So, you think the game you are working on just needs the right publisher to help you take over the gaming world. But how do you go about creating a pitch deck for your game which will be effective and help find the right publisher for you?

A pitch deck is only one piece of the puzzle, but it’s a key part, not only to have something to present or send to publishers, but also as a process to help sanity check the why, what and how for your game, and in particular identify any gaps in your planning.

At Fundamentally Games, we review a significant number of pitches every month. Previous to Fundamentally Games, I was a developer (and had to create pitch decks myself) and then worked as a consultant helping developers to raise money and helping investors to find and assess potential games.

When we review pitch decks, we see many developers facing the same challenges, so we decided to create a publisher pitch deck template to help address some of these, especially when pitching a living game. We’re not the first to create such templates, there are some great examples online from other publishers and individuals, and while ours is focused on living games and therefore has a specific angle, the advice is relevant to all games.

I do note however that raising equity investment into a company is fundamentally different to raising money for a game, and as such the pitch deck needs to be completely different.

Before we dive into the details, let’s look at the key topics you should be looking to cover:

• What is your game and why is it for?
• What do you want and where are you now?
• Why should the reader trust that you can make this game successful?

Additionally, you should be thinking about taking the reader on a journey; don’t just think about content, think about flow as well.

The following are the key sections that we recommend you cover in a publisher pitch deck.

1. Title page (obviously!)

The title page should be simple, with your game name and studio name, but importantly, it needs to catch my eye. What visuals would you use on your marketing materials? Think about how to get me excited to read more through the images you share — and apply that throughout the deck, not just on this page.

2. Introduction (or executive summary)

I have seen a lot of debate around whether to include a summary slide at the start of your deck. My view is that it’s really important, because I want to know the basics before I dive into the detail. This is useful for two reasons — firstly, it helps me to understand the context of what I’m reading, and secondly, it helps me, as a publisher, check that the game actually fits our criteria.

Assuming you agree you should have an introduction, then this slide should have short bullet points of the basics… but really keep it short and easy to digest. Think about the key selling points as well as the key practical points that a publisher will need to know.

3. Show me the game

Now for the fun bit — this is where you tell the reader about the game itself. You need to explain your game clearly and make your reader care about it. The way we like to think about this is:

1. Immediate: help the reader understand your game in seconds, show what is special about your game and convince the reader that players will want to download your game.
2. Relevant: explain why players will keep playing your game, what is the progression? Explain how players will be onboarded and how they will master the game. Don’t just tell me what your key features are; tell me why those key features matter.
3. Gorgeous: this doesn’t mean AAA quality, but it does mean that theme and art style will appeal to your audience and meet expectations.

4. Why should this game exist now?

Everyone has a reason behind why they are making their game, however a common challenge we see is an assumption that there is a market, and audience need, for the game.

Firstly, consider your market. Your market isn’t the whole games market, it’s a specific segment. What are the trends in this market, where is there a gap? Are you sure it’s a genuine gap and not just something that you want to play? Who are your competitors, what are your biggest challenges entering this market considering the other games that are already there? What are the market norms — what expectations are there for games in this market?

Then consider your audience. Who are they? ‘Male 18-35’ is not an audience — an audience is one or more groups of people, defined to sufficient granular detail that you know where you can reach them and what messaging they will respond to.

Games will often have more than one audience group, we tend to think about this in terms of primary, secondary and tertiary audiences, all of whom will play your game for different reasons and in different ways. Personas are a common way of identifying each audience group, as is looking at other games that they are currently playing.

Finally, and most importantly, tie your market and audience assumptions back to your game design. How does your game meet a genuine market gap and audience need? What is it about your game that will appeal? How does your game’s lifestyle fit and mode of use match how, where and when your target audience play games?

5. The team

The team is always critical to any project, but every team presents a different risk. Your job throughout the deck is to demonstrate how you are reducing risk as much as possible, and to present an opportunity where the risk and potential reward is reasonably balanced. The team plays a key part in that — if you’re experienced, and you’ve had successful games before, that’s going to reduce risk more than if you’re a new team of graduates.

Whatever your team’s background, you need to explain their key skills and experience, and make sure that: your team + planned hires + help that you’re asking for in the deck = covering all the bases needed to make this game commercially successful.

It’s ok to not have all the skills in house, or to lack experience, but whatever you are missing, you need to show that you recognise it, and that you have a plan to address it.

6. Data, data, data

As the team can reduce risk, so can proving that there is actually an audience for your game. Think of a game design as a hypothesis, and data as proving (or disproving) that hypothesis. Without data, you’re asking someone to invest time (and maybe money) on a hypothesis. If your team has a track record of successful hypothesis (previous successful games), then you may get away with needing less data, but nothing will ever replace actual real players confirming that they will play — and spend money on — your game.

Firstly, consider what success looks like and how you will measure against it, and how you will use market norms as a line in the sand. Consider the types of data you will gather; this will depend on various factors including the type of game — a free-to-play mobile title will gather different data to a narrative indie PC game.

Secondly, tell me what (if any) data you’ve gathered to date. If you haven’t gathered any, why not?

Thirdly, tell me how you’re going to gather data going forward, what types of testing you will do, and how your production plan is designed to support this, i.e. how will your process allow you to act on your findings?

7. Community & marketing

Some games will have the intention of leaving this completely to a publisher, and for some games that’s fine (but if that’s the case, make sure that’s clear). However, most games need to build community, and in many cases the game benefits from the developer being at least involved in that process, if not running it.

So, assuming that you are planning on having at least some involvement in this area, then you should explain your plans. How will you engage and build a community, and how will you use that to improve your game? Why will anyone care about your game, what will your marketing strategy be? How will you build a rhythm of activity towards and post launch? If user acquisition is relevant to your game, how will you measure and test its effectiveness, what will your KPIs be?

8. Production

This is where you explain your budget, timeline, process and milestones. This information is usually best presented visually, I don’t need the full details, just they key aspects.

What budget have you spent to date and how much more do you need to spend to get to launch? How much do you need to get to the point where the game is revenue sustaining? What still needs to be built and what is your timeline? What are your key milestones, and what are the key risks or unknowns that could vary your plan?

You want to ensure the reader is left feeling like your plan is realistic based on the game, the team and the market norms.

9. What do you need?

Finally, this is where you tell the reader what you’re asking for.

You may be asking for money to fund production. If so, then clearly explain how much you need, what you’re going to spend it on and when you need it by, and make sure it ties back to your production plan.

It’s likely you will also need other support, so list those things too. You may want marketing support, but you may also need help, advice or support in other areas.

Additionally, consider who you’re pitching to. Every publisher is different, there is no point asking for an amount of money or a specific type of support that is different to what the specific publisher can provide. Tailor your pitch as needed to the publisher you’re pitching to.

Finally, make sure that what you’re asking for is realistic, that it will give you everything you need to make this game a success — asking for too little is just as bad as asking for too much.

There is no right or wrong way to post produce a project: there is no right or wrong software package for each part of the process. How you choose to complete the work is down to a number of factors, not least individual preferences.

Except that for most organizations, they are locked into a specific toolset because that is the only way they can move projects around and work collaboratively. Everyone using the same suite of software applications may limit the operators, but it means projects can be (reasonably) seamlessly exchanged.

At EditShare we wanted to take a fresh approach to this. Our users told us that it would be great to have more flexibility. This is why we created Universal Projects, which allows you to move between platforms as easily as possible.

The idea is that you can start a project in any tool – including EditShare FLOW to set up bins and even rough cuts – and work in any other.

In the real world it may be unlikely that a single project will be worked on by multiple editors each using different NLEs, so you might ask why we have devoted our development efforts to this. But there are real-world use cases.

Imagine, for instance, working on an episodic series at an Avid post house. During the edit, the production company or broadcaster needs to start on the marketing campaign, and the in-house trailer editor prefers Premiere Pro. Having to go back to the raw footage and start the search for clips from scratch is clearly not an economic option. Being able to look into the programme edit, browse bins for each episode, and with key moments tagged by the producer, saves days of effort and leads to a much better result. When the pressure is always on to deliver things faster, this is a big benefit.

The idea of being able to share projects between platforms is sound. What does it mean in practice? Inevitably, there are differences between platforms.

