M+E Connections

Global M+E Day: Box Steps Up to Serve Distributed Teams

At the 8th June Global Media & Entertainment Day, held at the Royal Garden Hotel in London and via the MESAverse virtual platform, Box’s Diego Dugatkin, SVP and chief product officer, and Jade McQueen, VP and managing director of retail for media and entertainment, shared insights into how Box has been keeping pace with a workplace environment that’s evolved like never before.

During the pandemic, all of a sudden “everything had to become digital. Entire productions were able to become compliant with COVID protocols … and be sure there was nothing left [being done] with paper,” McQueen said during the presentation “Transforming M&E with a New Approach to Content.” “When you’re in production, your focus is on creating content and we don’t want technology to get in the way. We also know that every IT team in this room is lean and mean, without a lot of resources. We saw a lot of people come up with ways to get everyone from hair and makeup to drivers on digital platforms like Box.*

Box Content Cloud, a secure collaboration platform covering everything from file creation and sharing, to e-signing and retention, became a go-to for productions during the pandemic, which saw more distributed teams than ever before, not to mention a complex and high-stakes security and regulatory environment.

Box started off as a storage service, then moved into collaboration, and now “services the entire media and entertainment infrastructure,” McQueen said. “Our mission has always been to be there for our clients, from inception to delivery.”

The volume of content continues to grow, keeping Box busier than ever before in its history, thanks to “companies that are new to the production space [who] have had no choice but to be digital from day one,” she added.

Dugatkin pointed to pandemic-related tech advancements that will stick around long after the pandemic is history, including e-signatures and white-boarding collaboration services. “Yes, people are on Zoom for a call, but the files they’re working with no longer need to be moved around, creating security risks,” he said. “They’re in one place, no duplication needed.”

Click here for the full presentation.

The Global Media & Entertainment Day was produced by MESA, in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and the Smart Content Council and was presented by Box with sponsorship by Signiant, Convergent Risks, Whip Media, and Xcapism Learning.