Roger Chiang on Scaling content production at KQED

Season 1, Episode 1

Roger Chiang, Director of Content Production at KQED, divulges the secrets of how he & his team reel in the challenges of producing media assets for 54 programs that run the gamut of TV, Radio, digital, social media including TikTok & on-demand.

Together with the hosts, Brian & Rahul, Roger reviews the scope of content production at KQED. How media asset production has changed over the years. The role technology plays in keeping various moving parts together. What pain points do tools like Evolphin and other media orchestration tools solve for KQED.

Transcript

Read the full transcript of the podcast below:

Laura 00:00:10 You’re listening to the Real In Post-Production podcast, the show that focuses on post-production workflows for media asset managers, video editors, motion graphics artists and graphics designers. Enjoy.

Brian 00:00:26 Hello and welcome to the first in a series of podcasts, focused on media asset management in industry. My name is Brian Ahearn. I am the Chief Executive of Evolphin software, and today I’m joined by Rahul Bhargava, who is the CTO and founder of Evolphin. I’m also happy to be joined by Roger Chiang, who is the Director of Production and Technology at KQED.

Rahul 00:00:59 Thank you, Brian. This is Rahul Bhargava and we are very happy to have Roger today join us. Roger is one of our major customer in San Francisco using Media Asset Management for public broadcasting. So my first question to Roger is, Roger, can you share a little bit about your role at KQED as the director of, content production and technology?

Roger 00:01:22 Sure. Hey, well first let me say welcome to Brian and Rahul. We’re doing this here at KQED Studios and the Mission District of San Francisco, and it’s so great to have you here, right in the heart of all of our great production work here. I am the Director of Production and Technology at KQED and here at KQED, we have close to 60 different types of productions that include, radio, television. We’re putting a huge effort and focusing on our growth on digital video content production as well as a dozen or so podcast production. And so my job here is to make sure that all the teams and our video and audio teams are supported. They have the technology and the equipment that they need to get their work done. Everything from the Evolphin MAM to the Adobe applications, to any other plugins that we have, as well as supporting our remote field production teams when they go out into the field, with the cameras, audio equipment, lighting, any handheld recording, audio recording devices to go record those great podcast interviews. My job is to make sure that all of the teams are equipped that the production schedules are tight and we do all this on budget or preferably under budget. So that’s my big role here.

Rahul 00:02:31 Yeah, that sounds really exciting Roger, and I’m sure this would be quite stressful with all the budgets and schedule. So if you can share some thoughts about the scope of content production at KQED because you talked about a number of different shows, so there must be a lot of media assets being generated. And if you can talk about the scope and scale, that’ll be fantastic.

Roger 00:02:52 Yeah, we have two Emmy winning television programs that we produce right here out of the station. One is a weekly news magazine show done in studio. The second one is a combination of studio and remotes, where it’s a popular restaurant show called “Check Please Bay Area”, where we have guests come in, talk about their favorite restaurants in the Bay Area. And we also send out a crew to go out and film on location at those restaurants, all the great food that we see on TV. So we produce those two TV shows here. And then we have five digital video content shows everything from Deep Look, which is our 4K science show, which we get into like the nitty-gritty of things like bugs and plants. It’s really fun and has a global audience of millions of viewers. And then we do, artistic programs like If Cities Could Dance, where we focus on different types of dance methods around the country.

Roger 00:03:43 And then we do some education programming as well. And so all of that is produced right here. And that’s all of our video content production. And then we’ll get into it a little bit later, but we’re also, as mentioned, we’re gonna focus on digital video growth. That’s where the trends are. People are watching less and less scheduled television these days. They want to go to mobile devices to catch their favorite programs. And so we’re experimenting there and what we could talk a little bit about that more later, about what platforms we’re distributing to, but we have all that. And then we also have a lot of great, podcast production, that original podcast production that we do here as well.

Rahul 00:04:22 So in terms of the team size here, can you share with us how many people are involved at various stages of production of these shows and pre-production, post-production team sizes?