FLOW is the EditShare media management platform. In 2021 we introduced FLOW Panels – plug-ins – for Adobe® Premiere® Pro and for DaVinci Resolve, which were very well received. The Panels provide a means of accessing FLOW media management from within the familiar editor user interface.

More importantly, it is a simple means to swap bin structures, content, and all the metadata around the edit. Where it can, this is all maintained completely automatically. So you can create a project structure in advance in FLOW and have it pop up ready when you log in to your editor. If you add bins or sub-divide timelines or make any other structural changes, these are immediately reflected back into FLOW, and are available to any other user who logs in.

Avid Media Composer takes a slightly different approach and lacks the simple hooks for tight, cross-platform integration. But it would not be a very valuable cross-platform integration if it did not include Avid. So we have now brought Media Composer under the Universal Projects umbrella.

We think we are pioneering the universal projects concept. We are certainly the first to be able to integrate Avid technology and workflows into cross-platform collaborations.

Our implementation respects Media Composer’s way of working, like locking bins when a user has logged into a project. To allow it to be always available to other collaborative users, we implemented a routine that automatically generates a copy of the structure which is then reconciled again when the original user logs out or publishes.

This works in conjunction with the Avid Attic, so projects are backed up both here and in FLOW, ensuring each user can always access the history of a project as well as the latest version.

In effect, EditShare FLOW appears as another user in the Media Composer environment. It becomes a very powerful edit assistant, either manually through other portals into FLOW or automatically.

The original Universal Projects links are already available; the complete system including Media Composer integration is currently in advanced beta trials with a number of organizations from boutique post houses to major national broadcasters.

Whatever the application, it gives you an overview of every project and a means of planning and optimizing workflows. As a side benefit, it also helps engineers plan for future expansion, showing where the bottlenecks are in projects, and facilitating data-lead decisions about where to optimize workflows.

Ultimately, it is part of the new metadata revolution, whereby a strong, common, resilient set of information is used to drive complex workflows and automated processes from the camera to the screen.

Want to find out more? See it in action at IBC, book a meeting or a demo here, or request a follow-up

We are very excited to be bringing back the MediaSilo brand, and the product previously known as Shift will be known as MediaSilo moving forward. Having the company AND product named Shift has led to some confusion and questions in the market. Changing the Shift product brand to MediaSilo allows us to better communicate who we are, streamline our product offerings, and tap into the trust and respect the MediaSilo name has represented for years.

 

 

The only immediate changes in the product are the logo and name. We’ll continue improving the interface and user experience, but you won’t be met with a completely new experience the next time you log-in.

Click here to learn more about this rebrand, access FAQs, and download our new logo suite.

In the media industry right now, a lot of people are publishing opinions on the cloud. But they tend to focus on the features of the cloud, not the benefits.

We are all very aware of the features offered by outsourcing storage and processing. It is scalable, so you can turn things on and off, giving you the agility to try new things. But what are the things you might want to turn on and off? What, in short, are the benefits.

Take the case of a post house. You have a building, a fixed amount of space for which you pay rent. In that you build some facilities – edit suites, grading rooms, audio mixing and so on – and equip it with the necessary hardware and network connectivity. That is the limit of what you can offer, short of taking on more space, paying more rent, and buying more hardware.

If you are in a market, like London or New York, which expects city-centre facilities, it may not even be possible to expand. It will certainly be very expensive. 

Today, if a regular and important client comes in with a large and interesting project, they may well say they want to edit from their location. Or the set. Or from the editor’s home. Blocking out an edit suite for the project, knowing that the room will be empty and the editor working over Teradici – looks like a poor use of your expensive real estate and resources. The client will certainly want to negotiate a discounted rate, but all you are saving is the runner’s time making cappuccinos. Rent, business rates, power and all the other overheads will still be there.

You could, of course, say that they can be in the building or they can be on the other side of the world: the rate for the edit suite is always the same. The client would then most likely shop around and either find someone else to do it for them, or potentially put something together on Amazon Web Services (AWS) themselves. Either way, you’ve lost this project, and perhaps the client,  forever.

Or maybe you are a broadcaster, and your commercial team win the rights to a high profile sporting event. Suddenly you are asked to add a huge amount of editorial capacity, for a short time. Taking the conventional approach of building the extra edit suites – buying hardware and converting office space to creative rooms, even renting OB trucks – is not commercially viable if it is all going to be redundant the day after the event finishes.

Perhaps you want to experiment with augmented reality in one of your studios, because someone wants to try it on a pilot production which may turn out to be a one-off or may become a series. To support it, you need to add a lot of processing and storage for design and rendering, in order to create the virtual elements and give the show the wow factor.

These are the sort of opportunities for which the cloud can deliver real benefits. This is why we talk about scalability in the cloud, about being agile enough to add facilities and functionality quickly when you need it, without heavy capital investment which may never be amortised.

But the cloud is a great leveller. If we agree that you can do all these things in the cloud, then any disruptor could come in and win these sort of contracts from a blank sheet of paper.

The reason that the cloud opens up these opportunities for established businesses is that you already have proven strengths. The cloud just gives you the added capacity. To take advantage of it, you must move your existing business to be cloud-ready.

Importantly, you are not abandoning anything you already have today. Your capital investments, your business reputation, your physical location and working environments: they all stay exactly as they are, carrying on winning you business.

Now is the time to start building some experience in the cloud, no matter how small, so that you have the wheels greased, you have the systems in place so you are ready to go when the call comes. People across your business need to become comfortable with the cloud, allowing you  to  confidently guide clients who want to take advantage of your remote capabilities, or your pop-up extended functionality.

The reason that we call our cloud video storage and asset management platform FLEX is that it is built, from the ground up, to be completely flexible for both on the ground and in the cloud. That includes the ability to scale up and down, in compute as well as storage, without any changes to the user interface or working environment.

Making a small investment to start your experiments with FLEX in the cloud will help you realise just how simple it is to operate, how to add capacity as you need it, where it shines, and what changes you made need to adapt your workflows.

Armed with that knowledge and understanding, you now have a big advantage in the marketplace, because you’re ready to  ramp up capabilities on demand. Your cloud experience becomes a demonstrable asset when pitching. You can punch well above your weight, simply because you can turn on the capacity you need at any time.

That is the real benefit of the cloud: it allows you to step up to any business opportunity and deliver creative quality, whatever the requirement and wherever the location.

Choosing the right type of post production storage for media production and post production is critical for enabling creative teams to collaborate effectively and deliver work on time. The needs of media workflows are quite different from other applications and also from traditional IT-oriented considerations. Instead of focusing on the number of operations (IOPS) available from the storage layer, the critical metric for working with high resolution video is throughput: how many (typically) large media files can be read from (and written to) shared storage simultaneously by multiple editors and other users of the system.  

The simplest form of storage used in media production is DAS: direct attached storage. That is, a disk drive (or maybe a RAID array of disk drives) attached directly to a workstation, typically via USB or Thunderbolt or other external protocols such as SAS. It is fast and, by definition, there can be no contention because only one person can use it at a time. If more than one person needs access to the media on the drive, they will have to unplug it from one workstation and plug it into another. The alternative is for each person to have their own DAS, which quickly adds up in terms of raw drive costs and means a lot of copying files around, with the inevitable challenges of managing versions and keeping changes in sync.

To avoid all these limitations we need to move to an architecture which provides shared storage.

One flavor of shared storage is SAN (Storage Area Network) storage. This is a large server environment to which multiple clients can attach and access a shared pool of storage available from across many servers and drives. When a client connects to a SAN it appears the same as a local drive, essentially like DAS, and applications will  talk to the storage at the block level.

While the SAN provides a pool of storage, meaning that each workstation attached to it can have access to a large amount of storage when required, a given segment of the raw storage can still only be attached to a single workstation at a time and so has many of the similar limitations for media workflows as DAS.

Also, to get its promised performance, the SAN typically uses fibre channel connectivity (today, more usually FCoE: fibre channel over ethernet), a protocol which delivers fast data rates, but which really only works on local area networks, so is not suitable for remote collaboration.

There may be times when you need blisteringly fast connectivity, like dealing in uncompressed 4K or beyond with data rates in excess of 2GB/sec for digital cinematography, film restoration, and high end finishing. In these cases, SAN could be the solution, however these workflows can also be achieved with other shared storage options that also allow for easier collaboration, further optimising workflows and reducing overall data storage capacity requirements.

The alternative storage option is NAS, network attached storage. EditShare’s software defined shared storage is a high performance scale out NAS, whether deployed on-premises or in the cloud. The EditShare File System (EFS) is renowned for its excellent performance in production and post-production. Whilst you might initially think of NAS as a low performance storage designed for smaller applications, with a clustered architecture and other optimizations NAS can deliver high data rates and all the flexible and cost effective advantages of NAS without the need to build out a SAN. 

A NAS, as its name suggests, is storage which sits on your core TCP/IP network, not a branch off to a separate, dedicated network. Any other device on the network can access any part of the NAS, so collaborative workflows become completely simple and transparent.

Unlike a SAN, though, NAS is not accessed at the block level: file operations are sent over the network. This file-level locking has the huge benefit of making it simple to integrate with creative software and intuitive in use.

The question, then, is how to get the performance we need for premium post-production with shared storage on a NAS?

Typically, workstations and NAS servers communicate using standard protocols like SMB or NFS. These are designed to be suitable for whatever the computer needs, however can have limitations when pushed to the limits demanded by high bit rate editing and post.

So EditShare developed its own, media-specific network protocol, accessible using  EFS Native Client file system drivers that are available on MacOS, Windows and Linux.

Media applications rely heavily on  multi-threaded operations to present multiple video, audio and other data to be streamed to users in high resolution.  The  EFS Native Client takes advantage of this pattern to balance the throughput load across multiple storage nodes and determine the fastest way to deliver files back to the application.  The result is much higher performance than with conventional network protocols.

EditShare EFS storage systems are also inherently scalable: when you need more space, you add additional nodes and hard drives to grow the overall capacity of the system. A major advantage of this approach is that you can get a two-for-one deal: providing additional protection by spreading data across servers but also gain throughput benefits when reading data from multiple nodes to avoid hotspot of contention on particular hard drives or server nodes.

The advantages of software defined NAS are many. You can freely mix SSD and spinning disks (although in the real world you may well find that you do not need SSD as much as you think you do). You do not need to define the number and allocation of clients. Multiple clients can access the same files: you would have to manually define copy tasks on a SAN. If you need to re-size volumes from project to project, you do it with a couple of mouse clicks, not the wholesale restructure you need for SAN. In addition, the commodity TCP/IP network connectivity infrastructure you already have can be utilized, instead of having to deploy costly and inflexible parallel SAN infrastructure or bespoke dual personality Fibre Channel/NIC cards.

Importantly, for solutions such as EditShare EFS, there is a focus on the aggregate performance of the storage across multiple workstations simultaneously accessing a large pool of media. Of course, individual client performance is critical and EditShare continuously optimises both client and server to align to the sweet spot for real media applications. But beyond the individual it is just as important to consider the overall capabilities of the storage layer to support many users collaborating together across a range of applications that put different demands on the storage throughout the production lifecycle.  It is this focus on performance of the applications using the storage that is important: can multiple users edit multiple streams without latency, jitter or dropped frames? The answer with EditShare EFS is, they can.

In the post industry, the biggest pressure today – aside from the usual need to control costs and boost productivity – is the need to support a “work anywhere” environment. Creative staff want the flexibility to work their preferred hours, from a location of their choosing. It reduces or eliminates the commute to an office, which has real environmental benefits as well as reducing stress for the editor.

EditShare led the industry in developing cloud solutions. It took existing, successful products and concepts and added the open-ness, interoperability and scalability that the cloud offers.

All of this experience is now brought together in EditShare FLEX, which offers a highly tailored environment for all the major tasks from remote editing to secure archiving. Most importantly, FLEX is designed in such a way that it is simple to implement and intuitive to manage. It does not require IT expertise to get the best of the system, nor to ensure security and reliability.

Migrating to the cloud gives businesses the obvious advantage that they do not need to physically host the hardware on which their work depends. This reduces the space they need, the power they consume, the air conditioning demands and the downtime and staff to ensure that the hardware is maintained and updated as required.

Conversely, the creative team will be accustomed to their preferred software and know how it should respond. Forcing a change of edit software, for example, would be simply unacceptable. Equally, making the system less responsive to key presses or mouse clicks would be unsettling and cause slow down workflows and become a stumbling block in adoption.

The guiding principle of EditShare FLEX is that you should carry on using your preferred tools in exactly the way you are used to. Cloud and remote working means there is an abstraction between the operator and the physical workstation, but that cannot be any sort of obstacle: it must be completely transparent.

To make this possible, EditShare has collaborated with industry leaders. FLEX uses the popular and widely recognised Teradici software to provide remote access from anywhere to virtual workstations. And if you are new to cloud connectivity and do not have an established fast file transfer process we can integrate CloudDat software from Data Expedition Inc.

Even more important, the FLEX virtual workstations in the cloud support whatever NLE software you currently use: it is completely agnostic. Indeed, if you have some editors who prefer Premiere Pro, some who are Avid fans and others who are most comfortable on DaVinci Resolve, you can support all of them, simultaneously and completely transparently.

There are two main bundles of the FLEX offering at present, with more to come in the future. FLEX Cloud Edit does what the name suggests: allows your editors to sit wherever they like and edit on virtual machines in the AWS cloud. Customers can take this bundle a step further with FLEX Cloud Edit+ which adds workstation management and file transfer acceleration, providing video production teams with an end-to-end video studio suite virtualized in the cloud.

The second bundle is FLEX Sync, which synchronizes between local EFS storage and cloud-based archives. It can be set to be completely automatic and it eliminates the need for LTO tape libraries, another continuing cost for space, maintenance, tapes and upgrades. By moving your archive or DR backup to the cloud, you also gain massive resilience. Once your archive is available in the cloud it unlock opportunities to utilize it for other cloud solutions, including FLEX Cloud Edit.

There are options in each service so you can tailor your system to precisely your requirements. If you do not have the necessary IT and engineering skills in house, then EditShare’s professional services team can provide the system design and scoping.

The great advantage of FLEX, though, is that you maintain full control over your working environment. Your talented and creative team will notice few changes, and will be able to work as productively as before, if not more so.

It delivers against the key concerns. It provides secure and efficient remote working, alongside edit-in-the-cloud, with all the CapEx savings and OpEx control that implies. And you maintain full control over your working environment and, most important, the security of the content entrusted to you.

The newest Shift updates let you shorten the time you spend on the sharing tasks you perform most often. From grabbing all the files you need at once, to flying through dialogs faster, to finding links at your fingertips – getting more of your time back is the biggest feature you’ll find in the latest release of Shift.

Newest features and improvements:

Now frequent sharers can fly through the sharing dialog quickly without digging through options they don’t need. The Share menu now offers basic and advanced views to streamline our most common user workflows, while maintaining advanced functionality for more in-depth workflows. The most common sharing settings are now presented first and set to the admin’s defaults when sharing, while advanced settings are easily available to users who want more granular control.

Customers can opt to add visible watermarks to specific, one-off instances of sharing assets in a Review Link, even if the project was not set up to require watermarking. If a file is coming from a watermarked project, the Share dialog will default to the project settings. What’s more, the original asset will remain clean and unmarked for other uses – but visibly protected in the specific link.

Mix and match file sharing

Instead of selecting only files or a folder, now you can multi-select combinations of files and folders to move all at once. Add the files and folders you select to the collection bin or playlist, share them via Review Links or Presentations, or delete them. Just hold down Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) to select whatever combinations of files and folders you need.

Sent Items Drawer

Finding previously sent items is now much quicker, making it easier for anyone who needs to review and edit the contents of Review Links. Just open up the left drawer of the Shift UI, navigate to the new Sent Links tab, and click into the Review Link you want to edit. You can reorder assets, drag in new folders and files, or remove items from the link. Open up and edit link settings from this space as well. Once you’ve edited the link, it’s automatically updated so prior recipients don’t need a new link.

Player Updates

Play video content in whatever way makes it easier for you to view – in a loop, auto-advance, with varied playback speed, a 5-second skip forward & back, and adjustable volume – with the new and improved player controls added to Shift. Your video setting preferences are saved and carried throughout the app, no more having to re-select showing duration every time you watch a video!

History Tab

Check out the newest addition to the sharing dialog – the History tab. See at a glance who has been sent a link, when it was sent to them, and who has had access to it in its lifespan – even on public and password-protected links. From there you can immediately re-send the link to them, or copy the link URL, with the click of a button.

For more information on how this release might benefit your team, or to discuss how to add watermarking to your account, reach out to your CSM or customersuccess@shift.

Big brands today deal with a significantly greater quantity of digital and video assets than ever before. As a result, these companies have had to find better and more efficient ways to manage their assets. To meet this demand, a number of different digital media management softwares have begun to crop up, offering companies of varying sizes the tools they need to effectively organize their video content. These digital asset management systems help companies consolidate their assets on one platform that is easily accessible and allows for better team collaboration, more streamlined workflow, and simple usability for employees and clients alike. Wiredrive is one such system, built specifically for companies in creative production who handle a great deal of video assets on a daily basis.

Digital asset management systems such as Wiredrive offer big brands a platform capable of handling every digital asset that comes their way, regardless of size or format. With the growing popularity of 360 video and VR, many of these systems, Wiredrive included, have adapted to support these video formats as well. Having one universally accessible platform for all assets is crucial for big brands, allowing them to consolidate all of their content so that it is easy for all project members to upload, access, and organize their files.

It is essential too that large companies utilize a media management system that can be customized to their specific needs. Wiredrive allows users to create custom metadata categories, tags, and keywords to match the company’s specialized naming conventions, and gives users the ability to build custom folder structures to match specific workflows. Knowing that they can organize their video assets with customized metadata is a primary concern for big brands who want to be sure that content can be easy to locate and difficult to lose track of.

Implementing a video asset management system that is easy to use and has an intuitive interface is also key, especially for large companies dealing with many stakeholders all around the world. Wiredrive not only offers speedy and globally accessible service, but it also boasts a simple interface that all users will be able to navigate without any hindrances or need of additional IT support. Having a web-based video asset management system with no learning curve significantly cuts down time and cost, two factors that are very important to any big brand.

Large companies deal with a vast quantity of video assets with varying life cycles. To manage all of this content properly and efficiently, big brands also need to be sure that everything is properly archived in a manner that makes it quick and easy for an individual to locate specific files. Video asset management programs like Wiredrive make it easy to build corporate memory, giving users the tools necessary to create highly organized and detailed libraries so that members of the organization can find what they need and distribute it within minutes.

The on-air promotions team at FX Networks, the flagship general entertainment network from Fox, uses Wiredrive to streamline creative workflow for on-air communications that effectively promote the network’s programs and reflect the FX Networks brand. FX Networks is carried in more than 98 million homes, and are known for its growing roster of critically acclaimed series, including Sons of Anarchy, American Horror Story: Coven, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The League, and Louie.

Making time for work that matters

Creative services for on-air campaigns at FX Networks previously required a protocol that involved a sludge of meetings, which ultimately resulted in an increase in workload for teams. Wiredrive simplified their highly iterative process by allowing the team to cut back on meetings and focus more on meaningful projects.

“Before Wiredrive, we would have to set up recurring meetings to present concepts and progress in order to receive feedback. At times there would be a delay in receiving feedback so in order to fill time, we’d take on additional projects,” remembers Andre Carbonari, Creative Director of Broadcast Design. “The feedback process is quick and easy on Wiredrive. We speed through approvals and are more productive now that we can focus on one project at a time, rather than juggling multiple.”

“The feedback process is quick and easy with Wiredrive. We speed through approvals and are more productive now that we can focus on one project at a time, instead of juggling multiple.”

Maintaining a sense of teamwork

The FX Networks environment requires flexible communication systems for its increasingly mobile employees. With Wiredrive, teams feel more connected as a result of the solution that allows them to work the way they work best: anytime, anywhere, and on a wide-range of devices. “Our decision makers are constantly traveling, and want to promptly access projects and see progress on everything, such as how a graphic is appearing in a TV spot,” says Andre. “Wiredrive makes it easy to get things in front of people and signed off on. We simply send a link and distribute it to multiple people who can review it on their tablet or phone as soon as the project becomes available.”

