I was very pleased to be asked to give a presentation about my FCP experiences at the first ever Apple Broadcast Summit held in Nice 20th-21st November 2007.

It was billed as a forum for sharing experiences across broadcasters and that exactly what it was, with an Apple twist of course.


Click here for guest & speaker list

First up was Apple’s Cliff Smith who gave us some interesting trends, facts and figures about Apple. From the dark Amelio days back in ’97 (System 8 for all those geeks) Apple has sinced bounced right back ten years later in’ 07. An amazing recovery due to great products, design and forward thinking. Cliff also put my Keynote skills to shame!

Lionel Paillet from Apple then talked about ‘Apple in Media’ It is interesting the fact that if there is one area that Apple have got a really good grip on, that’s tv, video & music.

Third was Paul Cheesbrough, CIO of The Telegraph, although you might recognise him from his previous job where he was head of new technology at the BBC. It was interesting to hear his slant on managing creatives & how companies have to adapt.

, David Peto from Unit , the largest fully Mac based finishing house gave us the story on how his company was born. I didn’t realise that before Unit started he had unsuccessfully walked round Soho trying to find a post house to put his FCP project on tape!



All the speakers sat on the same table at dinner the previous night and obviously talked shop for most of the evening. Now, here comes the amazing bit. On the table was Graham Long from Unisys, who initially I thought I didn’t have much in common with on the business side. How wrong was I! When Graham gave his 45 minute chat I was stunned to see so many parallels there were between TV/editing and his company outsourcing IT. Both industries are getting bigger, but the infrastructure is getting smaller. Unisys suggest that the companies staff buy their own laptops and encourage working from home. This keeps the cost down. I suppose if you take it to its furthest extent, it would be possible to have a virtual company with no physical office at all.

Next came a panel of system integrators, Silex, Pharos and Marquis. Russell Grute from Pharos told us about Mediator which looks a really interesting media management (I hate that phrase) tool that uses Oracle. Interesting that one of his clients is one of mine, TWI!

Well, after lunch it was yours truly for three quarters of an hour followed by Brendon Kenny from VK Media who was promoting Jummp . What is Jummp? It is an industry group working to establish standards to make micro-navigation of media possible. Or in laymans terms, enabling the end user to find the goals quickly in a football match. Interesting and certainly worth keeping an eye on for the future.

Lastly, Mark Rogers from Apple rounded off the day with an impressive off the cuff speech. A good and motivating end to an excellent day.

It was really worthwhile attending and listening to other companies and how they use or integrate Apple software & hardware. Sometimes it can be a bit isolated editing or installing, so it was good to meet a lot of people from similar and different areas to exchange information, stories and contacts.

I hope that Apple will do this again next year, maybe on a bigger scale as I’m sure this event will gain popularity.

Name

Email

Title

Comment

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment