpredictable future.
So over the last few weeks, work practices have changed, and our customers have been asking us to work with them in new ways. And we're going to get into that. And I'm here with MC Patel.
MC Patel:
Hi everybody. Thank you for attending this webinar. It's the first one for me. So, you might find a bit of humming and ahhing, but hopefully, I'll impart some useful information.
Cindy:
So today MC, let me just tee up what we're going to talk about, and then I'm going to throw it over to you, of course.
So, we're going to look at three things today. We're going to look at; how you can deal with short term scaling and MC has got a really great story about a facility we worked with and how they conquered their lack of live content.
And secondly, we're going to look at on-prem SAS licensing. And how you can use that for processing archival material and other things as well.
And thirdly, we're going to get into cloud because got to talk about cloud, right? And how it can help product launch quickly and how you might use it.
So MC, let's get right into it and talk about short term scaling.
MC Patel:
So, basically the short term scaling, it sounds dramatic in a way. But essentially, what happened is when the lockdown started occurring in various parts of Europe, we were chatting to our customers saying, Hey guys. First of all, just to say, Are you okay? How are you coping? And so on. And we had a major playout centre in France. And they were playing up 16 channels. And they have an engine already.
And one of their issues was that clearly a lot, some of those channels were live. And they said we have no more live content at the moment. So, we are being asked to process files. And the engine that they had got from us was man enough to do the files they needed on a regular basis. But having literally got twice the amount of content or process through, they needed a solution.
And obviously, when the call came, they needed a solution like now. And so, we always have the ability to offer trial licenses; which didn't help in this instance because, the server itself that they had, was the production server, which will set up an additional workstation, wouldn't have helped them. Because they would have then had to work and man differently. So, they needed to scale up the existing engine.
They had the capacity to process three files at a time. They wanted to go to six files at a time. Now, normally, and this is all commercial and licensing stuff, and so on; we can actually do that quickly, but there was a commercial arrangement that needed to become through because they weren't sure how long they need it for and they wouldn't show anything. So, what we did basically, is we went ahead and just said, Right, we're going to double the processing speed. In the meantime, we will do a bit of arm wrestling on the commercials, and then you go and reach up your purchasing department and get the purchase order from that.
Now the drivers for this were obviously the customer had an urgent need. We, as a business, pride ourselves on being small and agile at a technical level. Generally, normally you'd get a call like this and say, I have a file that doesn't work. Or I have a requirement that I can't do with you. And we would respond. And what we did in this instance was responding to the commercial side. We got them up and running literally the day we had the conversation. They started processing the file. A few days later, the purchase order came through. And they're all happy.
Now, that really is the short term scalability now, because it's a software product. The licensing is flexible. It's not hardware dongle or anything. If I press the go button on in, all these things are possible. Clearly, the licenses are designed for perpetual use, but in this instance, we scaled up. And when they said, Right, we've done our stuff, we're back to normal again. They would under license. So it's a simple process, but really an example of saying, the flexibility exists certainly in our organization to be able to help customers.
And really Cindy, that was the scaling and the short term nature of it.
Cindy:
I like that story about the scaling. And I'm just looking through the folks on the call, and some of you are familiar with Emotion Systems. And I see some new names as well. So maybe just give us a little background about Emotion Systems MC, before we dig into the second topic.
MC Patel:
Yes. So it's interesting. Why would we be able to help if your live content goes away? And that's because we process file-based content. So anything that's preplanned, pre-processed, that requires formatting or processing, for example, loudness compliance. Prior to you putting it to air or online, we do that processing. And what we do that is different, is two bits.
The first one is, we will process the audio in a media file. We will take the audio out; we'll process it, put it back in again and give you a new file. So there is no, I've broken the file.
That's my timer.
The other thing that we do is, we provide this in automated or automatable manner. So we can have watch folders. You just drop the files in the watch folder, assign a workflow through that and process it. Or we can have a Telestream vantage connector, or we can have a MAM, or we can have all of them at once as some customers have.
So basically, it's file-based for your processing. What we offer effectively is, there's an awful lot of manual tasks. That boring, repetitive tasks that take up editorial time. Take up people's time. We offer to do that in an automated manner. So
