How Businesses Can Flawlessly Deliver Live Streaming Video From Anywhere
Apr 19, 2022 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM EST
Do you want solutions to the challenges facing your brand so you can deliver and create quality video performance and optimization? With 75% of people wanting to watch a video rather than read text on a screen, what can your brand do to manage and create content that resonates with your audience?
Delivering an on-demand and livestream video seamlessly is a problem of the past. Why? With advancements in technology, a live web-based interface is accessible anywhere on the globe. From broadcast to the corporate world, having a reliable, redundant, and high-quality stream is crucial. What steps can you take to boost your video performance?
In this virtual event, Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson sits down with Erik Wright, Director of Account Management at Qumu, and George Klippel, Director of Channel Sales US and Canada at LiveU, to explain the power of video optimization when delivering content. Together, they discuss the importance of a cloud infrastructure for delivering quality video content, maintaining viewership through video streaming, and the building blocks of a digital delivery environment.
Qumu provides an enterprise video platform that creates, manages, secures, distributes and measures the success of live and on-demand video within the enterprise.
Connect with QumuDirector of Account Management at Qumu
Erik Wright is the Director of Account Management at Qumu. He has over 20 years of experience in the digital management industry. Prior to his work at Qumu, he was the Enterprise Sales Manager for New England and Eastern Canada at Lifesize; the Solutions Specialist in Video Content Management and Digital Media for HB Communications; and the Advanced Technology Specialist of New York, New Jersey, and New England, and Eastern Canada for Polycom.
Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson is a Digital Strategist at BWG Connect, a network and knowledge sharing group of thousands of brands who collectively grow their digital knowledge base and collaborate on partner selection. With over 13 years of experience in the digital space, she has built a strong reputation for driving growth, innovation, and customer engagement across a variety of online platforms. She is passionate about keeping up with the latest industry trends and emerging technologies by speaking with hundreds of brands a year thru the BWG Network.
Director of US Channel Sales at LiveU
George Klippel is the Director of Channel Sales US and Canada for LiveU. He has over 30 years of experience building and managing channel sales. He has worked as the Channel Partner Account Manager for Avid Technology and was the Manager of Classroom Technology for Carnegie Mellon University and Case. George has experience working as a freelance videographer for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Cleveland Browns.
Director of Account Management at Qumu
Erik Wright is the Director of Account Management at Qumu. He has over 20 years of experience in the digital management industry. Prior to his work at Qumu, he was the Enterprise Sales Manager for New England and Eastern Canada at Lifesize; the Solutions Specialist in Video Content Management and Digital Media for HB Communications; and the Advanced Technology Specialist of New York, New Jersey, and New England, and Eastern Canada for Polycom.
Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson is a Digital Strategist at BWG Connect, a network and knowledge sharing group of thousands of brands who collectively grow their digital knowledge base and collaborate on partner selection. With over 13 years of experience in the digital space, she has built a strong reputation for driving growth, innovation, and customer engagement across a variety of online platforms. She is passionate about keeping up with the latest industry trends and emerging technologies by speaking with hundreds of brands a year thru the BWG Network.
Director of US Channel Sales at LiveU
George Klippel is the Director of Channel Sales US and Canada for LiveU. He has over 30 years of experience building and managing channel sales. He has worked as the Channel Partner Account Manager for Avid Technology and was the Manager of Classroom Technology for Carnegie Mellon University and Case. George has experience working as a freelance videographer for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Cleveland Browns.
Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect
BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution.
Senior Digital Strategist Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson runs the group & connects with dozens of brand executives every week, always for free.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 0:18
Welcome, everyone. I am Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson. I am a digital strategist and moderator here at BWG Connect. And we are a network and knowledge sharing group. That's what we do, we stay on top of the latest trends, challenges, whatever it is, that is shaping the digital landscape. We're on track to do at least 500 of these webinars this year, due to the increase in demand to better understand everything digital, we'll also be doing at least 100 in person small format dinners. So if you happen to be in a tier one city in the US, definitely drop us a line and we'd be happy to send you an invite, the dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having a specific conversation around a digital topic. And it's always a good time. We spend the majority of the time here at BWG talking to different brands. So I'd love to have a conversation with you. That's how we stay on top of what's going on with the trends and the challenges. So feel free to email me at Tiffany tiffany@bwgconnect.com. And we can put some time on the calendar. It's from those conversations, we generate topic ideas, to understand what people want to learn more about. And it's also where we gain our resident experts, such as Qumu, who's here today with live you. So welcome you both. And you want to be asked to teach the collective community as GM highly recommended for multiple brands. So if you're ever in need of any recommendations of any providers within the digital space, feel free to reach out to me, we have a short list of the best of the best, and we'd be happy to provide that information to you. We also know that a lot of people are hiring right now. So do note we do have a talent agency BWG talent that I'd be happy to put you in contact with as well. So a few housekeeping items, we started about four minutes after the hour. So rest assured, we will wrap up about four to five minutes before the end of the hour give you ample time to get to your next meeting. And we want this to be as educational and conversational as possible. So definitely put into the q&a chat bar, any questions you might have. If you feel more comfortable, you can always email me Tiffany tiffany@bwgconnect that calm and we'll be sure to get to those questions. So with that, let's roll and start to learn how to flawlessly deliver a video from anywhere. The team at Qumu and LiveView have been great friends, supporters, partners of the network. So I'm gonna kick it off to Erik and Greg, if you can give an introduction on yourself. That would be fantastic. And then we will jump into the information. Thank you.
