Gene Sudduth, National Sales Director for North America and Gianluca Bertuzzi, Sales Manager Africa & Latin America, shared their opinions about the effects of the pandemic on the industry over the last year in the IABM Special report.

Gianluca Bertuzzi
Gianluca Bertuzzi, Sales Manager Africa & Latin America

Market change

“I’m not sure I’d say that things have fundamentally changed, but there is much more interest in cloud-based products that can be easily accessed, scaled and used from anywhere, preferably with a simple web browser. The tendency is to postpone investments due to a reduction of the budgets; nevertheless clients keep inquiring about the product and they try to overcome the obstacles because they know they have to modernize.”

Company change

Octopus has supported work from anywhere operations for a long time and we’re bringing new products to market that promise to provide even better tools to work with. The company was coping well with the situation even before the pandemic, through innovation and the creation of new systems like iReporterKo:r and improving the existing Octopus NRCS. Instead of shrinking we grew organically and increased marketing.

There is always a need to work with our customers to add functionalities and to improve efficiencies in every workflow. Another prominent driver is the constant pressure to reduce expenses, both CAPEX and OPEX. Acceleration in the realm of technology and new ways of thinking about content creation among broadcasters and publishers are changing the needs and landscape of players in the market.”

Gene Sudduth
Gene Sudduth, National Sales Director for North America

 

Long term effects

“Yes, I believe that we’re seeing another permanent shift in our industry. The broadcasting industry has been quite the same for a long time; now there are changes which will influence the near- and long-term future. Innovation is paving the road for a more collaborative way of working at distance but also better and more effective content creation.”

 

 

What’s next?

“We believe in crowd journalism and for that we have created iReporter as video gathering platform and Ko:r, a brand new, cloud-based collaboration and planning tool, to our flagship product, the Octopus X newsroom collaboration system. This will boost content creation and open new horizons for clients who want to be market leaders and monetize from bigger inflow of videos. AI will be even more present in our technologies in order to facilitate and streamline workflows. The interoperability between our systems and third-party systems joined with cloud architecture will generate new opportunities also for businesses outside the broadcasting industry.”

Read the full IABM Special report here.

Share this article on: