I love the Thanksgiving weekend. It’s the one time of the year when most of the USA decides to shut down and have a little leisure time. For me, it means that my inbox tends to drop by several hundred emails before the madness of the working week starts again:

I am sure that the native American Turkey feels less good about the season. There are many reports of a shortage of fresh turkeys and that despite this shortage, the average US consumer still prefers to spend $20 on a bulk farmed bird instead of $300 on a free range hand reared bird that has taken a year of natural living to reach its market weight.
 
Interesting times for turkeys, but also for the media industry. Forcing 100x the “natural” number of turkeys through a farm may raise ethical concerns, but forcing 100x the “traditional” number of files through a media facility is now becoming the norm for many who have decided to take the plunge and go fully automated and file based. We know what happens to all the turkeys – there is an endless marathon that starts with the enormous roast bird on the table, followed by turkey soup, turkey sandwiches, turkey stew and baked Alaska with turkey (my son’s experimental cooking!).
 
According to this excellent article on yahoo, it would appear that the great American public is also in for a marathon this weekend. Many, many channels have decided that now the content is all digitised, it can be delivered in one great orgy of content where you can choose your channel, settle into your couch and then watch several complete series of your favourite comedy / drama / movie franchise / cooking show / documentary / …. without ever having to move. Obviously there is the need to eat more turkey and visit the lavatory, but essentially it seems that the Thanksgiving weekend is a TV highlight of the year.
 
I am encouraged to see that many of the shows and many of the channels have used or are using AmberFin software to deliver these marathons. Our whole raison d’etre is to allow a media company to quickly, efficiently and economically move large volumes of material from a cost centre (like an archive) to a profit centre (like a playout facility). Getting into the file domain and delivering resilient, reliable workflows is key to doing this profitably. If you’d like some free training on the fundamentals of enterprise workflow design (especially around transcoding), then please sign up for the next webinar in my Bruce’s Shorts series. I won’t pitch product at you, but I will tell you some of the theory and good practise around getting your business goals implemented in realistic timescales at low cost.
 
Save me some turkey!
 
‘till next time.

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