Keeping things under wraps

With a dedicated following for many of its popular shows, it’s natural for FX to make sure footage doesn’t make it online in order to maintain that element of surprise for viewers. Wiredrive plays a role in ensuring they succeed in protecting sensitive media. “It’s nice to have peace of mind knowing that people won’t have a problem looking at a private link I send – it will play on any browser and device, and also get there reliably and securely.”

To learn more about the latest FX show’s, visit their site: www.fxnetworks.com

Leslie Osborne is the Assistant Manager, Worldwide Creative Content at Paramount Pictures. With a long title and an even longer list of responsibilities, Osborne is at the charge to create and oversee marketing content across some of Paramount’s largest feature films, including Interstellar, Transformers, The Big Short, and more recently, Arrival, Fences, and Silence.

Paramount is one of Hollywood’s most well established studios, founded in 1912 by early film pioneer Adolph Zukor. Over its evolution as a mainstay in Hollywood, it has produced films like Titanic, Forrest Gump, Iron Man, Indiana Jones, and Ghost, to name a few. With numerous blockbuster releases under their belt, Paramount’s marketing division works with many outside creative vendors, coordinating screenings, junkets, and events, and collaborating with key advertisers to make sure their film releases are as impactful as the movies themselves. Wiredrive helps keep all of their operations as efficient and user-friendly as possible.

Saving countless hours

Six years ago, Paramount moved their marketing division onto Wiredrive technology to help best manage workflow and ensure everyone was on the same page. With so many moving pieces on countless projects, the marketing team was quick to adapt to the new interface.

Before the advent of Wiredrive and sharing files digitally, managers like Leslie were forced to work around time-consuming analog solutions. “Back when we used tape delivery, we had to do everything from duplicating or sending tapes to making viewing CDs or DVDs. I was personally grateful for our company’s decision to use Wiredrive and embraced it right off the bat, because I was the person having to ship out tapes at 10 o’clock at night.”

The use of Wiredrive has not only allowed a more fluid workflow, it has freed up countless hours for Osborne and her team to focus on creative marketing activations, like the massive campaign around Office Christmas Party, the upcoming holiday release starring Jason Bateman, Jennifer Aniston, T.J. Miller, and Kate McKinnon.

Developing as the industry grows

Collaboration is key to what Osborne and her team accomplish, and the more creative minds involved makes their product all the better. The nature of her business has changed drastically in the last decade or so, providing for much easier communication among a wider group of collaborators all excited to lend their hand in the game. While telecommunications and wireless have made notable advances, the importance of having a quick and secure assets sharing service was essential to the team and makes something as simple as an internal meeting that much more productive. “In meetings, like today, [a client] messaged one of the gals in my office and said, ‘I need all these promos ASAP.’ They hadn’t mentioned that beforehand but it came up in conversation, and it was like ‘well it would be beneficial if we can just look at it right now.’ So she was able to send him the link to the folder that had everything. Instead of having to set another meeting, they were able to cover it when it was being discussed in literally five minutes.”
‍

There’s no going back

“Wiredrive is a genius tool that not only revolutionized delivery within the film industry, but also continues to evolve in ways that are very advantageous for team collaboration and efficient workflow.”

Just as Osborne’s team continues to manage an ever-growing slate of blockbuster releases, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Meryl Streep-led Florence Foster Jenkins, the nature of their collaboration with Wiredrive has also evolved. What started as implementing a new system has drastically improved their operations across the board, with quick uploads and a cloud-based server to ensure that deliverables can be seen instantly anywhere in the world you need them. Wiredrive acts as the behind-the-scenes player to ensure that Paramount’s marketing teams can spend as little time delivering assets and still feel rest assured that everything is where it needs to be. “It’s a great tool for organizing things so that even if you aren’t aware of something you can go into the project and see what’s in there, because sometimes there’s so much going on that we may not all get the ability to sit down together and watch.” So besides the joys of not rushing out to overnight something before the store closes or hoping a postal worker arrives in time, Wiredrive’s digital asset management allows a certain security from very natural human errors by making everything you need available at just the click of a link.