Erik Wright 2:46
Yeah, my name is Erik Wright. I'm a longtime industry. employee, I guess I've been in the industry about 20 plus years around streaming and content management. I'm the character director for Account Management here at Qumu. And I've been at the organization for over five years. George,
George Klippel 3:08
yeah, my name is George or as Tiffany mentioned Greg Klippel. Or George Klippel. I'm the director of a US Channel Sales. Great. You did, but that's quite right. I've been called Greg before. Sorry. That's quite alright. George Klippel, Director of us Channel Sales at lie view. I've been with LiveU now for about six years, just over six years at NAB this year. It'll be six years, actually. And really excited to be here on this panel today. Looking forward to talking to everybody. I've been in this industry for about 25 years in the broadcast and production business. So really excited to be participating with the panel. Looking forward to it.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 3:51
Awesome, thank you. So I think before we get started, maybe we can give an overview about you guys, the team, and how did you start working together?
Erik Wright 4:00
It was actually a it was a very interesting engagement because we have one of the customers we'll be talking about today, a very large auto manufacturer actually put us in touch with with George and the LiveU team. They had just finished a $4 million build of their studio. And we're having some issues with network and connectivity. And brought in George, the LiveU technology and through some some of those meetings said hey, you guys should probably talk. So it was it was nice to actually connect with George and start that relationship there. And then from there, we've we're starting to see really good intros into the rest of the enterprise that Qumu has and and George is also introducing us to a quite a few of his partners, ultimately to their to their end users. So it's it's been a good good relationship, George
George Klippel 4:59
Yeah, it was really interesting. From our perspective, LiveU's been around since 2006, we're known for IP distribution, or what people call bonded cellular transmission, getting video from point A to point B in a reliable way. And, you know, among other things, if you will, and when the conversation was brought up about talking to Qumu. You know, it really hadn't ever occurred to us to, you know, talk to another manufacturer, to partner up with, usually, we're talking to reseller partners that sell our products and other products and have a line card of, you know, many, many other products. And this was the first time that we really entertained the idea of partnering up, if you will, with another manufacturer, and after talking with Erik and the team at Qumu, had made sets for us. Because there's a really good synergy between what Qumu offers and what we offer. And really, after working on a couple of projects, together with Erik and his team, and the folks there a Qumu, it really made sense for the because the products are so complimentary. And we really just help tie in each other and complement each other so well. So it's really been a wonderful partnership, as Erik just alluded to.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 6:21
Excellent. Perfect, I think we can dive right in.
Erik Wright 6:27
Yeah, so I think the big the big thing for for Qumu. And those that have not heard of Qumu, we are a video, video, first company, we, we do video on demand and live streaming, we're in a majority of the Fortune 500 We have a background in content management, distribution, analytics and security. Our whole business is around video, it's getting video, internally externally and at scale with within those organizations. So it's to George's earlier point, it's the relationship between Qumu. And LiveU is really truly a better together type of solution. Some of the places that we've we've had challenges as an organization are really the front part of creation, which is that content creation portion, which is a lot to do with encoders, and making sure that events go smoothly and that you have connectivity and and you know, let's be honest, when things fail, it's always our fault. So having the safety net of having a LiveU, barn and cell technology, also the cloud direction that they're taking is very much in parallel with with Qumu. And our focus on being a cloud first company. You know, even though we're still supporting an on prem solution, which is growing as we speak, and, and very valuable to those customers. But the other piece of that is the the last mile. So being able to walk in with somebody like LiveU, who is very synergistic with our approach to the market and how our customers want to work. Also, having reliability, scalability, and quality, which is great is huge, because as most of you know, is if you're using third party tools, by typing to the ticket scaler, you're giving up quality. In this case, George and LiveU literally allow us to have that broadcast quality without giving up any, you know, any of that quality when you start getting to scale. So for us, it was a no brainer. And they're a great organization to work with. George, I’ll let you elaborate.
George Klippel 8:44
And, you know, I agree we're a great organization to work with, of course, I'm here and, you know, that makes it even better. But no, look, our focus has always been from the beginning in the broadcast space, you know, we've got a huge percentage of that market sports as well. And, you know, corporate and enterprise is one of the other big legs that we stand on in the vertical market space. And, you know, for us having reliable streaming capabilities, whether they're integrated in Iraq, or more importantly, portable and for us, you know, of late, especially over the last few years, having the ability to be portable and to move and deliver for an enterprise infrastructure, like the ones that we'll be talking about soon. The ability to go and switch completely your entire corporate infrastructure and deliver messaging to your internal and external audiences. From what used to be your studio that you had in your facility and you know, you had a lockdown in your facility because of COVID. And all of a sudden deliver that same messaging from home. Having a portable encoder device and a portable platform and a workflow that we deliver that tied see seamlessly through our cloud infrastructure into the Qumu cloud infrastructure just, you know, made perfect sense for us and work seamlessly. And, you know, LiveU. And you'll hear more about this at NAB in the coming days and the announcements that you'll be seeing from us, you know, we're moving quickly into the cloud and doing more in the cloud. We've we've been doing stuff in the cloud for years. But you know, more and more, we're pushing into the cloud, which ties in directly to what Qumu has been doing with their infrastructure already. So again, it's a great synergy for us. And you'll see in these examples that we'll be talking about how it works and what we were able to accomplish.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 10:43
Fantastic. Looking back at just going back to that slide real quick, that's a big statement on the screen. And I just have a very basic question of the why. Why do companies have this challenge?
