Are REMI Production and Hybrid Events Here to Stay?

Learn more about REMI production at Streaming Media East 2022.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Casey Charvet: At Gigcasters, we were edging around a remote production for a number of years, like a lot of other technology providers. And we had begun installing certain pieces certain equipment, software packages in our data center footprint, incorporating it into our workflow for our regular clients. But we didn't really start using it to its full potential until COVID. And I think that drive came from--we work with a lot of agencies and these agencies are the ones that work directly with brands and some of these brands are pretty big. And I think the agencies realized pretty quickly back around March and April, that all of their scheduled activations and all of these live events that they had planned for the year were just not going to happen.

They started having conversations with us about what would be possible and to their credit, they got really, really creative and innovative on the narrative side. andso they, they started thinking in terms of like, well we want to do things like virtual wine tastings now, or virtual cooking demonstrations you know tour around with our different brand ambassadors and do a stream every week rotating through our different brand ambassadors at their house or their kitchen or, or what have you. And it sort of changed their model from doing maybe a couple of large activations at an in-person event a year to doing this much wider, more frequent set of activations, still with the intent of going to YouTube and Facebook and and social media destinations there, or standing up a microsite with a white label player.

But really what we saw was the frequency went way up. So, all of a sudden our production calendar had times blocked off all over it. And we needed to expand our footprint a lot to accommodate that as well as staffing. But then the ask in terms of production started to go up as well, because a lot of what we were doing before is we would just take the feed and handle the distribution and the onsite crew would do the rest of the production and that quickly transformed into, okay, can you do a pre-roll video? Can you do a lower-third? Can you do background music? What, okay, what can't you do remotely, if we're getting you the feed and the feeds of a good quality and things like bonded cellular and good modern protocols to really crack that open for us, by the way.

And so that asks has got an increasingly more complex up to the point where we're now looking at building virtual sets and, and you know bringing in participants from other areas as well, and dressing that up and putting graphics around that and really making everything coherent from a brand perspective for these activations. And so I think that the narrative has fundamentally changed that, that these agencies are looking to tell for their brands. And I think that's going to stick around because they like it. And all of the performance indicators are really high. Like we see, we see engagements. If I plot a minute by minute graph for some of these streams, if it's an hour cooking demonstration, we see it goes up and it plateaus for an hour, and then it drops off.

So we have our long engagement which for a lot of these things is unheard of for agencies. So we're really able to make pretty compelling content. And it's cool to see, if you're in the cooking scene, for example and you--like all these James Beard award-winning chefs and you see them cooking from their home kitchen it's pretty neat. Or if we do a hybrid, there we go. If we bring in one chef that's in Harlem and another chef that's in Baltimore and they're talking to each other and they're making the same dish at the same time, that's impossible to pull off in any other way. So I think now that it's sort of like saying once content, producers, and storytellers started thinking about things, when they switched from radio to TV and they started thinking about, okay, how do we, how do we actually leverage it?