Copa90 talks on why cloud based solutions are vital during this time
Gabrielle Skidmore:
Tell me about your company and how you handled the shift to working remotely?
Barry Flanigan:
COPA90 is a media business focused on football, so soccer, as you would say in the states. We’ve effectively built a network that reaches millions of fans around the world. We’re headquartered in London, but we deliver our content to a global audience. We reach about 100 million funds around the world. Pre-lockdown, we were creating probably around 2,000 to 3,000 bits of content a month. A lot of our content is video centric, so it ranges from at one end of the scale, what we would call longer form films. So anything that’s sort of 30-40 minute plus video content that tells the stories of football and fan culture.
Barry Flanigan:
We place much of that content on our own website or onto YouTube. We are also all the way through to the other end of the scale, which is short, snackable feed-based content, that goes on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and everything in between. We describe the Copa90 brand as being how football feels. What we mean by that, is that you go to traditional sports media, to find out what’s happening in the game of football itself, for example the scores, and the lineups, and the stats. But you come to COPA90 to understand how you feel about it. It’s that emotional connection with the game, that world of fan culture. It matters so much to young fans in particular, that’s where we can focus the content that we create.
Barry Flanigan:
The model is not based so much on match streaming, and actually showing football rights, although we do actually do that in places with partners. Our goal is to bring to life the whole world of football from a fan’s perspective. So the reason that’s relevant to the answer to your question is that we, through this period, although there’s been no football on by and large, although the game just returned last night actually in the UK. The English Premier League restarted last night with the first couple of games, and all behind closed doors. It is slowly starting to come back. Since our model is less based on actually showing football, there’s still a lot of fan stories and content that we’ve been able to create. Fans don’t stop being a fan of the game just because the game is not actually taking place.
Barry Flanigan:
We’ve been continuing to make content through the whole lockdown period. We’ve inevitably had to change some of the workflows and the ways that we actually worked, because we can’t send crews on production shoots, and we were not all together in the office creating content. We put in place quite a few workflows to support remote working. One of the things that’s been very crucial to that is our cloud infrastructure, which is what you at IPV focus on I believe.
Gabrielle Skidmore:
Yes.
Barry Flanigan:
In 2018, we made the decision to move a lot of our content workflows into the cloud. It was really important for us to have a much more robust way for all of our archive content, as well as the new content that we were creating to be managed because up until that point, like a lot of production and media companies, we had a pretty fragmented approach to the way that we were managing our archive assets, and it was spread across Dropbox and portable hard drives.
Barry Flanigan:
The initial move in 2018 to get into the cloud was to have a much better way of managing our archive, as we’ve been making content since 2012. We have about 200 to 300 terabytes worth of footage and owned IP, and that goes all the way back to 2012. There’s a lot of content in there that we wanted to manage more effectively, and have that available for us, as we reuse a lot of archived content in the fresh content that we make, as well as a lot of that content is evergreen. It’s less about the actual matches, and it’s more about the stories of the clubs and the players. There’s still a lot of content that still resonates, even though it was made two or three years ago.
Barry Flanigan:
That decision in 2018 put us in stronger position going into an unprecedented crisis like this, because we already had all of our footage in the cloud, tagged with metadata so we could access it easily. We could repackage and look at ways that we could use the archive content, at a time when we couldn’t shoot a lot of fresh content. The first sort of big shift I guess, is by being in the cloud and having that archive content readily available to our editors, which made it much easier for us to be able to continue to publish a lot of the archive content at a time when we couldn’t go and send people on traditional production shoots. That kept a volume of content flowing through into our channels.
Barry Flanigan:
A commercial opportunity was also from that content, because we could package and license it out to distribution partners around the world. For example, we work with Sky, one of the main broadcasters in the UK and a customer of IPV. We deliver our COPA90 channel onto their on-demand platform, Sky Q. The cloud workflows that we have are quite important to that, because we can create feeds of content that come from our media asset management system, and make sure that there’s no interruption to the content that flows out to partners like that, even though we’re not in the office. So first thing is being able to use the archive in a more effective way. That will very definitely continue beyond this crisis. That’s something that we’ve always planned to do with our cloud infrastructure.
Barry Flanigan:
The second shift is for the new content that we’re making. We’ve had to think creatively about ways to produce content remotely without having the luxury of being able to go on a shoot. Like many other businesses, we’ve been getting used to various workflows around Zoom, and other tools that enable us to create content remotely, but then have it edited centrally by our team. Some of those formats that we’ve created, have been our own editorial formats, but we’ve actually done a lot of interesting work with brand sponsors that we work with. One of our main revenue streams is working with sponsors who are heavily involved in football sponsorship, like Visa, EA, and Pepsi.
Barry Flanigan:
EA is a good example of this. We created a format with them called, “stay at home, play together”, which was using player ambassadors that we were able to shoot content with remotely. We put in place quite a lot of workflows to be able to effectively create an interview format that was hosted by Rio Ferdinand, who is a well-known ex player here in the UK. He was then hosting a FIFA tournament with other players, who were then playing each other in a challenge format. The point of that content was less about the actual game of FIFA, and it was much more of a good format that enabled us to create content with the players interacting with each other, and talking about general things about their life, that then was relevant to fans, that we could put out on the channel. That was also a commercial bit of work as well, that supports EA’s overall brand strategy.
Barry Flanigan:
The second big shift in the business has been learning to create remote content in ways that we probably haven’t had to think about before. If we were doing that format previously, we would have sent a production crew along to shoot the player, to create content on location. Obviously now, we’re trying to get used to effectively using remote tools. Vision mixing in the cloud, for example, and bringing all that together into a format that works. I think the third element that’s been interesting for us, it’s always been core to COPA90’s model, that the content doesn’t just come from us. We’ve built out a fan network, and we call it our creator network. We encourage fans around the world to create content on our behalf, to tell their stories own on COPA90.
Barry Flanigan:
That’s been a really interesting element during a time like this, when football fans around the world are experiencing all sorts of emotions. We’ve had a flow of content that comes into the business, from the fan network around the world. Our cloud infrastructure is quite key because we can pull that content, then we can manage it within the cloud so it’s readily available and is tagged with metadata. This makes it available to our editors to then on our channels. Just hearing and seeing the type of content that comes from fans around the world and gives them a sense of what they’re feeling around the game not being on. Linked to that, we do a lot of strategy and insights work. Beyond just making content, we help brands with research around fans.
Barry Flanigan:
Given it’s been such an unprecedented time, we’ve actually been helping some of our brand partners understand how fans feel at the moment. We’ve been doing various research studies with our fan community, and we then kind of bring to life those insights and we deliver it to our brand partners. That’s been an interesting sort of ongoing piece of work that we’re doing with our fan community. The main point is even though there’s been no football on, it doesn’t mean that fans stop being fans. We’ve been thinking of particularly using a cloud infrastructure to create content, and reuse our archive in innovative ways, that enable us to still maintain a flow of output to the audience, and also involving the audience in the content that we create.
Barry Flanigan:
Hopefully, we’re not back on lockdown and there aren’t subsequent waves, but you never know how this is all going to play out, so we need to be prepared for anything. On the more technical and content operations side, we made smart decisions early on to move to the cloud, which are now paying dividends at a time like this. I think we’d be in a much more difficult position during this time if we hadn’t made those investments in cloud infrastructure 18-24 months ago. It would just make our day to day that much more difficult without having that cloud infrastructure in place. We’re very glad that we did that!
Barry Flanigan:
Looking forward, we haven’t moved fully to the cloud, so we don’t do end-to-end full editing in the cloud. We still edit remotely, and then upload the content to the cloud. So we’re not doing full editing through the whole kind of workflow. That’s definitely something that we’re interested in going forward because that would make it even more efficient to be able to effectively have our editors, who are all working from home at the moment, be able to actually edit in the cloud. At the moment, we’re still kind of pulling files down for them to edit. We use Adobe Premiere as our main final editing tool. So we are still doing that remotely, finding ways to get files to them. And then that’s being uploaded back into the cloud.
Barry Flanigan:
I’d love to take us to a place where we’re actually going that one step farther. And I know there’s many media businesses that are looking at this at the moment. Given coping with a situation where for some time it might be a case where people are working remotely, and particularly producers and editors are working remotely. So how we can continue to just streamline the process of making it as easy as possible for them to produce content.
Gabrielle Skidmore:
It sounds like you were really well set up for the whole change. Bravo. You were definitely lucky you were so well prepared.
Barry Flanigan:
In some ways we’re sort of a disruptive business. We don’t have the luxuries of some of the big broadcasters in terms of budgets and technical resources. We keep our model quite lean, but COPA90 has really sort of honed it’s model, through major tournaments, like the World Cup, and the Euros back in 2006. I think it was because of that experience of creating content rapidly during a major tournament, it meant that it was a more obvious. The content getting created by fans around the world, and it had been distributed out to lots and lots of different places,made it a more compelling business case for us to move to the cloud early.
Barry Flanigan:
Major tournament experience has ironically, put us in a good place at a time when there aren’t any major tournaments. It’s going to be some time before that’s back. Since we put the infrastructure in place then, it actually led to us being able to cope much better with this current situation.
Gabrielle Skidmore:
Were there any technical challenges, or issues trying in getting your team used to working remotely?
Barry Flanigan:
I describe us as being quite adaptable. We couldn’t have anticipated it. Again, we don’t have the luxuries of some bigger, more traditional broadcasters. But one of the things it does mean is that we move and react very quickly to things. Compared to some bigger businesses, we were able to adapt relatively quickly to the sudden new way of working. That being said, it still took us a week or so for us to get our heads wrapped around this. I think you can have the best infrastructure in the world, but there’s still no getting away from the limitations of people’s home broadband speeds at some part of the workflow chain.
Barry Flanigan:
So that was a little bit of a challenge just initially. Just working out, literally, who had good connection and who didn’t have good connection. We put a VPN in place to help out. We’re also using file transfer tools like Signiant, that just make it easier for our editors and our production staff to transfer files between the business. The first couple of weeks was a mixture of everybody being a little bit shellshocked, combined with just trying to get used to new workflows.
Barry Flanigan:
Even beyond the technology, just trying to figure out when do we need a Zoom? When do we not need a Zoom? Tools like Slack, for example, that we’ve been using for quite a while, have really come into their own in this time, because just enabling us to organize projects. Whereas previously, we may have had a meeting to organize things, using tools like Slack to keep everybody in sync. We’re trying to use Zoom and Hangout in an appropriate way. As I’m sure many people have learned, if you’re on back-to-back Zoom or Hangout calls from 9:00 in the morning, till 6:00 in the evening, it’s quite tiring.
Barry Flanigan:
There’s some things that can be done over Slack, and don’t need my team to literally be on a video conference. Much like the rest of the world, we’re still figuring it out.
Barry Flanigan:
March was about just getting the logistics set and making sure that everybody was able to work from home. We also needed to make sure that everybody was healthy and can look after families. We were settled down a little bit by April, and learning that this was the new reality.
Barry Flanigan:
Next we will start to create our output and manage this next period of phase 2 when football is back, but in a limited way, since fans still won’t be allowed in the stadium. At some point, hopefully we get to phase three, which is either later on in the year, or going into next year. Hopefully we will be through this initial piece of the crisis, and things will have started to come back to some form of normality. We’re already thinking about what we’ll do around that shift in the business as well.
Barry Flanigan:
We are liking the flexibility of remote work. It’s probably something that we will want to continue with in some form. We don’t need everybody in the office everyday. Quite often we have people out on location, with fans or at games. We’ve always worked in that way anyway, but it raises interesting questions around how much of the workflows that we’ve put in place should we actually continue with, even at a time when this crisis has passed, and we’re all able to go back to working like we did before?
Barry Flanigan:
Coming out of this, it will be interesting to see what we have learned, and what improvements we will make to our way of working. Being a business focused on football and sports, there’s a whole load of technical and creative innovation that this period is really accelerating in terms of remote cloud-based working. It will be fascinating to see the games coming back behind closed doors, without fans there. How will they recreate the fan experience when fans can’t actually be in the stadium? We’ve already seen a lot of interesting experiments and technical tests around that.
Barry Flanigan:
The fans who are in the stadium have always been the core way we look at football, but there’s also a much bigger audience for the game all around the world. The bigger clubs have global fan bases, and much of that fan base will never have the opportunity to be in the stadium. Now everybody is in that boat, where nobody can be in the stadium. How do you bring to life the atmosphere and the emotion of the game for people that are watching it remotely? I think we’ll see a lot of creative innovation around that space. The technical vendors who can support some of that thinking, are going to have an interesting place coming out of this.
Gabrielle Skidmore:
Do you have any tips and tricks for other companies that would be in this situation that maybe weren’t as prepared as you? Such as, “Hey, going forward, try this,” or, “Don’t try this?”
Barry Flanigan:
It’s probably not the most inspirational message, but I would just bang the drum for cloud-based workflows. I know just from being in the industry and my network, many of more traditional companies that were hesitant about moving activity to the cloud, and unsure of the business case. There are a lot of benefits by being in the cloud as a content company, and more importantly, I think this period shows that cloud based processes are no longer just a luxury, but a necessity.
Barry Flanigan:
And to echo the point I said earlier – people don’t stop being a fan of a sport just because the sport isn’t on, and there are many creative and innovative ways to feed that fandom. If anything, what we found is that fans crave that community at a time like this. It’s the importance of sports beyond just the game itself. I can’t remember who said it, but somebody said that, “football is really not important at a time like this, but it’s the most important of the not important things.”
Barry Flanigan:
The point that they were trying to get across was that there’s that sense of community that comes from being a fan of a sport is now more important than ever, when people need that sense of community to get them through these times that we live in. I think that’s where organizations that are involved in sport have a real role to play. It’s beyond just covering the sport. It’s how can any business involved in sport help foster that sense of community at a time like this? I think that’s a thought provoking piece for anybody involved in sports at the moment to think about, which as we progress through this and come out of this, how do we keep that sense of community going for fans around the world?
**Content edited for readability