Erik Wright 10:56
Yeah, and the big thing is, there's, there's multiple reasons why a lot of it has to do with bandwidth or infrastructure or, you know, being able to produce something. First off, just creating content, right. So there's a lot of reasons companies struggle with video. Pan pandemic kind of raised that bar even a little bit more, but it, it really brought to home, why video was very important, it was always a nice to have, if you look at most of the companies that have had video, they would focus primarily on quarter lease, or, you know, they would hire some company to come in and help do their investor relations type announcements, things along those lines within the enterprise, but you sent everybody home. And every sitting at home, all of a sudden, boom, Zoom becomes one of the most valuable platforms on the planet, you've got teams, you've got, you know, 1000, other solutions that popped up out of nowhere, to try to meet a need, which was I need to put, you know, 3000 people on a video call. Now, how does that scale from home, it's actually okay, because you're using your own internet, most of the time, unless, you know, you're like me, and you have two kids that are streaming every platform on the planet. And then you don't have any bandwidth. So you end up having other issues. But really, you know, where this came in from LiveU and Qumu, who is what we'll be talking about what the, you know, the auto companies and whatnot, is we've, we've essentially groomed an entire new generation of workforce to use video. And that video, doesn't always doesn't always play well with networks doesn't always play well, you know, with the creation tools that people want to use. So being able to use things like LiveU from anywhere, anytime. 21. You know, I think George mentioned that, like 60% of the Olympics, came off of LiveU packs on the field, about how many corporations want to walk into a Sheridan and be able to stream their CEO event, right, and be able to rely that the internet connection isn't gonna go south, or that I'm actually going to be able to get on the internet. I mean, how many people stay in hotels and actually can't get their emails. So those type of situations and bring it to your house and be able to do CEO events from your home, do all the routing, all the switching, everything that you would need to do in a traditional studio, I can now do from the comfort of my my couch. So that's really why it's important today is because, again, we spent two years grooming individuals to use video every day, all day. Now we're going to put them back in an office, some things are going to, you know, are we going back 200% Back to the office, now we're probably seeing about 60% being, you know, some some level of it going back to the office, whether it's hybrid 40%, we'll never see an office again, unless they're in there, you know, for parties or meetings, outside of that everybody else is going to be at home. So that I think what's really, why it's important is because the way we work has changed in video and the way we consume video has changed.
George Klippel 14:08
And I think just to just add to that, I think the most important word there is integral part of everyday work. Because previously, I think a lot of companies had video, they use video, and they they all had it in some capacity, as Erik mentioned, zoom or teams or blue jeans, or blah, blah, blah. But it wasn't integral, it wasn't really that important. If you could get the CEO out. And if you know they could figure out a way to get something up on social media, a lot of companies just did it and they just whatever. I think especially with COVID I think it it gave companies a pause to figure out new ways to get video out and to get these external and internal communications because these are, you know two different animals when you're talking about external and internal. How you handle them is two different completely completely different ways and And I think now it's really important for companies, especially in the enterprise space, fortune 100, fortune 500 companies, how they're handling it today, they want to handle it in a in a way that is much more higher quality. They want to manage those the assets that they're creating, they want to distribute to more and more people. I mean, when you're talking to a fortune 100 company, it's not like you wanting to send out the CEOs message to just 25 people, it's going to 2500 people, it could be going to 5000 people. And there's, you know, Zoom is not set up for that it's really not designed for that. And there's other platforms and ways to, to manage that. And I think, today, these companies that we're talking about, and the ones that we're going to showcase now, and in a minute, I think, are really understanding that and the full impact is, as less sentences has not been fully realized. But it is now coming back off of COVID. I think people are now finally seeing that you, you have to look at this and really make sure that you're focusing on how to make a high quality product, how to make it deliverable to both internal and external often constituencies, if you will, and how are you going to capitalize on those assets? After you're done delivering them? And what can what else can you do to them with them? How can you repurpose them as well? So,
Erik Wright 16:26
again, and I think there's two important points in there. One is, you know, if you looked at teams and zooms, as I said, to get scale, you lose quality? Well, that was fine. That was a, you know, during the pandemic, we, you know, most organizations kind of took that as well, okay, well, we're gonna have to do this. Well, now we're back in office, and CEOs are like, Well, that was fine. But I need to have the same experience that we had prior to COVID. And so the idea that quality is now a sacrifice to get scale isn't acceptable, you know, it's it, we've moved beyond, it's just good enough, because of tools like Qumu and LiveU, I can do an internal I can do it external, as I said, you can do it from home. The other big piece of this too, is, all of this is really great. We can create a bunch of content, we can get it to people's desktop, and do it securely, you know, with encryption and everything else. But I need to, you know, what I what most marketing and executives want to know is how many people watched it? How long? Did they watch it? Where did they all fall off, you know, the CFO show up and everybody left? Okay, well, we should probably, you know, be able to tailor that message and structure those meetings a little bit better, to keep engagement. So all of those things come together between, you know, LiveU creation and reliability and quality and Qumu, ability to manage, distribute, secure, and then scale. So if you can take those two together, again, this goes back to the tagline that we are better together. And I could walk in any company right now and drop Qumu and, and LiveU to you in there and be 99.9% positive that you're gonna have a very positive experience.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 18:07
Definitely, and look at some of the stats that I've pulled to just you know, how people interact differently now with video, post COVID. This was like amazing and nice that 75% are more likely to watch a video than read text on a screen. So I've been talking to my kids is what they've been doing. Like, whoa, and then 50% of people watch more than five videos a day.
Erik Wright 18:32
Yeah. And that goes back to engagement. Right? So you know, we're, we don't create content, we manage and distribute and, and, you know, give you the analytics around it. So one of the big things that we've learned as customers that had an hour and a half DVRs, for example, the quarterly reviews, now we can do 30 minute ones, and do those multiple times a quarter. And so you're seeing engagement. So it's changed the way that we're actually getting content today to remember they will just in time, you're dealing with that right now with like chips for cars and manufacturing. But videos are very much the same. If I can get you 10 videos, short little snippets, you're more likely going to watch those 10 videos. And if I drop an hour and a half, you know, it's kind of the old death by PowerPoint, but with video, you know, you hear zoom, people are tired to zoom. People are tired of teams, they just want give me the information. Let me move on. And we're seeing that change. Or you know, it's the YouTube of the world I want to go in, I need to change the filter in my refrigerator. I don't want to watch how they built the refrigerator. I just want to know how to change it. And so you're starting to see those I know George is probably seeing you're seeing it in broadcast you're seeing it in corporate worlds, is you know more to the just in time kind of content creation.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 19:53
Very interesting. And just a reminder, anybody who has any questions, definitely feel free to drop them in the chat.
Erik Wright 19:58
All right. So. So here's a good one that George and I actually worked pretty closely with Scott as well, from the LiveU team on this one, this was kind of our, I guess, our testbed George, of how we were going to work together. This is a fortune five, health healthcare services company. That essentially, kind of went all in on Qumu, during the pandemic, they realized that there 300 plus 1000 employees are going to need video and they needed to really be good at video and be reliable that video. But with the pandemic threw through a couple curveballs out so one was, you know, how do we get people ready for COVID. The same company also has a lot of minute type clinics that they support. A majority of their, their employees are hourly store employees. And about 60 or 70,000 of those are knowledge workers living in, you know, working from offices, when COVID started, one of the big things that we were able to do there was actually build an infrastructure that allowed them to reach anybody, and anytime at any location. So with our back end for distribution through caching servers and whatnot, we were able to solve the big, big problem of okay, I've got a message, how do I get it out? How do I make sure people are consuming it? How do we get our analytics behind that, but we all we ran into the same problems. And you'll see this as a kind of a thread that binds us together is where we've seen failures. So some of the failures that they were seeing as network at work getting getting, making sure streams were were working appropriately, networks at executives, homes, that was a big problem as well. I mean, the team calls were huge. We had people because they'll run dedicated areas to executives, and have people monitoring those. So when you start talking about companies the size, she's really started, the margin of error zero. If there's a problem, if you don't care if two people buffered or had an issue, it's a failure with two people having an issue. It's just it's a, it's a, it's a zero sum game. But with organizations, organizations of this size. And with with this engagement, it was a, it was really a great place to bring in LiveU, because again, where we where we tend to have challenges is in that creation piece, we have creation tools, we do not have the ability to 100%, say whether my internet goes down, I'm going to be able to continue my encode and continue my presentation. That's where LiveU comes in. If my internet goes down, you know, I will move over to cellular, I will go to cloud as I do. And it will continue the presentation as as designed. And we will have a successful event. Traditionally, and in the olden days, as I say, prior to going to get duction to LiveU if the internet went down, that was the end of there was nothing more we could do about it. And those were very long root cause analysis calls that yeah, we're took many years, I have all these gray hairs, probably from yours, as well. George pulled all his out. So
George Klippel 23:47
George, I still have some on the side. Yeah, most of them are gone, most of them are gone. Exactly right.
Erik Wright 23:54
So you know, having LiveU as part of this and, and a good example, if we go to the before on the couldn't go back one just to kind of look at the architecture. And this is when I dropped this on George and Scott, they were like Holy smokes. This is what I call a Franken stack. And their traditional sense goes back to my days working with Cisco is there were so many points of failure in this that I don't know how anybody could really, really, yeah, when I saw this command, I was like, Wow, you guys are you guys are killing me. But what we were able to do with George in that team was really take a look at it. And then kind of figure out what is what's, what are we trying to accomplish? And that's always should be the first question. That's what George was start with, what do you want to do? And really, it came back to whether we're in the office or home, we need to be able to get it to the cloud and then get that will then that will feed distribution whether it's You know, public private behind the firewall doesn't matter. So what we did was we we mapped out this entire process. And you'll see here that there's Cisco a video endpoints in here. There's high vision, encoder decoders, there's multiple connections around internet. I think we have a couple, we have a Tricaster. For for doing a mixing. I mean, it's, it's, it's a pretty interesting. And then they were also on this question was also on prime at the time. So we were not only feeding an internal, but also feeding it to go external through through one of our technologies. But what we were able to do with this, and then the help with George, and if you go ahead and go over to the after, we were able to really streamline this. And it didn't matter where people were sitting to create to the content creation that can be at home. One of the big things with this healthcare provider is having the CEO have a virtual studio suddenly sitting in her office, she rolls it out, plugs in and turns it on, everything is managed remotely from, you know, from the office or from a home. And what we're able to do is take that entire frame and stack and really push it to essentially two cloud solutions, just turning to the cloud and talking about the LiveU, LiveU Central, we do have some on prem just simply because they do do you studios. But that's really for failover, more than anything. With that, I'll hand it over to George to kind of talk through the LiveU piece of this.
George Klippel 26:45
Yeah, and I think I think what really is nice in this case is that we gave, you know this company, the opportunity to have a encoder unit, the ALU 800, which is our multi camera output unit, it can take four signals and output 123, or four cameras at any given time. So it's great for individual single camera shoot with the CEO in their home insert studio that they developed here, in this case, or they could take it on the road and do a multi camera shoot at a conference or use it for any other reason that they may need to do it. But as this was designed out with the Qumu team and talking with the customer. As Erik mentioned, we have our LiveU cloud infrastructure feeding the Qumu cloud, and then the LiveU value 2000 Server on prem that allows them to take an SDI or HDMI signal out, excuse me, SDI or NDI signal out, we support NDI natively into a Tricaster environment. We also support MPEG TS or SRT out. And any of those flavors can go into that mixer environment that we have in the studio back in the on prem environment, etc. But what really, I think is most important to point out in this environment in any environment that uses a LiveU is the LiveU Central, Erik mentioned as well, because that's our web based interface, it's our command and control center allows you to really control the units and the experience from anywhere in the globe. And it allows the CEO in this case to as Erik said, Just come in, sit down in our Insert studio at her home, turn the button on for power, everything lights up. And she's not worrying about setting the lay deciding where the signals going and how to get it over to Qumu. And how to get it to anywhere because that web based interface can be controlled by an engineer that could be in another country in another state even. And that's that web based interface live you central controls everything the delay settings where it's going to go where the signal is going to get to what server it's going to etc. And that's really one of the things I think of as probably one of the most powerful tools that we have in our tool belt. Aside from you know the technology in and of itself that gives you that reliable stream, that that constant stream and that that backup, right, and it connects to in the home it connects to Ethernet because that's what they're going to use. They're normally Ethernet and you have the bonding cellular bonding as a backup. And you can actually set our system up we call least cost bonding where it uses Ethernet first, Wi Fi second and the modems last, but they're all auto failover. So if one went down if let's say the CEOs Ethernet just cut out, it just fails over to Wi Fi and cellular immediately there's no dropping of frames audio and video is always in sync. So it's a very nice robust solution that, as you can tell by this slide, it cuts out a lot of that Frank and stuff that Erik, Erik mentioned on the previous slide.
Erik Wright 29:54
Yeah, the other thing is the supportability of this right you're talking about two vendors versus probably two In, right, so, and you're also seeing a huge cost reduction, because you're not having to refresh 10 items, you know, every three to five years. This is essentially two platforms, this is LiveU this is could, you know, yes, you're gonna go buy TriCaster or whatever for your mixing. But generally, those are boxes and it's not, you know, I got contracts with Hikvision I've got contracts with Cisco got contracts with Qumu I got contract, when you can contract yourself to death. But in this one is really to next to choke, really one because you know, Qumu, and LiveU become in together. So it's, it's, you know, we work together that way. And the the points of failure here are none. Because really the, you know, as long as you've got Internet, and you've got outs to the cloud and to the on prem, you've got redundancy, that's really the benefit of this type of architecture. The other architecture, if you're gonna do redundancy, you take those, you'll end up with twice as much than we showed, in order to have that redundancy from creation to hitting Qumu. To to deliver. So now, showing this to the executive team, they said, Oh, you guys can really do this by just two of you? And the answer is yes. And we can do it all day long, every day, even on Sunday.
George Klippel 31:20
And that's, and I think what's funny, or not funny, actually, but oh, they think so unique about this, too, in this relationship that we, you know, agreed to enter is that really Qumu is taking the lead role and installation, integration, etc. But LiveU also has a 24/7 365 support arrangement. So we're supporting the equipment with Qumu. A completely across the board. And the other thing that's important, I think, to mention, when you look at this type of setup, when we talk about our encoders, a lot of these enterprise corporations that we deal with LiveU and Qumu are, you know, this is a fortune five company that we're talking about. They're not just sitting here in the US all the time, they go all over the globe, and they do things that are outside of the home outside of the US. And one of the nice things about our encoder offerings, aside from the portability is that we use dual SIM modems, so the A side modem, Sims and the modem, they work in the continental US and the beside SIM in the modem is at&t global roaming Sims and can work in 196 different countries around the globe. So by simply moving that encoder that says on location live you well, you 800 With that CEO, to get on her jet or his jet to a another country. They take essentially this entire infrastructure that you see right here on the road with them. And we can feed the LiveU cloud sir, right in the Qumu cloud from anywhere that they need to go and still be able to do live transmission and feed that internal or external mis messaging to their customer and their clientele, just by using the technology that's built into the units and into this infrastructure.
Erik Wright 33:07
Yeah, I think it's very important about this, as well as when we build out these and you'll see the manufacturing build here in a few moments. But, you know, LiveU, like Qumu is not a one size fits all, essentially, we they have products that are designed specifically for specific use cases. So for example, the L U 100. Allows for multi cameras, it allows for data, a data switch, it allows you to do a lot of things, but you don't need not need a lot of things. Maybe I just need a rack mountable encoder, with no digital with no cell cell support, they have it, most of our customers will probably buy majority of those, that's great. If I want to enable cell on him, great, then I can make that I can turn that cell on and turn around and sell off depending on the use case that I'm doing. So those are the things that when when Qumu looks for best best of breed is that they have the tools to help us support our customers, no matter how they want to produce their content where they want to produce that content. And that's really been very valuable when we've been challenged. I mean, let's be honest, we're all challenged in video today how we want to do it better, we want to do it faster, we want to do cheaper. You know, George in his in the LiveU team step up with a line of products that allow us to pretty much meet any goal that a customer wants to accomplish when it comes to content creation.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 34:36
Just going back to the before and after, how long did it take to implement that after model?
Erik Wright 34:41
So the after model is still it's still in process just because it's a large company but we literally did that from the time that we started the POC at the time we closed about 90 days. So you're already they're already using LiveU for a lot of their large events for the corporate, the office setup is a work in progress just because there's a lot of there's a lot of setup around just getting into the CEOs office and getting all the pizza pieces and parts. So for example, one thing we didn't talk about as part of that after was, yes, we're gonna have multi cameras sitting off of that, we're also going to have a Telestrator, we have tele lights, we have returned video, all of that is going to be built into this home studio, they're also going to have that same studio in a box. So if they want to have, for example, they're going to do something on Fox Business or CNBC or whatever, they'll be able to stick that in the box and send it to somebody else in the United States or across, you know, across the pond, in order to set up in their their office and be able to deliver a quality event, we call it studio in a box. So they are going to have that full capability as well. But today, they are using it for all of their major events. And they think two years ago, they started they were doing about five events a month. I think they're up to about 45 events a month today. So they're seeing massive growth. And LiveU is a real big piece of that.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 36:16
And then the before I'm making the assumption here, there was no opportunity to gain analytics in that model, am I correct?
Erik Wright 36:22
Well, they had analytics to the Qumu on premises platform. And now that they've made the transition to cloud, it's just as it's just as simple, just as easy. It's just now it's cloud versus having an on prem. The benefit, though, is that they're doing a single publish point versus multiple publish points to agreement. In this case, they're they're literally publishing through a LiveU central to Qumu. In the cloud, it's and that's the preferred method for most corporations today, they don't want everything on prem. The reason we do have the L Yutu. 2000, in there is really simply just to have redundancy, because if for whatever reason, something happens with their outbound gateways, at least locally, we'll be able to be able to work through the 2000s. So we built in redundancy as part of this.
George Klippel 37:13
And we find with most most corporate customers, especially this high level of corporate enterprise type customer, they want that redundancy and backup capability.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 37:26
Makes sense. Before we move on, we do have a question from the audience about cellular. So they mentioned you might want to mention the international ability of the cellular. Any expansion on that?
George Klippel 37:39
Yeah, I think I covered that already about the dual SIM modems that can go anywhere with the unit, the A and B side modems that I mentioned, that come with the unit. So that gives us the capability to go anywhere in 186 different countries. So that's when I was talking about the A and B side modems and the global roaming Sims, we also do international rentals. But in this case, it's usually the companies like this and others that we'll be talking about in the next case study, they're able to just take the unit activate those global roaming Sims and get off in a plane in in Canada and Mexico and wherever they do want to go. And they're just able to light it up and just start using it without having to look for local sins in another country and get into a short term contract. And it alleviates a lot of the pain, which corporate CEOs and IT people don't do not like.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 38:31
Understandable. Perfect, thank you.
Erik Wright 38:32
So yeah, let's talk about our global or global automaker. So this has been a longtime customer as well also was an on prem, what we what we call video control center customer, BCC. About five years ago, they actually made the move to cloud. And that came about the same time that they were moving corporate headquarters. And as part of that led to a multimillion dollar refresh of their entire studio infrastructure. So everything from the switchers to green screen type technologies across the board. And one of the challenges that they've faced, just like many of our other clients is not the corporate networks aren't always so nice and getting thing registered to the corporate networks can be just as challenging, especially if they're not approved by InfoSec, for example. So one of the challenges that they had, prior to COVID was actually getting encoders registered to the to the corporate intranet. And that's really where I think the LiveU piece started. was yes, they had. They have a very large campus. Yes, they wanted to do things from all over that campus. But the number one initiation of that was hey, I can't get my encoder online. So going back to George and to the LiveU, group that filled An immediate need. And that immediate need was I can do this from anywhere at any time, just by having. And I think that we're using guest network at the time, right, George? Because they couldn't get it registered on the on the network. Right, right. Yep. Yeah. So fast forward to the pandemic, okay, so everybody goes home. The producers are sitting at home, and they're trying to produce like they would sitting on and off as well. Like I mentioned earlier, they actually had a couple of failed events because internet to their local homes, again, that last mile that we really can't control when you're when you're living in the rural world, you know, essentially failed, failed miserably. So the funny story is, is that, that producer hopped in his car, drove back to headquarters, grabbed his LiveU unit, drove back to his home, and from the entire rest of the pandemic, he ran everything off his LiveU unit from his home. And that just shows the flexibility of LiveU going to Qumu. Because, again, they're their standard for delivery, both internal external support for all of their brands, and all the dealers and all the service departments come through Qumu. But all that was created, you know, with the foundation of LiveU as as the encoder of choice, because the, they didn't have another failure through the entire pandemic, two years. And, you know, just that tied with with Qumu, they could reach their audience, no matter where they work globally, securely at scale. So just another use case of why the ability of LiveU working anywhere remotely to Qumu, in this case, can be cloud, anywhere, at any time, solve the issue and allowed them to really get through a tough time. Who knows, the next thing is going to shut down. I mean, most companies, you know, didn't think about it before. I think eventually, we'll look back in the rearview mirror and say, Well, wasn't that an interesting time? But it could happen again, in NaVi at any time, right? I mean, we're seeing Philadelphia, already going back to masks. So who knows what the future holds, but we should, with our solutions together? It does future proof most organizations and how they create and how they distribute content?
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 42:32
Awesome. How do you keep everybody connected with a consistent message?
Erik Wright 42:37
Well, a lot of that comes back to content creation and how that content gets delivered. So if I go back to earlier, it's, it's being able to put replicate how people become used to consuming things, right, people get used to zoom people who are used to teams, the content in it, you know, I think is overlooked a lot of times because it takes a lot to build content. But a consent, you know, having consistent messages delivered in in very similar ways people come very comfortable with it. So one of the benefits of having things like Gmail, even though a lot, nobody ever actually, no, I would be very shocked how many people in the fortune in our client base actually know Qumu by name, it's very small, and I'm sure live use the same, right, because they all really what they get is the result of human we're LiveU. And hopefully, those are really good experience. We really strive for having really good experiences, if you know our name, and it's either really good or it's really bad. So generally, we try to keep our our names, you know, on the good side. And one of the jokes for the auto dealer was, you know, back when we had some challenges on the prime that really didn't work with some very good as they were Qumud. Well, that Qumu now is a great thing. It's an awesome, you know, they were gonna build badges and all kinds of things, hand them out. I think we've been Qumud. And it was a great thing. So there the reg hedging on whether it was HR issues or not with that, but the message is really come down to can we keep them short? Can we keep them very precise? Go back to you know, how many people want to go sit and watch a three hour movie these days? Nobody, right? That's why you have 14 parts of a movie that was one book at one point. So it's building very concise, very short, and to the point content, and if it really content is king. Now, George and I are in the business of creation of that content and digital delivery and tracking of that content. Your contents bad. There's nothing in the world that we can do to save you.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 44:39
I’m not gonna go through your systems and like Well, ah, yeah, exactly.
Erik Wright 44:43
Yeah. So I'm not gonna take I'm not going to take your PowerPoint and make get better.
George Klippel 44:48
Yeah, I think I think to add to that, I mean, our job, you know, on the front end of this, right, we're at the front end of this. And to Erik's point, right, if you don't have you know, a ring light if I turn off my ring light there you go. was half my lighting, right? If your lighting stinks, your lighting stinks. If you don't have a good mic, you don't have a good mic. If your messaging stinks, your messaging stinks, right? We don't control those things. But our job at LiveU is to make sure that you have complete reliability and redundancy. And our technology is not going to fail on that front, right. So that's our job at LiveU. Just to make sure that you have reliability, redundancy and high quality, and that we're going to deliver that regardless of what your message is. So you could have a terrible marketing messages message, we're still going to make you look good at the highest quality that we can, but your message still may stick. And you might have bad lighting, and no backlighting and bad audio, but we're still going to deliver it in the highest quality, your content will look great, your contents great look great. And the Qumu cloud great. And we're going to make sure that that first mile is stunning. And, and beautiful. But you know, obviously we don't control that message in that content. But we're going to make sure it gets there, right, because that's our job. But you know, reliable redundant audio and video in sync. And that's that's the big thing that I think from lessons learned over the last three years. I think people you know, every everybody's come to accept a zoom quality and teams quality and a blue jeans ball, you know what it looks like, you can see it on the news. If somebody's using zoom, immediately they know it. And all of a sudden videos out of sync with audio, they immediately know it but when you know we got LiveU, you've got over 65% of the market. Every broadcast network has a LiveU serve or they take live feeds all the time, every day you see a LiveU hit you see our backpacks all over the place. And you know, when it's a LiveU, you feed, it's not out of sync, it's great quality. And then you can tell when there's a zoom feed or a Teamspeak coming in, you can see it because the quality is lower scale, the lip sync will sometimes fall out. And it's just it's just you're using the wrong tool for a broadcast or broadcast type of thing. And when you're working with these companies, now they want higher level of quality, they want to make sure their messaging is going out both internally and externally. Because CEOs are sometimes asked to go on to CNBC or MSNBC or Fox or other networks, or to communicate with others that are high level executives, and they want to make sure that they look good. Their video and audio stays in sync because that's just so terrible. When it goes out of sync, you know, when you're saying something, and then your voice is three seconds behind. So anyway, just not to belabor the point. But you know, we don't control the messaging or how you look on the camera. And, and as Erik made a joke to my slight loss of hair for these directions, gray. You know, we don't control the look, but we do control the quality.