Roger 00:04:32 Yeah. We’re a small and nimble teamwork. We’re a public media station, so we are small and nimble. Our production teams are maybe five-six, that includes producers and executive producers. On the TV side, we only have two post-production editors. On our digital side, it’s more of a indie production kind of operation that we have here. We have small teams that are not only the producers, but the camera operators and the editors and the publishers. And so they all work in their small entrenched teams of maybe four or five per program.

Rahul 00:05:04 And, how’s the workflow these days after the pandemic? I’m sure a lot of your editors and folks are working from home. You might have a hybrid model. So if you can talk to us about how you’re managing the challenges of people working from home.

Roger 00:05:17 Yeah, and we’re still having challenges of people coming back to work. I mean, the pandemic is still around and people are still afraid of it. And we got the winter season coming up soon. We’re recording this here in November of 2022. And, and we don’t know what the future of, the weather, and, the pandemic’s gonna bring. So people are still a little bit hesitant to come in the office. You know, we acquired the Evolphin MAM back in January of 2020 and we had it installed right at the start of the pandemic. And we built this thing as an on-prem system where we planned to have all of our editors come in and work at their workstations to edit. But then that all went awry with, with the pandemic, and we quickly, shuffled and we had to re-engage the Evolphin team to say, Hey, let’s bring in the cloud component.

Roger 00:06:03 And we have a hybrid model right now where we are editing and doing some cloud storage with Evolphin, but then we’re archiving on-premises here. But it’s working well. The biggest challenge that we have, despite the system, because the system is running efficiently, people are loving it. And the biggest challenge that we’ve had to date is getting people to adopt it. That’s always the biggest struggle with any organization bringing in any technology piece because people are set in their ways, especially now during a pandemic. People are like, what are we gonna do? Are we gonna stay home or are we gonna go into work? Are we gonna do both? And with the Evolphin cloud method, we have come up with a process where people have the flexibility to do both to work at home or in the office, or a combination of both. And that not only counts for our offline editors, but also our online editors as well as our specialty craft editors who do the 3D 4D graphics, who do the animations, who work in after effects to help bring all that stuff into a single video production.

Rahul 00:07:05 So, I had a question about, your videographers. So we talked about like, they go to sites, restaurants and whatnot. So what are some of the sites, or do you just do this in Bay Area or there are people who might travel for like the science show elsewhere and shoot?

Roger 00:07:21 Yeah, you know, it’s, being a regional public media station most of our productions originate and stay here in in the Bay Area. This is our media audience. But, you know, our digital programming takes us around the country, and sometimes occasionally around the world. And so we have our If Cities Can Dance episode, we are literally going to every, many cities around the country and filming local dance companies that are displaying their local dance moves. And it’s such a fun thing to do to go to New York. Even the outskirts of Washington DC, Miami, Arizona. Our teams are all over the place. And they’ve even gone south to South America to film some, some international dance troupes.

Rahul 00:08:03 So when they travel internationally, do you hire crew freelancers in, let’s say… Roger 00:08:10 Yeah, generally, yeah. Sometimes, we’ll, we will have a producer go down there. We generally bring our equipment, our camera, audio equipment, because we know it, we know the formats, we know the formats that will serve our post production as well. And so yeah, we’ll hire the crew locally, but we’ll sometimes ship our cameras or we’ll give them camera specs of what we need.

Rahul 00:08:31 And these days, are you shooting in 4K or mix off HD 4k? What, what sort of formats and resolutions are you shooting?

Roger 00:08:37 Yeah, our, our producers and editors are preferring 4K because of the flexibility that 4K offers, especially these small and nimble Indie teams that we have. We don’t have a large team to do two, three, four camera shoots. And so the 4K offers us the flexibility to zoom in, zoom out of specific shots, and that’s what we do when we’re producing under budget.

Rahul 00:09:01 Mm-hmm. I think it’ll be great for our audience to also know what sort of cameras and camera card formats are you using? What’s working for you today and what’s not working so well?

Roger 00:09:10 We’re using a couple different camera formats right now. We, our, our preferred cameras right now are the Sony F7 and the Panasonic A7S. The Panasonic A7S gives folks the mobility. It’s almost a handheld size camera just to kind of be quick and nimble. And then the F7 is more of a traditional camera. And on the TV side, we are using the Canon C300 right now, the Mark III, and we have some older traditional cameras. And so we’re, you know, we’re always constantly upgrading our cameras. We’ll probably look into new fleet of cameras in the next year or two.

Rahul 00:09:43 Yeah. I would love to get into the details of post-production, but before that, I wanted to ask you, since you have had over two decades of experience in this field, how have you seen the media production, post-production world change over the last 10 years, or even the last few years? Of course, we talked about the pandemic and the effect it has, but curious to hear your views as things have moved along over the years.

Roger 00:10:06 You know, I’m a big TV person. I was the executive in charge of the long standing TV show called America’s Most Wanted, that was on television for close to 25 years. So I’m a TV guy and I really love TV. But we know that the viewer habits have changed and everybody, especially during that pandemic, are going to mobile devices to, to get their viewing fixed. And so earlier before the pandemic, our distribution model was, we would send our media, our programs to wherever people the audience would go. Whether it was Facebook, Facebook Live, YouTube, we were even in talks and had some distribution with Amazon. But again, those viewing habits have changed and folks are now going primarily to YouTube. That’s our primary platform where we send our video production. We also display it on our own website, go to KQED.org. And then we also go to social media, do shorter clips, shorter episodes on, Facebook, Instagram. And then of course here we are in the era of TikTok. And so we are now just beginning to have teams focus on, producing specifically shortcuts for TikTok.

Rahul 00:11:15 Hmm. That’s really cool. So with TikTok, are videographers just shooting on mobile phones or more casual filming versus using sophisticated cameras?

Roger 00:11:24 Yeah, you know, everybody around the country right now seems to be just using, mobile phones for their devices. And so we’re experimenting with, just the, the highest quality iPhones available. And even the Apple products have their own version of file formats, which we have to convert. It’s not, it’s not your common H.264, H.265 formats. So we’re experimenting them with that. We’re also experimenting with little other handhold devices. There’s a DJI mobile device, it’s a little handheld camera, and sometimes some of these devices have 360 degrees. And so a lot of experimenting going on to see how we can make some efficient TikToks. But then even that workflow is not as simple because when we’re shooting short clips for video, we’re still editing them on Adobe through Evolphin, we’re inserting texts, we’re inserting graphic, we’re graphics, we’re inserting other B-roll or other images to compliment that very, very short TikTok clip. And then we export it out of Evolphin and Adobe and then we email it to ourselves and then we upload it from our mobile devices.

Rahul 00:12:33 So I guess what you’re saying is the post-production workflows are really still very similar. Even if the audience sees a 30 second TikTok video, they might go, wow, this is such a small casual video, it shouldn’t take much to produce that. But the post-production process is still just as complex with animation and graphics involved.

Roger 00:12:52 Are the post-production elements are there. Luckily, because it’s only like a fifteen second clip or twenty second clip, the post production intensity isn’t there, but it’s still there, you know, the folks still have to put some effort into it.

Rahul 00:13:06 Yeah. And all the native videos that you’re shooting, even phone these days have pretty high resolution. They can shoot in 4K 60 frames per second.

Roger 00:13:14 Right.

Rahul 00:13:14 And some can even probably go beyond that. So in terms of file sizes, the file sizes that you and your team are seeing, they’re probably still just as large from the challenge of managing media at scale.

Roger 00:13:26 Yeah, luckily for these smaller videos, like for TikTok, the file sizes are, are much smaller, which is great, but you know, sometimes there are many clips that we sift through. And so maybe the volume is, is there not as quite as large as some of our traditional productions, but the volume may be consistent.

Rahul 00:13:45 Mm-hmm. Roger, we would love to hear your thoughts on technology and how it’s keeping things together at KQED.

Roger 00:13:54 You know, we are such a diverse organization. On the TV side, we are editing in Avid, but we’re pushing our files to Evolphin. On the digital side we are ingesting and, and editing and archiving all in, Evolphin and Adobe. And then on the podcast side, we are editing an Adobe Audition and then pushing to Evolphin. And so the great thing about this Media Asset Management, the Evolphin Media Asset Management tool is that it all gets put together and it’s such a collaborative process. The essence, the mechanics of post-production editing, they’re all the same. There’s the string out, there’s the offlining, there’s the specialty editing, then there’s the onlining, and then there’s the publishing. That’s all the same regardless of what platform you’re doing. But what the MAM technology is enables us to do is to be more nimble, to work where we need to work, to be able to collaborate more, share media and actually work and diversify the content of our programs to have an expanded use of our shows.

Roger 00:15:02 One of the great things that we’re doing here at KQED is we’re taking our archival media. We, the station started in 1954, and we have tons and decades and decades worth of great media that is very historic and very, very valuable. And we are in the process right now of piloting an archive show to bring back the history of the San Francisco Bay area and show how topical a lot of those topics are, are still today. And the MAM has served a great value of being a tool to not only quickly research, you know, decades of clips, but also to pull, extract that those clips from our library and then put it straight into our MAM for editing, and then work with our co-producers that may be here on site or offsite and string together a story about these archival stories and then put it in a post. It’s really fun. It’s been a really fun process.

Rahul 00:15:57 Yeah. I’m sorry, we forgot to talk about archive because I know that was a really big deal for KQED to take all those assets that were sitting on your various NAS and SAN and then bring them into an asset management system. So can you share with us some stats on, perhaps number of assets that you ingested from your archive and number of hours of videos that are now accessible from the MAM?

Roger 00:16:21 You know Rahul, we, we have, as mentioned, we have decades and decades of archival footage. And we, we still have tons of media that are still on 16 millimeter film. We still have tons of media that are on CDs and older tape formats. And we’re in the process of investing in digitizing all of that stuff. To date. We have about 300 LTO archive tapes of all of our media and, and we still have enough film that stretches between San Francisco and Santa Barbara to compile and digitize. So we have tons of, tons of film and then we have tons of cassette tapes of all, all of our audio productions. And so I always love pushing my team to get as much of that stuff into the MAM, have it library cataloged, put all the metadata in there, that metadata is so rich and valuable.

Roger 00:17:10 And when folks come to us, whether they’re trying to do a historical archival story here at the station, or there’s a breaking news event where we need to refer to a historic event, a historic person. You know, we’re right here in the Bay Area, we have the first speaker of the United States House of Representatives based here, Nancy Pelosi. She’s the representative. And think of all the rich archival material we have of just Nancy Pelosi, you know, the first woman and African American and Asian American Vice President of the United States had her political roots here in the United States. So we have a lot of Kamala Harris footage. And then we have the legendary governor here, Jerry Brown. We have tons and tons of video and audio archives with him. We actually did a archival encyclopedia series with, Jerry Brown, where he recited his legendary governorship here and under two different terms. And so we take all that stuff, put in our archives, and we just have rich, rich media to share out with our public.

Rahul 00:18:07 And now that you have all this rich media in the MAM, talk to us about how metadata is utilized at KQED to help you and your archivists and editors find all this fantastic content.

Roger 00:18:20 Oh, so metadata is so vitally important. I have our, our station media manager and archivists, all that’s all he does is hounds people all day long to put the right metadata in, whether it’s the person that we’re interviewing the day, the time, the decade, even to the nuance of location. And I have some wizards on our archive team that can pick a street corner in San Francisco from like 30 years ago and recognize that and say, that’s that street corner here in San Francisco. And that’s where this event occurred. And that’s how we’re gonna catalog that into our MAM system. It makes not only for easy searching, but it makes it for a more better sharing of our media with the public as well as the National Archives. National Archives, we have a partnership with the National Archives and they’re, and, and they have access to our library as well. That’s how Richard is.

Rahul 00:19:07   Wow. Yeah. Those are some great examples of how KQED is employing Media Asset Management to basically streamline your video workflows with all this archival content. So in, in the next, section of this conversation, I would like to talk to you about ingest. (Roger: mm hmmm) So you said you have teams that sometimes go to other parts of the country or to other parts of the globe. So if you can talk to us about what happens after a shoot is completed, let’s say in South America, how’s that content ingested and made accessible to your editors?

Roger 00:19:40 Yeah, we always encourage our folks to bring their media back to the station. That’s our priority to bring that media back to the station, to ingest that here on premises, because then they can use the Evolphin ingest workflow to add that rich metadata and get that media immediately transcoded so that they can work in proxy format on rare occasions. And, you know, it’s, it happens with, in the normal course of production, you have a second shoot that is not part of your original shoot or you’ve come across B footage or stock footage that needs that you find later on in the post-production process. If that’s not ingested here on premises, then we are put in place the process to ingest that through the cloud and have that transcoded in the cloud and, and utilized as part of that production.

Rahul 00:20:22 So teams that are ingesting through the cloud, they use the Evolphin clients to ingest (Roger 00:20:28 Yes) into the cloud. And, and then can you talk to us about what happens after that content is ingested into the cloud? Where are the proxy stored and, and how do the editors make use of these proxies?

Roger 00:20:40 So the process that we want the folks to follow is to ingest the media offsite, get that ingested into the cloud, and then use that cloud transcode to put it into proxy format so that they can edit it, whether they’re on premises or off location. And then we, here at KQED, we bought a little bit of extra cloud storage so that all of our current productions can live up in the cloud and have some, not only proxies, but high res media stored in the cloud. And then once that project is complete, then we will wrap that production, we’ll wrap that show, and then we’ll delete that high res media out of the cloud and ready for their next episode to be ingested.

Rahul 00:21:19 Okay. So are the editors editing with proxies mostly or they’re editing with the native content that they access from on premise or on the cloud?

Roger 00:21:28 It’s a combination of both. You know, and that’s more of a personal preference for our folks. Our 4K teams love to edit in native. That’s what they prefer, that’s what they’ve been doing. And they like to see the finer details. You know, they do things like where they see like grasshopper legs crisscrossing, and that’s the fine detail that they wanna see. They can see it in proxy, but they would rather see that in native 4k, just for their own comfort. But then we have our education team that produces the, award-winning show “Above The Noise” and they’re working in, in, in proxy format and they love it. (Rahul: 00:22:00 Mm-hmm). It’s nice and easy.

Rahul 00:22:01 Oh, okay. So when would you say proxy format works well with video editing? Like in Adobe Premier, sometimes editors will complain of lag with H.264 proxies, and so they will prefer to use a ProRes format. You have any thoughts on the formats for editing and what works well in your various teams?

Roger 00:22:18 No, you know, all of our teams across the board, if they’re editing in proxy, they are working fine in H.264 and we’re in the process of upgrading the H.265, which with our Telestream Vantage System is a little bit cleaner, responds a little bit cleaner and quicker. But right now, H.264 proxies are what’s working for them, and they’re seeing the value of having that remote workflow using proxies.

Rahul 00:22:42 Okay. So, and are these clips, the H.264 transcoded clips, what are the durations of these clips? Are they short form, long form?

Roger 00:22:49 They’re, they’re a combination. For our “Above the Noise” team, they’re just our studio clips. So very short durations of our host show hosts just introducing a piece or, or having a short conversation. But then for our “Deep Look” team, they spent hours and hours tracing crickets or plants growth. And so they have long duration, sometimes hours if not overnight hours of footage that they are, that has been transcoded, and then they scratch through in the viewer to see what clip that they need.

Rahul 00:23:19 So it sounds like the Deep Look science team is probably the most complex video editing (Roger 00:23:23 Oh, absolutely) operations at KQED.

Roger 00:23:25 Yeah. Cause not only is it a combination of 4k, but it’s hyper 4k, ultra 4k where they like really zoom in on great details. And then we have our great graphics and animation editor who puts in his work. And then of course we do color correction, audio correction, all of that stuff as well.

Rahul 00:23:44 So for Deep Look, what’s the typical Premier project size in terms of how many clips would they typically link with and graphics, etc.? Just ballpark.

Roger 00:23:54 Dozens. I don’t know offhand, but it’s dozens. You know, they have their base clip, but then they also develop their own animation, then they find B-roll or other stock footage. Sometimes they’ll even pull stuff from our archives. And so while they’re focused on one particular subject for each episode, it’s dozens of clips from, from variety of sources.

Rahul 00:24:14 Mm-hmm. And is this team mostly On-prem now? Or they are distributed and some of the folks are working from home?

Roger 00:24:22 It’s a combination of both right now. You know, here we are, 2022 pandemic is still going on. We are having folks return to work and folks are just coming back into work a couple days of the week. So they’ll work in our edit base primarily here at the station, but when they home, they’re back on their iMac computers.

Rahul 00:24:42 So the distributed post production workflows are working out for you where people working are working on their IMacs or edit station here? (Roger 00:24:50 Yeah) And they’re exchanging their medias using the Media Asset Management from Evolphin?

Roger 00:24:55 Yes.

Rahul 00:24:56 Okay. I would like to talk to you now about the various tools that are used during the post-production process. We mentioned Adobe a few times. What are some of the other applications that are used here at KQED?

Roger 00:25:09 We use Cinema 4D, After Effects. We have some very specialized software that our teams use as well for slow motion tracking. We also use Slack. We’re, we’re using different tools to help not only share clips for viewing, but we’re also in collaboration with our marketing and product teams to get them the assets that they need to collaborate, to manage, to review, to approve, and to find shorter clips for, for publishing.

Rahul 00:25:38 Hmm. So once all these projects are executed, using these various tools, Cinema 4D, Adobe CC, the deliverables, what is the process for exporting and reviewing them? Are you taking advantage of some of the review and approval capabilities that Evolphin MAM provides?

Roger 00:25:54 Yeah. The teams are really enjoying the collaboration tools that Evolphin offers to not only share projects internally with our internal co collaborators, but also with our external collaborators. We have PBS digital in Washington DC or, or Northern Virginia that we send our media to for, for content review and approval. We have other collaborators that, even the independent producers that share their footage with us, we have to share it, share it back with them for, for review and rights and all that stuff. And so all of that stuff, we’re pushing them to do that more and more and Evolphin and give up some of the older tools that they have been using. Expanding that within our own company here at KQED, our product team for publishing, our marketing team for promotion, our social media team to process various cuts for whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. And then the various platforms of distribution all have their own specs and they all have their own requirements. So that’s actually also a very labor intensive process as well, where we have to put on some new tops and tails, put our bugs in certain places that can be a little laborious, little intense work there. And then export all of that stuff after we, we package all of that for the various platforms. We push it out through media encoder through Evolphin, and then, and then publish it to whatever platform we go.

Rahul 00:27:15 So that’s really interesting because a lot of people associate Media Asset Management with archive management and search capabilities, but it’s interesting to hear about publishing workflows that could be integrated into the media asset management solution.

Roger 00:27:29 Yeah, and I’m pushing the teams to do more, to automate more and more of that through the Evolphin process. You know, we’re not quite there yet, but we’re working towards that. It’s great to see this process work and the folks are thrilled when it does work, and it saves them a lot of time.

Rahul 00:27:46 Al right. So coming to the end of this podcast, what are some of the pain points that you would summarize as Evolphin solving for you with regards to Media Management and production?

Roger 00:27:57 Well, you know, the first major pain point that we had was storage and archiving. We had all these diverse teams producing independently, all keeping their media on hard drives, in their desk drawers. And we needed to put it all together in one central place, have it all labeled, all the metadata attached, and then share all that stuff because man, oh man, we were wasting resources. You know, one shot of the Golden Gate Bridge was sitting in one person’s drawer, and then another team would need of that, and we’d have to run around and say, who has that shot of the Golden Gate? So now that it’s all stored, we can just go and grab that and put that in the next production. And then the other point was the collaboration. Everybody in their inherent ways of the old process, in the very isolated ways, we’re just working in their own teams. And now we’re expanding. We’re sharing media, we’re sharing projects, we’re sharing assets. And not only that, we’re sharing ideas, which is great, which I love because it makes our station more creative and it makes our work much more efficient and cost effective.

Rahul 00:29:00 That’s great. So if you had some advice for other companies that are looking to implement Media Asset Management solution to address some of the challenges that you have, what would you say are the top three things that should they, they should look out for?

Roger 00:29:14 Yeah, if you want to certainly have a good platform for all your media to be not only stored, but it’s gotta be tagged, it’s gotta be tagged with all that metadata. I, I know we’ve said this like three, four times on this podcast, but that is so imperative. Otherwise you just have a bunch of media living nowhere, you know, and not searchable, not traceable. So number one, have it stored, have it searchable. And then two, make it shareable. And that is the great thing about having a Media Asset Management system and the Evolphin and MAM has the ability to not only make it shareable to other people, but you can put some right restrictions on there. You could say, who can have access to this? You know, and who cannot have access to this media? Hey, this footage is embargoed until X dates, because this interview isn’t gonna be published until whenever. So sharing that stuff. And then the third thing I touched upon this last briefly earlier, is just finding opportunities for creativity. I, I mentioned that we are starting an archive series, but also, you know, with busy production seasons, you don’t always have time to come up with original programming. Sometimes at the end of the year you wanna repackage stuff the best of this for 2022 or the best of that. And so the MAM has that ability with that search, with the cataloging, all that stuff to make your teams collaborate and much more creative.

Rahul 00:30:39 Thank you, Roger, those were some amazing stories and, scenarios that you shared with us. Brian, any closing thoughts?

Brian 00:30:47 First of all, Rahul, thank you for asking all of those questions. And Roger, thank you for, for sharing your, your perspectives. Thank you for sharing with us how you are using the technology that, you know, work so very hard to deliver. Your  perspectives are gonna be very useful for other people who are considering this sort of technology, but it’s also gonna be so, so useful for our company to understand how you are using it and it’s gonna help us get better and it’s gonna help us bring better product to market. And I’m very grateful for your thoughts and your comments.

Roger 00:31:23 One of the greatest things that I really appreciate about working with Evolphin is having the weekly contact with you, our weekly calls with your management and with your, with your technical workers. Because not only are we able to fix any kinks that may be in a complicated technology system, and it’s not on, not just Evolphin, but we have it integrated with a transcoder. We have it integrated with the archive system. And so if, if something breaks in any of those systems, then we may experience technology chaos. And we try to avoid that. And we try to be proactive and that’s why we appreciate working with you on a weekly basis to make sure our systems are streamlined and operating the way that they should. But also what I love is having our team here at KQED share with you the real life ways our users are using the MAM so that you can enhance it and make it more user friendly. And you have done that. You’ve delivered it, on several occasions, which makes it a more attractive product and makes it easier for adoption for all of our users.

Brian 00:32:22 Thanks for the encouragement. I’m very grateful.

Roger 00:32:24 My pleasure.

Rahul 00:32:25 Thank you, Roger. Thank you Brian.

Roger 00:32:26 Great to be with you all.

Laura 00:32:38 Well,  that’s it for this episode. Thank you for being here. We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have any questions you want answered on our podcast, don’t forget to visit evolphin.com/ask.