Being a global organization with offices as widely spread as Beijing, Dallas, Delhi, Southampton, and Tel Aviv, it’s not too often MediaKind’s sales, marketing, and product teams come together in person to meet with customers and share our vision. Trade shows and customer days are where we come to life as a company, and it’s where we deliver the best experience around our technology innovations and product updates.
Virtual customer days and live-streamed demos from our innovation suite in Southampton, UK, enabled us to continue dialogue with customers and partners over the past year. Yet, finding out-of-the-box and practical approaches to meet with them in person has remained front of mind. Since the summer, we’ve supplemented our customer engagement approach with more local and low-risk events, including sponsoring SVG Europe’s ‘Back in the Game’ event in July. Last week, I had the pleasure of welcoming several UK-based customers to central London, where we hosted an exciting day of product demos and presentations!
Sharing MediaKind’s innovation
Demos throughout the day offered technical insights on a range of subjects. One of the highlights of the day was our real-world experience of secured UHD event delivery using SMPTE 2210, which showed how all-IP 2110 UHD workflows can be implemented for live events of all sizes. Our Contribution product was demoed live, showing the delivery of high-quality, low-latency contribution links up to UHD HDR. Supporting SMPTE 2110 and the SRT transport protocol enabled both rapid and easy transition to a cloud architecture.
Our MediaKind Engage solution for flexible, end-to-end channel streaming was another popular presentation. The demo enabled content rights-holders and broadcasters to see the possibilities behind integrating dynamic live streaming events in the cloud through a broadcast-grade framework. Visitors were walked through MediaKind Engage’s content acquisition and distribution functionality, which captures and delivers the best content sources from an event and transports them to the cloud. The demo also showed how the solution facilitates cloud-based production and auto-curation workflows to maximize content value while managing every element from live to video-on-demand (VOD) and all associated metadata.
Our content monetization demo generated enormous interest! Here, we demonstrated how we enable next-generation media experiences at scale through dynamic and targeted ad-insertion. It was great to show customers the rich capabilities of PRISMA, our solution for unifying advertising and linear rights across broadcasting and IP.
Insights from the MediaKind Roadshow London Event
We all know how quickly the pandemic caused the movement towards remote production and remote working in media in general. I certainly heard that we jumped 5-7 years on through necessity; it is amazing how quickly technology has come together to solve problems. It was also interesting to hear the traditional objection of “we need to be there” has melted away. I am sure we will see some more at-event productions in 2022 but we will never get back to anything like pre-pandemic levels.
The importance of cloud is becoming a reality for broadcasters. They are now looking at moving their compression headends from on-site data centers into much more flexible cloud environments. During this transition, the clear message from our customers is that we need to continue to maintain the levels of control, flexibility, reliability, and excellent picture quality that MediaKind is known for. Some of the demonstrations we had for cloud management certainly put their minds at rest.
When it comes to building an entire ecosystem, the importance of well-integrated partners is clear to see. The integration of BCNEXXT, Tellyo, and Telestream into our Engage demo was appreciated by all attendees. It is clear to see how by combining these components, you can quickly create new live channels in the cloud for one-off events. The support from our partners at this event illustrated how ongoing collaboration builds better solutions.
Putting MediaKind customers first
Showcasing our latest and greatest innovations in a physical environment was a fantastic feeling. Being back with our customers outside of a video conference call felt like a welcome return to normality for many of the MediaKind team that attended. With industry trade shows and conferences now slowly returning to our calendars, we’re proud to have innovated with new and unique ways to share our story and maintain customer contact regardless of organized events.
Across the pond in North America, the MediaKind Roadshow continues in earnest, having already showcased the latest and greatest of the MediaKind portfolio to our customers in Atlanta, Long Island, Denver and Seattle. The MediaKind Roadshow truck is fully equipped with full demo capabilities, taking our newest innovations to our customers’ doorstep and engaging with them in an exciting, fun, and low-risk way.
We can’t wait to see the whole industry again at trade shows in Amsterdam, Vegas, Singapore, and Dubai. Until then, it’s been a pleasure coming to our customers and partners directly and maintaining that all-important facetime!