Erik Wright 47:52
I would say that the trend and this is this goes back to kind of a flexibility of of our relationship is we're seeing a huge amount of pre produced content today, meaning that what is considered a live event is now what we would consider a simulcast. For example, back in the olden days, right where you do, the simulcast, the boxing, it's, but it's some some time for what it was produced. So we're seeing a lot of that actually enter the frame, which is important for us as well, you know, in working with LiveU is because when you're in the field, and you're doing B roll, or you're doing an interview, having that come back, and then be able to put it into something like Qumu and distribute that is just as important as the live stream itself. So you know, we are seeing when you talk about content, and making sure that content hits the mark, it's not always live, there's a lot of times where you know, I'll go, we should go interview the CEO before, get all that down, and then build around, build the rest of the presentation around that. And then do something like this for the moderated q&a. Now, that can still be the CEO. But nobody doesn't. Nobody needs to know that we've already put all that magic in prior to the event. And all we're going to do is essentially push that, that recording back through an encoder and allow it to be viewed as, hey, this is brand new, everybody. This, this could be new if you were sitting in a conference room, and the only way you wouldn't know is you don't see the CEO, because he or she's already in, you know, on to their next meeting while this thing is being sent out. So we are seeing when you start talking about content and making sure that the message and that there's no zero error is being able to pre produce a lot of this content, and then have those as VOD that are being played back for first time and then doing things like moderated q&a And these type of forums or, you know, through Qumu where we've got moderated q&a And you can actually bring those things and answer questions, etc. In a live forum. So you're starting to see those goes, you know, similar to collaborative versus streaming technology starting to gray, you know, we're really starting to see that black and white become gray, because So organizations are starting to figure out, hey, I can make this really professional, I can make sure that there's zero errors, nobody's gonna say anything bad, the lighting is gonna be great. You know, all of that thing can be done and avoid a lot of the things that you you might potentially have in a live event. So just those are some of the trends we're seeing.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 50:29
Awesome, we do have a couple questions that have rolled in. One is, is there a talkback or intercom between the multiple locations?
Erik Wright 50:36
Yeah, that's great. George, you want to take that one from a LiveU perspective?
George Klippel 50:40
Yeah, sure. So all of our units come with if be built in. So that's direct comms to like, the anchor or the talent, if you will, from your control room. But we also have what's called Audio connect, that allows multiple types of connections, one way two, way, intercom, or one to many, or many to many. So there's a couple of options that you have when you start talking about talkback, or communications between multiple locations. So it absolutely does exist, then you can add that into the mix in any way, shape, or form that you kind of like ends on your workflow.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 51:18
Awesome. Well, what that mean, that was a robust conversation. And like in all of these questions that are coming in, there are some questions about connecting. So yes, we'll make sure connections are made on the back end, no worries there. We do have one more here. What is the future of the LiveU solo? Using LRT increasing enterprise level solutions?
George Klippel 51:45
Oh, boy, that's good question. So the Solo has some exciting news that you'll be hearing about that I'm embargoed to talk about on this webcast. Right now. So you'll be hearing about that shortly. I think the timing on that is probably right after NAB. So I'm not going to speak any further on that on this call. But stay tuned, you'll be hearing about that news after NAB.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 52:14
Awesome. And then is this something that can be integrated with a social app live or like Amazon live?
Erik Wright 52:21
Yeah, so from a from a Qumu's perspective, we don't have native integration to those. But you absolutely can embed our player. For example, when you start talking about third parties, they're built to manage their own stuff. So if you look at YouTube, we're not populating YouTube, you're actually taking video and putting it into YouTube, for example. We have essentially as a enterprise platform, you know, ideas of widgets and playlists, for example. So being able to take content and embedding that in other locations. So we would actually be the back end of those versus the third parties that you might use, like a like an Amazon or, or a YouTube type or a face, Facebook type engagement will feed those will be able to surface that content wherever you want it, but it wouldn't be actually served up by those those third parties. Hopefully that answers the question, but if not certainly reach out to me. And we can we can dive into that a little bit more.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 53:19
Make the connection? Absolutely. Well, huge. Thanks, Erik. And George, awesome information. Greatly appreciate taking the time. educating the community always appreciated. We encourage a follow up conversation with the Qumu and LiveU team. So definitely take the time to do that'd be worth the time to learn more. And I'd like to have a conversation with you as well. That's how we get the Intel for our future events. Again, Tiffany@bwgconnect.com. So with that it's a wrap everybody have a fantastic week. Stay safe. Take care. We hope to see you at a future events. And again, thank you so much, Erik and George, greatly appreciate it.
Erik Wright 53:57
Thanks Tiffany.