M+E Daily

The new Klio Studio cloud-based production management solution for TV networks, production companies and studios can make remote work a lot easier and more secure also, according to Adrienne Lunson, CEO and founder of Klio Studio and a former U.S. Navy officer.

When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the entertainment industry to a halt in early 2020, it was the first-time producers and production companies could stop and consider how they do business. They soon realised that productions didn’t necessarily have to be managed in person the same way they had been for the past 70 years.

Migrating workflows to a digital cloud platform allows for a better quality of life and remote work, while also improving collaboration and securely protecting intellectual property and personal contact data. And Klio Studio can help keep track of hundreds of productions with thousands of employees across multiple continents.

Lunson developed the idea for Klio Studio while working at a network that had six shows in production, two of them outside the U.S., one in Los Angeles and the rest in other U.S. states, she recalled during the Productivity & Remote breakout session “Post Covid: Moving Production Management to the Cloud to Enable Secure Remote Work” at the July 21 inaugural, all-virtual Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) event.

That network also had 30 shows in development in just her department alone, she noted.

“The writer teams were all over the city and all over the country and just trying to keep all of that coordinated” was difficult, she said, explaining: “It doesn’t matter if your team is on the other side of the country or on the other side of the city. Traffic and everything just makes it very difficult to collaborate, either through paperwork or through just communication. So I wanted to see what we could do to create something that would help with remote work.”

Klio’s developers were also able to “inject security – cybersecurity, intellectual property security and personal identification security – into the platform in order to get the creatives to comply without impeding them in what they want to do and need to do,” she said, adding: “It’s kind of like putting vegetables into the macaroni and cheese.”

Klio, which uses the Microsoft Azure platform, is “all permissions-based,” she said, telling viewers: “You can have all of your projects on one platform [with] the Klio platform. But, to be able to access a project, you have to be added and, when you’re added, you’re given your job title” on the project.

There are “default permissions tailored to that job,” she said. For example, you might want to allow an executive producer to view everything but not edit anything. “They can look but they can’t touch,” in other words, she noted.

Scripts can be kept in one place with Klio Studio and watermarking is used, so a record is kept of whoever accesses it, she pointed out.

People working on the same project can also communicate with each other without getting access to each other’s phone numbers or email addresses.

Asked why she developed Klio Studio, Lunson said: Much of one’s time while working on a production is “eaten up – it’s a tough quality of life and L.A. traffic doesn’t help with that.”

She explained: “I was trying to find a way to improve the lives of my friends and myself to keep doing what we love but, at the same time, have a much better work-life balance.”

Although, “at the moment,” watermarks “are visible” on Klio Studio, she told viewers: “We are looking to add the forensic ones as well. It’s just the next step in the security settings that we’re putting in there.”

The Entertainment Evolution Symposium event was produced by the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), Pepperdine’s Graziadio Business School, and MESA. The event was sponsored by Whip Media, PacketFabric, 5th Kind, Qumulo, EIDR, Klio and the Trusted Partner Network.