The Record - Issue 21: Summer 2021

104 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om T he Covid-19 pandemic has caused widespread disruption across almost all industries, and this has been no different in the field of content production. With demand for content only continuing to grow, the pressure to adapt quickly to the new ways of working that the pandemic necessitated was particularly high. Plans for the adoption of new technologies, particularly those enabled by the cloud, had to be accelerated quickly. Such was the impact, says Rainer Kellerhals, managing director of media and communications EMEA at Microsoft, that there was a potential for the industry to be forced into a complete stop. “It has impacted content productionmassively, in some cases to a point that production was in danger of grinding to a halt,” says Kellerhals. “Picture this – creative staff in publishing, TV and film production, and in advertising who had been using high-powered workstations in their companies’ offices to edit graphics, videos, and layouts, and who had met with editors-in-chief, with directors, or with their clients at these offices to review the finished content and get it approved, from one day to the next couldn’t access these offices and these workstations anymore. Similarly, studios for live-action TV and film production had to shut down, stopping many ongoing production projects. It’s fair to say that the pandemic caused a major business disruption for content produc- tion in TV and filmmaking, and at the least jeopardised content crea- tion in all media verticals.” Media24 had planned to migrate 4,000 Office 365 accounts with only four months to plan before the pandemic hit, complicating an already As the Covid-19 pandemic threatened to bring content production to a halt, Rainer Kellerhals discusses how Microsoft tools have helped media companies to adapt to new ways of working BY A L E X SM I TH Producing pressure under F E ATUR E