HITS

Remote work may have started the pandemic as a crisis-management fix, but it has morphed into a better way of operating for the near future, and beyond. One industry that has unexpectedly seen the most change: media and entertainment, where a huge number of artists and animators are tasked with bringing content to the masses. But they rose the occasion — and delivered.
 
Now studios and production teams are looking to continue their remote approach to scale and bring in talented workers from anywhere in the world. In fact, studios like Jellyfish Pictures, known for being Europe’s first wholly virtual-studio, went so far as to expand its operating model to access talent across the world, where artists can work from home with the same experience as teammates located 6000 miles away.
 
According to a recent study “The Separation of Work and Place” by Teradici, creator of virtual workstation software, the tech and media and entertainment industries in particular plan to increase their IT investment by more than 200 percent. In addition, tech and media and entertainment companies also expect to continue having over 50 percent of their workforce continue to work from home. The study polled nearly 700 decision-makers and managers from companies based in 64 countries.
 
The media and entertainment industry not only moved quickly to adopt a new future of work approach, but it proved their artists and animators can successfully create top content right from their living room to audiences around the globe. Here’s how media giants such as Pixar, ESPN and others abruptly shifted during the pandemic.
 
CBS: Star Trek When the CBS team finished the last episode of Picard, they immediately  went into quarantine the next day. Within just a couple of days, they found and set-up PCoIP technology, allowing their team VFX artists to quickly and securely log on to their machines remotely and continue creating the next installments in the Star Trek universe.  
 
ESPN: Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance When producers working on wrapping up Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance had to shift to work from home, due to COVID-19, the editing team was only able to complete three of the 10 episodes of this docuseries. To meet an accelerated timeline and the new requirements that came from their team working remotely, they needed a way to operate and complete the project more efficiently from home.

This led their engineering team to leverage both the cloud and a virtual desktop platform that enabled the best outcomes for the range of workers and artists including the colorist, and audio teams to complete the project.
 
Fox Sports: World Series FOX Sports is no stranger to implementing the use of remote editing tools, like zero clients which were used during the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2019. This year, with all the health and safety precautions in place, they had to consider additional technical aspects of remote production. For this year’s World Series, the FOX Sports team was able to leverage technology to virtually edit the broadcast content from their homes. Having a high-performance cloud-based remote media-management system gave them the same, seamless access and experience as if they were on-site at the event. 
 
NBC: The Blacklist When the actors and production team for The Blacklist had to stay-at-home during the mandated quarantine, in just five weeks, they were able to leverage remoting technology to help create the final scenes that would complete the show’s seventh season. They did not want to disappoint fans by not airing a season finale, so they brought on a skilled team of artists that created animated scenes that would intertwine with the half live-action scenes already filmed prior to shutdown, using technology that would compress and encrypt files allowing users to access and share files and desktop applications. 
 
Pixar Animation Studios: Soul Remote teams aside, media and entertainment and broadcast companies often face rigorous industry requirements. VFX in particular struggled with privacy concerns when they were forced to start working from home during the pandemic. Pixar Animation Studios still had roughly seven weeks left in the production of their next film Soul when they shifted to working from home. To meet the industry requirements they added technology enabling new remote workflows. 

Their remote working strategy helped their artists and editors get up to 75 percent efficiency quickly.

* By David Smith, CEO, Teradici
  
David Smith is the CEO of Teradici, the creator of industry-leading PCoIP technology and Cloud Access Software. Teradici works with a number of industries including financial services, manufacturing/CAD, government, education, gaming and has been awarded an Engineering Emmy Award by the Television Academy for its work with broadcast and media & entertainment.