“Just when you thought it was safe…”

As we enter the third year of Covid, now with the omicron variant, media and broadcast industries enter their third year of rapid technological advancement. But things are different in 2022 than they were in 2020.
Pavel Potuzak, CEO, Aveco

“Just when you thought it was safe…” That was the start of the tagline for the 1978 follow-up to Steven Spielberg's classic Jaws – Jaws 2. It is also quite possibly horror's greatest tagline (in its entirety: "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…") Since then, it’s been used as the beginning for a myriad of phrases, but none as horrific as those connected with Covid.

In the first few weeks of last December, we went from thinking we were reaching the transition of a pandemic to an endemic to omicron. But there was a difference: media and broadcast organizations had already embraced new technologies and processes that allowed them to stay on air since the pandemic began.

No longer were Covid safety protocols something new, they were something we became used to. The exact same way we became used to remote production, increased use of the cloud, and hybrid workflows.

Now you might be thinking “of course” or “so what?” but take a step back to 2019 and look at where we were. Look at how your organization was working. Look at what tools you were using. Look at what you thought the pace of technological advancement would be. There is no one in 2019 who would have thought that the way we work now would have been possible.

In less than three years, we’ve literally had somewhere between five and eight years of advancement. Not because the media and broadcast industries wanted it, but because they needed it.

Manufacturers didn’t want it that fast either. We have roadmaps – what we work on, when we work on it, and when we release it. Covid made five year roadmaps useless. All of that work would need to happen now, because those planned advancements were needed now.

Today, you can do almost anything from your home, as long as you have the right tools and connectivity.

At Aveco, we’ve been providing remote workflow solutions for years. But Covid made us re-think what “remote” really means.

We looked at the weak points that were popping up because of Covid. What we found was a great disconnect between remote work and MAM. That is what lead to us to redesign what a MAM should be with our new GEMINI MAM (gemini.aveco.com). GEMINI doesn’t care where you are – in the facility, at a home office or in the field across the world. Any desktop and any tablet with a web browser and internet connectivity deliverers all the MAM tools needed.

Our industries have changed for the better. And they will continue to do so in 2022. That’s a good thing. It’s how we got here that should never be celebrated.

InBroadcast: Just when you thought it was safe